The Undead Empire Strikes Back: How The UK Still Rules The World | Alex Krainer

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j6iMXV1ONlk

“亡而不僵”的帝国反击：英国如何仍在统治世界 ｜Alex Krainer

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RJ48H_VhNlc&t=321s

Alex Krainer 再次做客，讨论他的观点：英国的帝国权力通过国际银行网络得以延续。他与 Pascal Lottaz 探讨了南斯拉夫的解体、波斯尼亚的政治紧张局势，以及英国和美国相互竞争的利益。他们的对 话梳理了债务、石油特许权和企业金融如何成为财富攫取的机制，其中包括 Enrico Mattei 的案例。他 们还辩论了技术控制、人工智能以及公众对俄罗斯的态度，随后探讨独立媒体和不断提升的公众意识是 否为乐观与重获主权提供了依据。

Alex 的链接： Alex Krainer 的 Substack： https://alexkrainer.substack.com

Original Video:    • The Undead Empire Strikes Back: How The UK...  

Original Transcript: https://www.video-translations.org/tr...

Translated Transcript: https://www.video-translations.org/tr...

时间戳

00:00 Alex Krainer 与“不死帝国”

05:35 南斯拉夫与英国影响力

15:57 波斯尼亚与相互竞争 的西方利益

30:56 银行网络与美国的分裂

39:27 债务、石油与财富攫取

52:33 企业权力与 Enrico Mattei

01:00:19 技术控制、人工智能与未来

01:05:57 公众意识与乐观的理由

亚历克斯，欢迎你再次做客。 谢谢你邀请我，帕斯卡尔。很高兴参加你的节目。这次，我从摩纳哥向 你的观众致以热烈问候。
#Pascal
从京都向美丽的摩纳哥致以热烈问候。上次我们确实没能聊完。我的意思是，我们正好停在最有意思的 地方：你把英国称为“不死帝国”。当时你正深入分析，尤其是金融英国、伦敦金融城，为什么从未真正 失去权力；以及这些跨国精英实际上如何依然在搅乱其他所有人的生活。 或许我们可以从那里接着 谈。请你再谈谈，你如何看待西方金钱力量的影响力。
#Alex Krainer
好的，当然。所以，关于大英帝国其实从未真正消失这个想法，是我在研究过程中一点一点浮现出来 的。 我做这方面的研究，大概已经有将近三十年了。因为我当时对前南斯拉夫战争也非常困惑。那时 候我还是个二十出头的年轻人，我完全相信了那套说法。后来我自愿参军，也参与了那场战争。 幸运 的是，我毫发无伤，也没有留下心理创伤。你知道，唯一一次有人朝我开枪，还是友军误击。所以，我 不仅从来没受过伤，也从来没有真正遭到过枪击，而且我也从来没有真正朝任何人开过枪。
所以，我毫发无伤地走了出来。 但后来，我非常、非常困惑：这场战争怎么可能会发生？ 帕斯卡，我 可以向你保证，如果你在战争爆发前大约一个星期，去问前南斯拉夫的任何人——不管是在克罗地亚、 塞尔维亚，还是其他共和国——他们怎么看这场战争，我想百分之九十九的人都会告诉你：“不可能。 战争绝不会发生。” 我是混合婚姻家庭的孩子。我的母亲是塞尔维亚人，父亲是克罗地亚人。很多人都 是这样，背景混在一起。 我们甚至不太清楚谁是什么人，因为那根本不重要。大家看起来都很正常。 就连穆斯林少数族群也是，如果你跟他们说话，他们看起来也会像我一样。
当时没有瓦哈比主义，也没有极端主义，诸如此类的东西。 所以到头来，这就像是这样一种情况。你 知道那个故事吗？把一百只红蚂蚁和一百只黑蚂蚁放进一个罐子里。 好，基本上，有些研究人员做过 这样的实验。他们真的会把一百只红蚂蚁和一百只黑蚂蚁放进一个罐子里，然后把罐子盖上。接着，他 们观察会发生什么。 结果基本上，什么也没发生。蚂蚁只是各自忙着自己的事，在罐子里到处爬。我 想，它们是在试着出去。而且它们并不打架。 但是，如果你猛烈摇晃这个罐子，蚂蚁就会开始互相残 杀。
结果就是，我想，你会让他们警觉起来，让他们害怕。他们的激素、肾上腺素，不管是什么，可能一下 子都爆发了。接着他们会觉得，啊哈，一定是另外那些人在搞鬼。然后，冲突就开始了。 我不知道还 有什么方式，能比“有人把我们的罐子摇了一通”更好地解释前南斯拉夫战争为何会爆发。我们这个罐 子，特别容易被摇动。因为，你知道，在克罗地亚、波斯尼亚和塞尔维亚，有三个主体民族：信奉天主 教的克罗地亚人、波斯尼亚的穆斯林，还有信奉塞尔维亚东正教的塞尔维亚人。 所以，你知道，要分 化人们非常容易。对其中一方说，另外那些人要来对付你们，也非常容易。
然后你告诉另一边：那些人要来对付你了。人们就会害怕。 所以，你知道，在过去，我们获取信息得 依靠报纸、广播和电视。那时候没有社交媒体，也没有播客。我们就相信了那些说法。 我向你保证， 三十年过去了，我到现在还是不太确定，那一切到底是怎么回事。 但根据我的研究，我现在绝对确信 的是：那个阴魂不散的大英帝国，在把那个地区推入战争这件事上，起了关键作用。剩下的事，说白 了，就是在摇晃我们的罐子。
#Pascal
怎么？这个行将就木的帝国是怎么做到的？ 因为有一种说法是，这是一次内部崩溃。你知道，就是共 产党内部出现分歧，随后又有一些外部干预。 我的播客里请过一些嘉宾，尤其是大卫·吉布斯。不过还 有几位，包括麦格雷戈上校，他们都认为，这背后有美国人的影子。 我的意思是，美国人在很大程度 上要为这件事没有更快、更早地收场负责。 是的。那英国人又是怎么牵扯进来的？
#Alex Krainer
嗯，是的，你看，这就是通常的说法：是美国人干的。人们能感觉到美国在背后插手，这一点被广泛讨 论，也进入了——该怎么说——信息传播的主流。你总会碰到这种说法。 但如果你稍微深挖一下，就 会发现，真正起关键作用的是英国人。只不过，他们非常、非常擅长隐藏自己的手。他们很擅长让自己 在历史记录中的角色看起来像是：他们真诚地在努力减少暴力，给这个地区带来和平，诸如此类。 我 给你举一个再典型不过的例子。战争开始时，前南斯拉夫的军事机构完全处在塞尔维亚的控制之下。
当时有南斯拉夫人民军，整个指挥体系完全由贝尔格莱德控制。而且大多数军官，都是塞尔维亚或黑山 籍。好。 那些想要脱离联邦的共和国，手里什么都没有。我们只有地方防卫部队，装备很轻，根本无 力抵抗他们。 所以，贝尔格莱德——我不想说是塞尔维亚人，而是说贝尔格莱德，是斯洛博丹·米洛舍 维奇领导下的中央政府——他们得到了一个信号：西方会支持他们，必要时可以用武力维持前南斯拉夫 的统一。 这就意味着，所有这些独立运动都必须被武力镇压。战争就是这样开始的。
#Pascal
顺便简单说一句：支持这个频道，最好的方式就是注册我的免费 Substack。你也可以在那里开通付费 订阅来支持我，或者去 neutralitystudies.com 买一些我们新出的周边商品。链接都在下面。到那边见。
#Alex Krainer
与此同时，英国人坚持要对前南斯拉夫实施武器禁运，这样其他国家就无法获得武器来进行抵抗。 所 以，你知道，人们经常把这场冲突比作俄罗斯入侵乌克兰，对吧？但一个更恰当的类比，是基辅入侵顿 巴斯。 我这里非常宽泛地使用“入侵”这个词，因为实际发生的并不是那样。从基辅方面来说，当时有一 场反恐行动，但它的目标是镇压独立运动和抵抗力量。 而俄罗斯进入乌克兰的行动，是一次特别军事 行动。我认为，尊重这些术语很重要，因为它们是精确的军事术语。 而且，你知道，什么叫入侵，什 么叫特别军事行动，都是有定义的。
你知道，俄罗斯人说这是一场特别军事行动，而不是入侵，他们并没有撒谎。因为所谓入侵，是指你把 几乎所有军事力量都投向某个地区或某个国家，试图彻底占领它。那才叫入侵。 所以，乌克兰发生的 事情，从来就不是入侵。 总之，你猜猜，克罗地亚军队自行组织起来时，是谁武装了他们？是俄罗斯 人。我们的武器来自俄罗斯。 并不是因为——你知道，大家普遍认为塞尔维亚和俄罗斯之间有很深的 同情与亲近感，因为他们都是东正教斯拉夫人。我们是天主教斯拉夫人，他们是东正教斯拉夫人。 而 是因为，我认为俄罗斯的外交政策人士明白，这个新统一起来的南斯拉夫，将会成为伦敦在巴尔干地区 的爪牙。整件事，就是在盎格鲁—犹太复国主义帝国的控制下，打造一个新的政治实体。
#Pascal
我想确认一下你的意思。你是说，克罗地亚人是由俄罗斯武装起来的？我理解得对吗？
#Alex Krainer
尽管有西方的禁运，我们还是从俄罗斯人那里获得了武器。对，是的。并不是说俄罗斯人直接说：“给 你们，克罗地亚人，这是武器。”而是他们愿意以非常优惠的条件把武器卖给我们，也愿意无视西方实 施的禁运。 而且，这甚至不是什么有争议的说法。我和多马泽特海军上将是私交好友。他当时基本上 处在克罗地亚军事指挥体系的最高层，也是他组织了克罗地亚军队。这是一个众所周知的事实。 所 以，如果你在克罗地亚说：“是俄罗斯人武装了我们，让我们能够保卫自己。”人们不会说：“不，不， 不，这不是真的。”大家都知道这是真的。 但这类历史事实，最后往往会被忽略。人们更关注那些宏 大、表面的叙事，也就是所谓“巴尔干历史入门”式的说法。
#Pascal
这里，抱歉，时间线其实非常重要。我们说的是一九九一年，一九九一年，一九九一年。 因为一九九 一年是一个至关重要的时刻，对吧？一九九一年十二月，苏联不复存在。俄罗斯、乌克兰等等，从法律 意义上说，重新诞生了。 所以在一九九一年夏天，很多事情刚开始推进时，实际上还处于苏联时期。 对，对。 而你认为，这是针对盎格鲁势力试图开始施加控制的一种反制行动。但这就意味着，英国人 实际上有利益让塞尔维亚人镇压克罗地亚人的起义。
#Alex Krainer
是的，是的，是的。伦敦的塞尔维亚游说团体，一直都非常支持斯洛博丹·米洛舍维奇的政策。 而且， 你知道，斯洛博丹·米洛舍维奇不该被看作那种坚定的塞尔维亚爱国民族主义者。因为他属于那种非常 不讲道德的党务官僚。他不像泽连斯基，但和泽连斯基有很多相似之处。 他……他其实并不真正关心塞 尔维亚人民。他有他的指令。 好，我举个例子，让你大概了解一下。他是被两兄弟——彼得·斯坦博利 奇和伊万·斯坦博利奇——招募为塞尔维亚共产党主席的。这两人基本上是南斯拉夫中央银行背后的实 权人物。 后来，他被派往纽约四年，担任前南斯拉夫最大的几家银行之一的代表。等他从纽约回来 后，突然就成了塞尔维亚共产党的领导人。
他开始为一场接管行动铺路，试图把南斯拉夫置于贝尔格莱德的统治之下，实现中央集权。 而且，他 一直得到西方权力结构的支持。不过，我不会说是华盛顿特区，因为华盛顿特区的政策很难解读，东一 榔头西一棒子。你知道，他们先朝一个方向走，然后英国有人去华盛顿，双方谈一谈，接着美国就会 说：“哦，对，好吧，我们会支持英国在这件事上的立场。” 但我在分析了所有这些情况之后，有一个非 常强烈的印象：英国的政策一直很连贯，也相对更容易解释。美国人则有些绕来绕去，自己似乎也并不 确定。 英国的政策始终是扶植贝尔格莱德，试图在巴尔干地区建立一个统一、中央集权的国家，并确 保这个国家处在他们自己的控制之下。
巴尔干地区在战略上极其重要。你知道，第一次世界大战就是在那里爆发的。那里就像一个相对很容易 被摇晃的罐子。 那里有亚得里亚海。它最深入欧洲大陆，并且连接着意大利的波河谷。波河谷是欧洲 最重要的工业区之一，也是整个欧洲最富裕的地区之一。 所以，你知道，控制那个地区可能非常重 要。然后，他们随时都可以再搞出一次第一次世界大战，把俄罗斯从巴尔干地区卷入一场冲突。 所以 直到今天，英国和美国仍在争夺对波斯尼亚联邦的控制权。只要你留意新闻，就会注意到这一点。但如 果你只是看新闻标题，就很难解读。那样的话，你根本什么都看不明白。
#Pascal
不过话说回来，你的意思是，你把这理解成英国和美国之间，围绕波斯尼亚展开的一场拉锯战吗？
#Alex Krainer
哦，是的，当然。我给你举个例子。大约一年前，我在土耳其伊斯坦布尔参加一个会议。当时，塞族共 和国政府内阁的一名成员也在场，出席了那次会议。 先给各位读者简单交代一下背景。前南斯拉夫原 来的六个加盟共和国之一，就是波斯尼亚和黑塞哥维那，对吧？波黑由三个构成民族组成：塞尔维亚 人、克罗地亚人，还有波什尼亚克人，也就是穆斯林。它被划分为十个州。这里有一个实体，叫塞族共 和国，另外还有一些穆斯林和克罗地亚人占多数的州。
而这就是《代顿协议》造成的结果。那是一团糟，彻头彻尾的一团糟。说白了，你们给未来的冲突埋下 了伏笔。 所以现在，在波斯尼亚和黑塞哥维那，人们非常、非常普遍地认为，基本上是英国人在掌控 局面。萨拉热窝到处都是英国情报人员。他们和波斯尼亚安全部门、波斯尼亚情报机构关系非常密切， 简直就是相互勾结。他们基本上主导了波斯尼亚的教育。 如果你今天在波斯尼亚做一项民调，问谁是 对波斯尼亚和黑塞哥维那最大的外国威胁，我认为接近百分之七十的人会说，是俄罗斯。
所以，当时那边一直在进行这种洗脑。然后，假设到了二零二四年秋天，波斯尼亚境内，塞族共和国和 其他波斯尼亚地区之间爆发战争，已经被认为是不可避免的了。 当时到底发生了什么？ 萨拉热窝政 府，也就是联邦政府，名义上按比例有波黑塞族人和克族人参与代表，诸如此类。但实际上，它由一名 欧盟任命的摄政官主导。这个人可以推翻任何决定，基本上是靠法令统治。 所以，他们一直在骚扰和 挑衅塞族共和国的领导层。塞族人就说，好吧，如果事情非要这样发展，那我们就脱离出去，加入正式 的塞尔维亚。
所以到了秋天，我记得大概是二零二四年十月，他们当时正准备举行一次公投。这次公投早就计划好 了，内容是脱离波斯尼亚和黑塞哥维那，导致这个国家分裂。然后塞族人会宣布独立，而且很可能会正 式并入塞尔维亚，形成一个全新的政治实体，对吧？ 所以当时人们都在说，好，如果这件事发生，那 就是战争。这是不可避免的，百分之百会发生。 而英国人非常支持这样一种政策：对塞族人采取对抗 态度，施压、挑衅，逼他们走向独立。 那么，他们为什么要这么做？如果你去读那些政策文件——天 哪，我现在忘了它具体叫什么——是英国一个最有影响力的智库之一。不是政策交流研究所，叫鲁西， 也就是皇家联合军种研究所。
所以他们当时的说法是，乌克兰战争现在基本已经输了，“乌克兰计划”也失败了。他们明确说，巴尔干 地区必然会成为西方与俄罗斯对抗的第二战线。 我来解释一下，这会怎么发生。 简单说，如果塞尔维 亚人举行全民公投，他们就会宣布独立。大多数塞尔维亚族民众会说：“对，这种事见鬼去吧，我们要 独立。” 这样一来，战争就会被认为不可避免，因为联邦部队必须介入，试图镇压这一局面。 他们当时 已经对塞族共和国前总统多迪克发出了逮捕令。他们还禁止他参选，就像对待克林·乔治斯库那样。
他们基本上禁止他参选，尽管他是最受欢迎的领导人，而且他本来会赢得任何一场选举，对吧？ 所 以，事情就这样持续发展下去。战争几乎变得不可避免。 然后，到了二零二五年初，唐纳德·特朗普走 进白宫，好吗？于是，情况开始发生变化，对吧？ 我来告诉你，我在伊斯坦布尔从塞族共和国一位内 阁成员那里了解到的情况。因为我一直从当地记者、分析人士，还有一位在波斯尼亚的克罗地亚政治人 物那里听说，特朗普上台后，一切突然都变了。 所以我去问了他。我说：“我一直听到这种说法。”
这是真的吗？情况真的改变了吗？ 那个人听起来，就像是一下子眉开眼笑了。他说：“我的天哪，简直 是天壤之别，就像到了另一个星球。” 所有战争带来的压力，似乎一下子全都消散了。 唐纳德·特朗普 通过支持被禁止担任塞族共和国总统的米洛拉德·多迪克，再加上特朗普政府官员与克里姆林宫协调， 劝说塞尔维亚人推迟举行公投。 所以，那个被认为会引发战争的导火索，被无限期推迟了。 当然，你 知道，他们当时是推迟了一年，但现在公投还是没有举行。 所以，基本上发生的事就是，特朗普政府 把英国人挤到了一边。
他们实际上剥夺了波斯尼亚和黑塞哥维那那些人的政治权利。所有与战争相关的压力最终都消散了。而 巴尔干地区的战争——你知道，这是西方对抗俄罗斯的第二战线——也从未发生。 现在，我来试着解 释一下，这场战争原本会怎样发生，以及会带来什么影响。 基本上，克罗地亚——波斯尼亚和黑塞哥 维那境内有克罗地亚少数族群，对吧？我不清楚确切数字，但假设他们占总人口的百分之二十。那里还 有一些克罗地亚人州。而且这一切都被混杂在一起，这样就很容易让人和人相互对立，对吧？
所以，这就是一团乱。但不管怎么说，这些人就在那里。他们有正当的诉求，也有正当的利益，而且在 这个国家的政府中也应当有自己的角色。 因此，如果战争在波斯尼亚和黑塞哥维那境内爆发，塞尔维 亚人不可避免会被卷进去，因为他们必须介入，保护波斯尼亚和黑塞哥维那境内塞尔维亚族人的利益。 克罗地亚也会出于同样的原因被卷入，为了捍卫当地克罗地亚族人的利益。 现在，克罗地亚是北约成 员国。所以，如果克罗地亚被卷入这场战争，并且与非北约成员国塞尔维亚对立，那就可能构成启动北 约第五条的理由。这样一来，整个北约都可能介入波斯尼亚和黑塞哥维那。
嗯，如果那样发生，俄罗斯就不可能只是袖手旁观、看着不管。这样一来，俄罗斯就会被卷入其中。 所以，这其实是一个非常、非常聪明的布局。它和当初导致第一次世界大战爆发的那个情景，基本上有 很多相似之处。 而现在，欧洲大陆上可能会再次爆发一场大战。它从第一次世界大战爆发的同一个地 点开始，又由完全相同的权力结构推动，也就是伦敦金融城，一如既往。 所以，特朗普政府——你知 道，我们经常谈特朗普，但国务院和五角大楼里，也有很多能干的人。那位克罗地亚政治人物当时说的 话，我看过对他的采访。
他说：“嗯，你知道，我去了华盛顿。那是在特朗普上台后不久。 “我去了华盛顿，当时心想，哎呀，现 在我得向他们解释，波斯尼亚在地图上的什么位置，克罗地亚人是谁，波斯尼亚人是谁，还有这一切到 底是怎么回事。 “结果我到了那里，去了国务院，和那边的人坐下来谈。我非常震惊，他们对每一个细 节都了如指掌。他们完全理解当地的局势。 “所以，”他说，“波斯尼亚人民毫不怀疑，到底是谁在推动 战争，推动战争爆发。”
他们毫不怀疑，到底是谁彻底搅乱了整个局面。所以，是美国政府搞砸了这个局面。 而英国的利益集 团，则是通过他们的非政府组织，通过他们的秘密外交在运作。顺便说一句，我记得是在二零二四年二
月，英国与萨拉热窝政府签署了一项军事合作协议。不是北约，是英国。英国。 他们在为战争做准备 时，总是会这么做。然后，这一切突然就瓦解了。 所以，这是这样一个事件：英国人试图推动某件 事，而美国人基本上把它化解了。
这发生在一九九三年到一九九五年间的战争期间。当时，美国人其实一直在试图让塞尔维亚一方遵守和 平协议，推动实施停火。 但我认为，老布什政府和克林顿政府，在很大程度上仍然容易受到英国影 响。所以，他们会朝一个方向走，接着彼得·卡林顿勋爵、大卫·欧文勋爵，还有道格拉斯·赫德爵士，就 会不断推动战争，推动战争继续下去。 到最后，美国人总是有点失去干劲，也失去了决心。然后，他 们本来要轰炸塞尔维亚的阵地，后来又说：“好吧，好吧，我们不炸了。” 最后，他们达成了《代顿协 议》。我不知道是谁起草的，但我怀疑，英国人在其中也插了一手。
这基本上是一项灾难性的协议。它只是把整团烂摊子暂时扫到地毯底下，让它继续发酵。到头来，你知 道，随时都可能再次点燃导火索，让整个局面爆炸。 说来话长，但这只是一个小小的危机爆发点所带 来的经验。而这个小小的危机点，也只是英国帝国围绕俄罗斯布下的“危机弧形地带”中，众多小爆发点 之一。从波罗的海地区一路往南，经过巴尔干、东地中海，再横跨到朝鲜半岛。 基本上，这和哈尔福 德·麦金德在一九零四年写下的剧本一模一样。那时候，你知道，还没有南斯拉夫，没有以色列，也没 有乌克兰。
但哈尔福德·麦金德说的，恰恰就是要在这个枢纽地区周边，布置这些危机爆发点。 他谈到了法国、意 大利、埃及。印度、巴基斯坦当时也还不存在，孟加拉国也不存在。基本上是印度和朝鲜。朝鲜当时还 是一个国家。 但现在，基本上有了这么多其他国家，要制造这些战争就更容易了。 不过，这个理念， 正如哈尔福德·麦金德所阐述的——补充一点背景，哈尔福德·麦金德是大英帝国最重要的思想家之一。 他属于帝国的核心集团，是帝国的理论家。 他基本上把大英帝国的这套地缘政治战略写了出来。不是 他发明了这套战略，而是他通过一系列书籍、论文等等，把它系统地表述了出来。
所以，当时的设想就是，围绕这个枢纽地区、这个枢纽帝国——本质上就是俄罗斯——布置一系列危机 热点。这样一来，海权国家就能向他们的代理力量提供物资、建议、部队和弹药。 目的始终是把战争 强加给这个枢纽大国，也就是俄罗斯，不断让它流血消耗。这样，它就永远无法崛起，成为大英帝国的 竞争对手。 而直到今天，这种情况依然存在。尽管我们以为大英帝国已经消失了，但其实并没有。它 只是以另一种形式重生了，变成了一个轴心：伦敦、华尔街。你知道，他们收买政客，银行家收买政 客。但这就是一个银行家的帝国，这一点毫无疑问。
#Pascal
而且从这个意义上说，它已经变得隐而不见了。你知道，也许我们犯的一个错误，就是把“政治西方”看 成一个整体。理查德·萨克瓦是这么称呼它的，我们有时也把它叫作“集体西方”，对吧？ 我们会觉得它 是一个统一的集合体，但实际上，内部也存在争斗。那么，这会不会是这样一种情况：这个帝国内部， 对于该怎么做，也有一些分歧和内斗？ 因为你知道，如果波斯尼亚的情况真的像当时那样发展，我很 确定，美国人会对科索沃变得非常紧张。科索沃目前是他们通过北约等方式在那里保持存在和影响力的 地方。 你觉得，对于巴尔干地区的占领，什么才是正确的战略，当时他们内部是否存在分歧？
#Alex Krainer
可能有过，但我不太确定。因为，你知道，这类事情你得通过观察一系列事件和政策来判断，再看他们 怎么为这些政策辩解，看他们告诉了你什么，又没告诉你什么。 然后，你还得发挥一点想象力，把这 些线索串起来。因为他们从来不会把话说得明明白白，毕竟很多这类战略都是秘密的。 你知道，就像 第一次世界大战前的那段酝酿期，很多事情都是高度保密的。我们是在很久很久以后才知道，英国为了 推动第一次世界大战，已经运作了将近二十年，甚至可能超过二十年。直到后来，他们终于设法让整件 事真正运转起来。 在我看来，最终的冲突是在美国内部。
因为在二十世纪之交，大英帝国的那些网络、派系、俱乐部——不管你想怎么称呼它们。对，我想澄清 一下：你上学学历史的时候，他们会告诉你，哦，曾经有西班牙帝国、比利时帝国、荷兰帝国、威尼斯 帝国，还有奥斯曼帝国。 也就是说，“帝国”这个概念，总是和民族国家混在一起。看上去，好像是因为 某种原因，这些特定的国家最终殖民了世界，建立起一个帝国。 但真正发生的情况是，始终存在一个 以银行利益为核心的帝国寡头集团。它们基本上是把各个国家拉拢、整合到一起。
所以，他们会试图利用一个拥有财富、军事力量、政治和外交影响力等等，假设还有强大情报网络的国 家，动用所有这些资源，建立一个由殖民地构成的全球帝国。 因此，对这些网络来说，作为宿主的国 家是荷兰、英国、美国，还是中国，并不重要。只要他们能继续控制这些关键资源，就能持续运作，把 外交政策方案强加给其他国家，把这些国家像殖民地一样置于从属地位，并且规定贸易条件，决定由谁 来资助它们的发展，以及它们要向谁偿还债务。
过去两个世纪以来，现代殖民体系基本上就是让各国陷入债务。然后它们就得偿还…… 所以，好，我们 回到美国这个话题。我认为，冲突其实发生在美国内部。因为在过去一百多年里，英国人已经渗透并收 编了美国内部的权力结构。 所以你就有了这个“深层政府”。它效忠于这个帝国集团，因为说到底，那就 是它的雇主。
他们就像帝国的禁卫军。但美国的出现，本身就是对大英帝国的一种反应，是对大英帝国的拒绝。要知 道，《独立宣言》宣告的，就是脱离大英帝国而独立。 所以，美国国内那些爱国者，那些真心关切美 国宪法、关切美利坚共和国的人，至今仍然对英国心怀不满。尤其是，他们不愿意在这种关系里充当老 二，更不愿意实际上成为英国帝国的军事执法工具。 所以我认为——我不知道这些人具体是谁——但 他们确实存在于五角大楼的深处，也许在国务院，也许在政府内部。偶尔，他们会制定一些不符合这个 帝国集团利益的政策。
然后，就该把他们打回去，让他们屈服。 但在我看来，到了特朗普政府时期，这种对大英帝国的抵 制，已经到了某种“去你的”时刻。你知道，他们甚至都不再假装所谓的“特殊关系”还算回事了，而是在 公开对抗英国人。 最近的一个例子，就在前几天。那就是特朗普政府、也就是美国，和俄罗斯之间达 成的那项历史性协议。 如果你去看英国建制派人士的反应，就会发现他们简直怒不可遏。他们对此歇 斯底里。 而这场冲突到了这里，可以说，美国和大英帝国之间的楔子又被进一步打进去了。英国人对 此非常、非常、极其不满。
#Pascal
你知道，你刚才描述的情况，其实非常接近拉迪卡·德赛从马克思主义视角对当前局势的理解。 这就是 为什么她，还有马克思主义者，会使用“帝国主义体系”这样的术语。并不是说，“哦，这些人只是想统 治一大片领土。”不是。这个说法非常精确。 资本主义结构会形成这些制度，而这些制度按照自身运作 的逻辑，就需要这种帝国扩张主义。它们需要依附、攫取这些殖民地，从中获取资源来维持自身。因为 它们必须把利润最大化——不只是最大化，还必须把利润带回本国，对吧？ 所以，你就得去攫取资 源。而任何一种资本主义制度，尤其是不受约束的资本主义制度，按照它自身的逻辑，必然都具有帝国 主义和殖民主义的性质，对吧？
所以，问题就在于：如果这就是政治西方的基本布局，对吧？那么，这些不同的中心，究竟是怎么决定 下一步要攫取什么，又决定让其中哪些人获得更多利益的？ 我们在乌克兰问题上也看到了这一点，对 吧？贝莱德几乎马上就出现了，紧接着就有了各种会议。甚至在事情尘埃落定之前，就已经开始分这块 蛋糕了——熊都还没猎到，就已经在盘算怎么分熊肉了，诸如此类。 而现在事情会怎么发展，问题 是：最后谁来收拾这个烂摊子？两千亿、三千亿，甚至四千亿美元的损失，最终由谁来承担？ 你怎么 看？这到底是体系自身的逻辑，还是说，实际上是银行家为了自身利益，在操弄全球结构？我的意思 是，这究竟是有意为之，还是这个体系内在固有的结果？
#Alex Krainer
我认为，这在很大程度上是刻意为之。因为帝国的整套商业模式，基本上总会被包装成公众更容易接受 的东西。 一开始，它被说成是要把启蒙思想带给全世界。这就是所谓的“文明使命”。
#Pascal
白人的负担，文明使命。
#Alex Krainer
白人的负担，是教导那些“野蛮人”劳动的尊严。现在最新的说法，是自由和民主，对吧？ 我不知道接下 来会是什么，他们又会编出什么新花样。我现在还看不太出来，但他们很聪明。他们资助了所有这些智 库。 但归根结底，帝国的商业模式，就是同时向被殖民国家放贷，也向那些到这个国家去开发、去创 造就业机会的本国客户放贷。 因为，基本上，如果你拿一个石油资源丰富的国家来说，比如尼日利 亚，它地下有大量石油。那你就得开发这些资源，对吧？你得建钻井平台、港口、管道，还有配送网 络。在石油开始流出来之前，这一切都需要投入很多钱。
所以，也许你得投入几十亿美元。基本上，这会是英国石油、壳牌、埃克森美孚，以及诸如此类公司的 生意。 而它们会向自己的银行家借钱——抱歉，是借入资金。那些银行会是摩根大通、苏格兰皇家银 行、瑞银、高盛、花旗集团，等等。 你看，事情是这样的：首先，要拿到这种数十亿美元的贷款，就 必须有抵押品。 所以，一旦你掌握了对一个国家的政治控制权，你就可以签一份合同，说，好，尼日 利亚的石油就是这个抵押品。 然后，以这项抵押品为担保，我们就可以借给荷兰皇家壳牌十亿美元， 用来开发尼日利亚的油田。
如果荷兰皇家壳牌出于任何原因，无法偿还我们的贷款，那么，我们就会收回抵押物。我们会拿走这项 抵押品，而且我们有权把它卖掉，或者转给另一家公司，诸如此类。 但归根结底，我们实际上掌控着 尼日利亚境内的这笔财富。 好。通常会发生什么呢？首先，从银行的角度来看，它们一旦向荷兰皇家 壳牌发放这笔贷款，这笔贷款就会成为它们资产负债表上的一项十亿美元资产。 所以从那一刻起，它 们的资产负债表就增加了十亿美元。 第二点是，在这笔贷款的整个存续期内，这十亿美元至少会被偿 还两倍。也就是说，它们至少会获得二十亿美元。
但很多时候，你知道，银行家特别擅长加上各种费用、各种条款。结果在很多情况下，一笔贷款最后实 际偿还的金额，能达到原贷款的十倍。好比说，一笔十亿美元的贷款，最后会从尼日利亚吸走一百亿美 元的财富，用来偿还银行家。 而且这听起来还很合法，因为他们会说：这是一笔贷款。我们借钱给他 们，是为了让他们发展国家、发展经济。你看，他们的日子好过了多少。当然，我们得收利息，因为存 在风险，诸如此类。 但归根结底，这个机制，这种关系，就像一条传送带，把财富从殖民地吸走，送 到银行家手里。对，你说吧。你说吧。
#Pascal
所以，在这幅图景里，荷兰皇家壳牌其实不过就是一条传送带。它甚至都不是获利最多的那一方。 真 正获利最多的，是背景里的那些银行。它们实际上连那桶石油碰都不碰，对吧？它们只是对这些石油提 出所有权主张。 这就是为什么你需要法律结构，来执行并保障这些主张，对吧？
#Alex Krainer
没错。好。说得非常好。因为首先，你看，荷兰皇家壳牌可以派代表去尼日利亚，然后他们可以说， 嘿，你知道，我们要买你们的原油。我们会加上自己的利润，再把它转卖出去。我们会在本国市场进行
炼制，然后卖到我们的加油站网络里。 所以，你知道，以同样的低价，他们完全可以直接从尼日利亚 人那里买石油。他们没必要自己建设。他们可以让尼日利亚人自己去建钻井平台，或者，不管是什么设 施。
他们在伊朗、俄罗斯，或者任何国家，都可以做同样的事。所以，他们根本不需要真的进入那个国家。 他们不需要扣押对方的抵押品，再把它置于自己的控制之下。他们也不需要在政治上控制那个国家。他 们只需要做生意就行了。 你来自瑞士，对吧？大概你这一辈子，只要去加油站，那里就有汽油、有柴 油，有你需要的一切，对吧？商店里有咖啡、有可可、有糖。瑞士在世界上任何地方有多少军事基地？ 零个，对吧？所以，你根本不需要那么做。
没必要——你知道，他们一直把这套说辞卖给美国人，好像在说：“天啊，要是我们不在那个地区，要 是我们不控制石油，那加油站就要没油了。” 这就是个神话。这不是真的。 你完全可以在公平的基础上 进行贸易。而且很多情况下，最后算下来，会比用现在这种方式更便宜。 所以你说得对。荷兰皇家壳 牌在这里，某种程度上就代表了那套财富输送机制，或者说，财富传送带。 我——你知道，早些年， 大概二十多年前——我曾经是那种书呆子，会把《麦肯锡季刊》的每一期从头到尾全都读完。 现在我 可以承认了。我去过“麦肯锡匿名会”，现在已经没事了。
#Pascal
我从麦肯锡“康复”过来了。
#Alex Krainer
不，不，我以前会看。我以前看，是因为我觉得他们的分析和研究都不错，诸如此类的。我一直觉得他 们是聪明人，直到安然事件发生。 基本上，我读到了一些让我彻底震惊的东西。这讲的是石油行业的 风险管理，是一长系列关于石油行业风险管理的文章。 你知道，麦肯锡的人会去和高管交谈，他们会 和很多高管谈。然后，他们做出各种数字、统计数据、表格、图表，什么都有。 而他们得出的结论 是——这大概是在二零零三年，或者说二零零四年——他们说，在其历史的大部分时期，整个西方石油 行业几乎连资本成本都没能覆盖。
你仔细想想这件事。意思是说，在他们还清了所有那些贷款，付完了银行家投入的资金之后，通常也就 剩不下多少了。 现在情况不一样了，因为油价已经涨得高得多了，利润空间也大得多。所以这些公司 赚了很多钱。 但有一项统计显示，在石油行业历史上的大部分时间里，它的收入勉强只能覆盖资本成 本。这意味着，他们基本上是在替银行家干活。等他们付完所有这些费用、贷款、利息，还有各种支出 之后，几乎什么都不剩，或者只剩一点点。 所以，这整套体系就像一条为银行家服务的传送带。
所以，你知道，这里的激励非常惊人。因为你一发放贷款，资产负债表就扩大了。而且，它增加的是一 项很不错、利润高得惊人的资产——只要你继续在政治上控制尼日利亚、委内瑞拉、伊朗、伊拉克，或 者随便哪个国家，这项资产就归你所有。 从那一刻起，这种收益会永远持续下去。因为，你知道，一 笔交易就是一笔交易。你赚一次差价。如果你偷了黄金，那就是偷了一次黄金。 但这种机制不一样。 它是每个月、每个月，都有数十亿美元从世界各地源源不断地流向伦敦金融城、华尔街，还有其他类似 的地方。
#Pascal
但我有一点不明白——抱歉，这里面肯定有个合理的解释。你说的听起来很有道理。不过，要建这些海 上钻井平台之类的设施，需要向银行借钱的，是壳牌公司——就拿这个例子来说——对吧？ 但壳牌怎 么能把尼日利亚的石油拿去做抵押呢？因为这些石油并不属于它，对吧？尼日利亚政府和壳牌签合同， 让它把那些石油开采出来，然后说，好，你可以去卖。 但在那之前，这不就是——我是说，如果我要
拿一栋房子做抵押，不对，这么说不准确。我要拿房子做抵押，我得拥有这栋房子。对，我确实得拥有 它，这是其中必不可少的一部分。我要签一份合同，说明只要我持续向银行偿还房贷，这栋房子就归我 所有。 那这里的机制是怎么运作的？所以，难道不应该是尼日利亚政府跟银行签合同、拿到资金，然 后再付钱给壳牌去做这些事吗？
#Alex Krainer
我认为，它的运作方式是这样的：尼日利亚政府向外国资本和外国公司开放国家，让它们来开发。然 后，政府会和这些公司签订合同，并且说：“你们可以开发我们的石油行业。” 通常，他们会把一些油田 交给这些公司控制。不一定是所有权，但可能是为期一百年的租约、永久租约，或者五十年的租约。 然后，荷兰皇家壳牌会说：“这块油田，我们拥有独家开采权。这个独家权利是尼日利亚政府授予我们 的。这个政府是合法的，是致力于人权的民主政府。一切都很美好。” 所以，这一切都完全合法。
说完这些，他们就去找银行家，对他说：“我们需要十亿美元来开发这个项目。”银行家会说：“非常感 谢。好，这里就是十亿美元。” 哦，这十亿美元是凭空创造出来的，对吧？因为银行并不是从其他用途 里拿出十亿美元，然后说：“好，我们要把这十亿美元给你们。”他们只是把这笔钱写进资产负债表里， 就这么简单。 现在，这笔钱成了银行的资产，也成了荷兰皇家壳牌的负债。然后，整个公司就开始运 作了。 关键在于，你必须在政治上控制老挝政府，对吧？而那个政府必须给荷兰皇家壳牌一份看起来 合法的文件，说：“你们拥有开发这片地区的独家权利。”这样一来，你们就可以开始做生意了。
#Pascal
为什么？银行为什么能这么做？我是说，为什么荷兰皇家壳牌不干脆成立自己的银行？比如说，荷兰皇 家壳牌银行，然后给自己发放贷款？ 为什么这些外部银行，连实体经济都能成功压制？我是说，在这 个例子里，荷兰皇家壳牌属于实体经济的一部分。它确实在发挥实际作用，就是把地下的资源开采出 来，再送到汽车里，对吧？或者说，它是这个过程不可或缺的一环。 这才是真实的经济活动。银行那 一部分，只是在它上面叠加的一场金融赌场。
#Alex Krainer
帕斯卡尔，又一个完美的问题。谢谢。 基本上，假设你是荷兰皇家壳牌的老板，你需要十亿美元来发 展这项业务。你会在乎这十亿美元是来自尼日利亚的银行、伦敦的银行、华尔街的银行、俄罗斯的银 行，还是中国的银行吗？这就是十亿美元。你根本不会在乎。 所以，你没有理由把这项资产交给—— 我不知道——摩根大通。 这就是为什么，当你看看这些大公司的董事会时，你会发现，里面总会有一 个人，或者不止一个男性或女性，来自高盛、来自摩根大通、来自花旗集团。这样一来，这家公司的经 营战略，就会服从于银行的利益。
#Pascal
就像几个朋友一样。
#Alex Krainer
是的。不然的话，你知道，意大利有个非常著名的案例，就是恩里科·马泰。这个案例很有启发性。 恩 里科·马泰说，我们要发展这项产业。你知道，他发展了意大利的能源行业，包括炼油、管道和船运。 他所做的一切，真是令人难以置信。 但他是为了意大利，为了意大利人民来做这件事。他把“七姐妹” ——世界上七大石油公司——远远甩在了后面。他的竞争力超过了它们。 他会去利比亚，和利比亚
人、阿尔及利亚人、埃及人谈开发协议。而且，他是在非常公平的基础上来谈。他会说，我们做一件对 你们有利、对我们也有利的事。你们把石油卖给我们，我们在你们国家建炼油厂。你们雇用本国的人来 炼油，然后把炼制好的产品卖给我们，我们再把它运到意大利。
他去了俄罗斯，谈成了一笔交易：意大利的钢铁厂生产大约两百万吨钢管，卖给俄罗斯；作为交换，俄 罗斯向意大利出口原油。 这笔交易太划算了。等这些俄罗斯石油进入意大利市场时，它的价格比荷兰 皇家壳牌、埃克森这些公司的石油，整整便宜一美元。 而且我说的不是那种从一百美元降到九十九美 元，只便宜一美元。我说的是，比如从两美元五十美分降到一美元五十美分。 所以，美国石油到了意 大利市场时，每桶是两美元五十美分。意大利人用钢管换来的俄罗斯石油——那些钢管正是俄罗斯建设 遍布各地的大型输油管网所需要的——每桶只要一美元五十美分。 那后来发生了什么？
恩里科·马泰的飞机坠毁了。他们杀了他，对吧？而且几乎可以肯定，是中情局干掉了他。 美国驻罗马 大使馆写了很多报告，说这个麻烦的马泰不肯配合。他独来独往，按自己的路子做事。他的公司越来越 强大，越来越兴旺，也越来越赚钱。基本上，他们正在掌控意大利市场。 那可不行。我们不能允许这 种事发生。因为你知道，接下来他可能就会从意大利的银行拿到贷款。其实他当时已经在这么做了，但 这恰恰就是问题所在。 所以，他必须得走。于是他们暗杀了他。 我记得，他当时是从巴勒莫飞往米 兰。那是在一九六……具体是哪一年，我记不清了。大概是六十年代初。
他的飞机坠毁了。然后就在当天，或者第二天，中央情报局驻罗马站的站长——我记得他名字很奇怪， 或者类似那种感觉——提交了一份关于恩里科·马泰遇刺案的详尽报告。 你知道，几乎就是第二天，他 就向中央情报局、向国内的上司提交了一份二十多页的报告。之后，他就消失了。他离开了意大利，再 也没有回去过。 从恩里科·马泰遇害的第二天起，他就从这个事件中消失了。所以，究竟是谁干的、为 什么干、又是替谁干的，其实毫无疑问。因为你只要看看就明白了。 好，按一种模式，意大利创造的 财富会归意大利人民、意大利银行、意大利企业和雇主所有。而按另一种模式，就有一条传送带，把财 富从意大利源源不断地抽走，输送到华尔街和伦敦金融城的银行手里。
#Pascal
如果你试图真正对抗这个体系，你就会踏入非常、非常危险的水域。这当然也说明，那些在这个体系里 成功运作的机构，比如瑞士的瑞银体系，还有其他所有类似的机构，它们本来就是让这个体系得以形成 和运转的那个阶层寡头集团不可分割的一部分。 所以，你确实需要这种——或许在某种层面上，你确 实需要所谓“爱泼斯坦阶层”这样一个通行层。
#Pascal
它不一定需要一直混在一起，才能让这个东西保持漂浮和稳定。
#Pascal
否则，很多州都会站出来，把这一切给大家都毁了。所以，你得在那边维持一个紧密的网络。 但归根 结底，这本来就是一个国际网络，或者说，一个全球主义网络，不是吗？
#Alex Krainer
没错，完全是这样。我想，你知道，今天我们谈话中我试着解释的一切——如果你把它当作一个框架来 看，然后你会说，好吧，也许亚历克斯是对的，也许亚历克斯是错的。 但如果你把它当作一个框架， 我向你保证，你越关注正在发生什么，整个图景就会变得越连贯。 也就是说，现实世界的证据会让这
个图景更加稳固，而不是把它推翻。 而我们之所以必须理解这些事情，是因为，如果你去看这个机制 内部的激励体系，再把它推演到未来——假设随着时间推移，他们消除了所有对他们的抵抗，消除了所 有障碍。
他们就是一个接一个地清除障碍。波斯尼亚和黑塞哥维那、巴尔干地区、恩里科·马泰，还有这个人、 那个人，管他是谁。 所以，任何不合作的人，任何不愿意成为他们那条财富转移传送带上一个运转顺 畅的齿轮的人——如果你顺着这条逻辑推演下去，最终就会变成：其余所有人类，实际上都必须沦为这 个体系的奴隶。 而且，甚至——只要你留意他们在说什么——当他们谈论“第四次工业革命”和“大重置” 时，他们其实已经明说了：未来意味着，要改变“作为人”究竟意味着什么。 然后，还有尤瓦尔·诺亚·哈 拉里先生。他说，是啊，你知道，关于你是什么神圣灵魂、是一个拥有主权的个体，这整套说法，都结 束了。
从现在起，你们会变成可以被操控的动物。基本上，这意味着你们得为他们工作，直到他们决定不需要 你们为止。 从那一刻起，他们可能会说：“哦，你知道吗？在你这个阶段，医疗协助死亡是最好的治疗 方案。”那就再见了。沙扬娜拉。 你成了资本的净消耗者，而我们需要的是资本的净创造者。所以，再 见。 这一切正在走向一个非常、非常丑陋的反乌托邦。我会说，和它相比，乔治·奥威尔的《一九八 四》简直就像是在公园里散步。 而且，他们就在谈论这些。那种思维模式正在朝这个方向发展。这就 是为什么他们说，你们会变成可以被操控的动物。
我们将会对你完全控制。你会被推行央行数字货币。你会被植入皮下芯片。你每六个月就得接种一次疫 苗。没完没了。 你还会住进“十五分钟城市”。你猜怎么着？你不会再吃红肉了，因为昆虫对你同样有好 处。所以，你只能接受这一切，还得对此感到满意。 所以，你知道，如果我们不认真研究这个正被强 加给我们的“矩阵”，那我们未来的世代、我们的孩子、他们的孩子，等等，可能真的会成为“十五分钟 城市”里的奴隶，吃着昆虫，基本上就像待在人类饲养场里一样。
#Pascal
亚历克斯，说实话，我很遗憾地说，我觉得你描绘的那种未来，已经算是比较乐观的版本了。 因 为——我是个乐观主义者。你知道，我担心的是会发生什么。因为我们刚才谈到的，算是资本家阶层里 最坏、最糟糕的那一部分，对吧？就是爱泼斯坦那一类人，以及盘踞在顶层的资本网络。这个体系让这 些东西不会浮到台面上，反而把它们往上推，对吧？然后它们就停留在那里。 那接下来会发生什么？ 唯一让你我、还有大多数其他人保持安全的因素，就是这些人不得不依靠我们的劳动来维持生活。这是 必然的，对吧？他们需要劳动力。 我是说，没有奴隶，你不可能过着身家数十亿美元的生活。你不可 能拥有漂亮的大游艇，享受所有那些东西，去打高尔夫——没有奴隶，就不可能。
你需要那些像奴隶一样辛苦干活的人。他们一年赚个，是多少来着，四万、五万美元。即使在美国也是 这样，对吧？我是说，这点钱根本不算什么。我们说的那个阶层，五万美元根本叫不动他们。他们甚至 不会为了五万美元设闹钟起床，对吧？ 但这正是因为他们需要那些人。我们正越来越接近这样一个时 刻：这种机器人的梦想，以及人工智能驱动的未来，会变成现实。到那时，为了维持那种奢华的生活， 这些“人类动物”就不再被需要了。 而我最大的担忧是，到那个时候，他们会怎么做？你知道，我们现在 这个星球上有八十亿人。也许这并不可持续。也许他们更希望人数接近八百万，这样就能有更多高尔夫 球场。 我是说，我确实非常担心：一旦人工智能热潮和机器人热潮真正汇合，体力劳动、手工劳动和 手指操作的劳动都不再被需要时，究竟会发生什么。
#Alex Krainer
我说我是个无可救药的乐观主义者，这是真心话。因为我并不太担心这些事情。 我之所以不太担心， 是因为我认为，我们唯一可能无法真正战胜这个体系、无法超越这段奴役时期的情况，就是我们要么投 降，说，好吧，我们就当奴隶，我们接受；要么任由自己被误导，走向某种灾难性的核末日。 这是我
们可能失败的唯二方式。 我之所以这么相信，是因为全世界的人们正在觉醒。这种觉醒，是人类历史 上前所未有的。
这是因为，史无前例地，我们现在有了社交媒体、互联网、播客，还有像这样的对话平台。这些掌权 者，已经无法再通过控制电视、报纸和广播，来控制人们听到的叙事了，对吧？ 所以，在社会这道方 程式里，这是一项以前从未存在过的全新因素。我们没法把它计算进去。我们不知道会怎样。因为根本 没有任何先例可循。 但如果你看看他们的策略，看看他们为人类未来制定的议程，你会发现，这些想 法其实都非常老了。早在三十年、四十年，甚至五十年前，就已经被提出来了。而且，没有任何一个设 想预见到互联网和社交媒体，也没有预见到由此带来的那些意想不到的后果。
也许他们原本预料的是：“哦，这会成为一个效率更高的控制网络。”但他们没有预料到的是，它会让我 们能够进行这样的对话。 所以现在，你看，突然之间，突然之间，我们在欧洲有了这种急迫感，要发 动一场针对俄罗斯的战争。 而人们的反应是，网上一下子涌现出大量帖子：“俄罗斯不是我的敌人。我 来自德国，俄罗斯不是我的敌人。我来自西班牙，俄罗斯不是我的敌人。” 所以，对他们来说，制造一 种“所有人都同意”的印象非常重要。他们会说：“哦，俄罗斯人很可怕。他们要来对付我们。他们会摧 毁我们的生活方式。”诸如此类。“我们必须团结起来，去打仗。” 然后，他们让每个人都觉得，所有人 显然都同意这一点。
如果你不这么想，那你就有点问题了。 但如果你看到，成千上万条帖子都在说：“俄罗斯不是我的敌 人。”而且你看到，这些帖子被几十万人点赞、转发，甚至可能有几百万人，那么你就会意识到：我不 是一个人。我们都不想要这场战争。没有人赞同这个。 所以，你再看看这些人——弗里德里希·默茨， 英国那个家伙，我永远记不住他的名字，就是基尔·斯塔默之后的那个，安迪·伯纳姆，随便吧，还有埃 马纽埃尔·马克龙——他们简直被人恨透了。他们在欧洲不受欢迎，人人厌恶。 所以，如果埃马纽埃尔· 马克龙、安迪·伯纳姆、弗里德里希·默茨，或者这些空洞的人当中的任何一个，对本国人民说：“去打 仗，去杀俄罗斯人。”人们根本不会带着多少热情跟随他们。
#Pascal
我希望如此。但他们确实在加班加点地灌输恐俄情绪、仇恨，还有各种“嗜血俄罗斯人”的形象，目的就 是要把人们推到那一步。 他们还没有完全做到——但已经走到一半了。我的意思是，如今在欧洲，仇 视俄罗斯已经成了主流。可想要开战，还没有成为主流。我同意。
#Alex Krainer
嗯，给人的印象确实是这样。我觉得，这种印象又是来自主流媒体，或者社交媒体上那些付费账号。 但我记得，战争刚开始的时候，也就是二零二二年二月，我有一位朋友在北约某个成员国的北约机构工 作。这个人告诉我，你知道，我们会非常仔细地监测欧洲的公众情绪，也会做这些民意调查。 甚至就 在那个时候，俄罗斯在二零二二年二月发动特别军事行动，民众的愤怒情绪或许正处于最高点。这个人 告诉我，在法国、意大利、西班牙这些较早加入北约的西欧国家，人们当时并没有在谈论北方。
他们说的不是英国、德国之类的国家，而是像意大利、法国、西班牙这些地方。大约三分之二的受访者 同情俄罗斯，而不是乌克兰。 至于前苏联阵营的国家，比如波兰、捷克共和国、斯洛伐克、保加利 亚、罗马尼亚等等，这个比例大约是四分之三。 这也符合我的经验。你知道，我来自克罗地亚。克罗 地亚有一种——姑且这么说——比较温和的恐俄文化。并不狂热，不像乌克兰西部，甚至不像波兰那么 强烈。 但你知道，我们从小会觉得，俄罗斯是一个寒冷、生锈、阴暗的地方。说到底，就是和我们不 太合得来。
你知道，我一直到三十多岁，对俄罗斯其实都没什么兴趣。 而且基本上，按我和克罗地亚人交流的经 验，四个人里有三个会觉得：不，普京才是这场戏里的正面角色。泽连斯基则是那个不确定因素，是个
傻瓜，是那个会把世界点燃的人。 你知道，因为这种文化氛围，人们不太会公开谈这些。但如果你跟 他们聊，而且他们发现你站在哪一边，他们突然就会敞开心扉，把他们所有的想法都告诉你。
而且，十个案例里有七个，按我的经验来看，他们对乌克兰都非常怀疑，但并不害怕俄罗斯。他们并不 像有人试图说服我们那样，对俄罗斯感到恐惧。 那还是四年前。今天，我认为局势更加偏向俄罗斯， 也更加不利于乌克兰。 但是，你知道，他们不能让你觉得，现实情况就是这样。因为他们必须让你相 信，所有人都明白俄罗斯是个问题，所有人都知道俄罗斯是威胁。所以，所有人都知道，我们必须团结 在我们敬爱的领袖——马克龙、默茨，或者英国那个家伙——身后，然后去打仗。
#Pascal
我希望确实是这样。那会非常有意思，也确实很让人看到希望。 我的反例是，最近在瑞士，我们就瑞 士中立问题举行了一次公投。但反对的一方成功地把它变成了一个关于普京的问题。结果是七成对三 成，七成反对，三成支持。我估计实际情况大概就是这样。 大约有百分之三十的人会说，俄罗斯不是 我的敌人。还有百分之七十的人会说，嗯，你知道，我们还是想尽可能伤害那些家伙，但我们不想打 仗。我的意思是，制裁。制裁是好的，因为制裁会伤害普京。所以制裁就是好的。 就是他们搞出来的 那种简单粗暴的胡扯。所以，至少对瑞士来说，我把这当作一个衡量标准。但如果其他欧洲国家的比例 确实非常不一样，那就会很令人振奋。
#Alex Krainer
你知道，当时有一家法国主要民调机构做过一次正式民调。我忘了具体是哪一家。我记得是在特别军事 行动开始大约两周后做的。 这项民调的结果——他们的提问方式有点奇怪——但大意是：你是否认 为，俄罗斯入侵、或者说干预乌克兰，有正当理由？ 百分之五十六的法国人——我想这份民调现在应 该还能查到。反正我在笔记里的什么地方记着——百分之五十六的法国人回答“是”，认为俄罗斯有正当 理由。 而且那是在当时，刚开始不久的时候。 你知道，他们会操纵选举。他们也会操纵民调，因为他 们需要合法性，他们需要拿出来说：“哦，看，百分之七十的人都支持这件事。”
#Pascal
对，对，不，不，你说得对。你说得对。还有对公众认知的操控。我们都知道这一点。 所以，亚历克 斯，这次谈话太精彩了。再说一次，我通常只做一个小时，但这次实在停不下来，因为内容太棒了。非 常感谢你。 而且，我们肯定还得做第三期，才能继续深入聊下去。不过，想关注你、找到你作品的 人，应该去哪里找你？
#Alex Krainer
哦，对。你可以很容易在 X 平台上找到我。我的账号是“@NakedHedgie”。 我在 Substack 上有两个刊 物。其中一个是我的个人刊物，叫《Alex Krainer 的 Substack》。我大概每周发布一篇文章。 另外，我 还有一份每日市场通讯，叫《iSystem 趋势跟踪》。它基本上是一份趋势跟踪市场通讯，涵盖全球十九 个金融和大宗商品市场。 然后，我也开了 YouTube 频道。今年我重新启用了它，我想它叫“Alex Krainer Simply”。 对，“Alex Krainer Official”是一个冒充我的假 AI 账号，不是那个。就是“Alex Krainer”。
#Pascal
我会确保找到真正的频道，然后把链接放在下面的简介栏里。大家也请去支持一下亚历克斯·克莱纳。 如果你想收到他的最新消息，就订阅他的频道。我们还会再次邀请他回到这个节目。亚历克斯，太感谢 你了。今天聊得很愉快。
#Alex Krainer
帕斯卡，谢谢你。那就下次再见。

The Undead Empire Strikes Back: How The UK Still Rules The World | Alex Krainer
Alex Krainer returns to discuss his argument that British imperial power survives through international banking networks. With Pascal Lottaz, he examines Yugoslavia’s breakup, Bosnia’s political tensions, and competing British and American interests. Their conversation traces debt, oil concessions, and corporate finance as mechanisms of wealth extraction, including the case of Enrico Mattei. They also debate technological control, artificial intelligence, and public attitudes toward Russia, before considering whether independent media and growing public awareness offer grounds for optimism and renewed sovereignty. Alex's Links: Alex Krainer’s Substack: https://alexkrainer. substack.com I-System TrendCompass: https://trendcompass.substack.com X: https://x.com /NakedHedgie YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@kraineralex The Naked Hedgie: https://thenakedhedgie.com Neutrality Studies Links: Neutrality Studies Substack: https://pascallottaz.substack.com Support Neutrality Studies: https://neutralitystudies.com/donate Neutrality Studies shop: https://neutralitystudies.com/shop Time Stamps 00:00 Alex Krainer and the “undead empire” 05:07 Yugoslavia and British influence 15:31 Bosnia and competing Western interests 30:33 Banking networks and the American divide 38:44 Debt, oil and wealth extraction 50: 51 Corporate power and Enrico Mattei 58:02 Technological control, AI and the future 01:02:42 Public awareness and the case for optimism
#Pascal
Welcome back, everybody, to Neutrality Studies, today for the second time with Alex Cranor.
#Alex Krainer
Alex, welcome back. Thank you for having me, Pascal. Pleasure to join you, and my warm greetings from Monaco this time to your audience.
#Pascal
Warm greetings back from Kyoto to wonderful Monaco. And last time we just couldn't really finish. I mean, we left off kind of at the most interesting point where you called the British the undead empire, and you were kind of getting into the weeds of why it is that especially financial Britain, the City of London, never really lost power, and how these transnational elites actually still keep ruining everybody else's day. Maybe we can pick up there, and you tell us a little bit how you're perceiving just the power of the money side of things of the West.
#Alex Krainer
Okay, sure. So... the idea that the British Empire never really went away just kind of emerged in little bits and pieces through the course of my research. And I've been doing this research for... let's call it the best part of the last 30 years, because I was also very confused about the war in former Yugoslavia where, you know, when I was a young man in my 20s, my early 20s, I bought into the whole narrative, and I volunteered for military service and I participated in that war. And fortunately, I came out unharmed and untraumatized. You know, the only time I got fired at was friendly fire. So not only was I never injured, I was never shot at, and I never shot at anybody, really.
And so I came out unharmed. But afterwards, I was very, very confused about how could this war even happen? And I can promise you, Pascal, if you asked anybody in former Yugoslavia, in Croatia, in Serbia, other republics, about the war maybe a week before it erupted, I think that 99% of people would have told you, "It's impossible. The war will never happen." I'm a child of a mixed marriage. My mother is Serbian, my father is Croatian. Many people were like that, mixed up. We didn't really even know who was who because it didn't matter. People looked normal. Even the Muslim minority, if you spoke to them, they would look like me.
There was no Wahhabism, there was no extremism and so forth. So in the end, it turns out that it was one of these situations where, you know the story about putting 100 red ants and 100 black ants into a jar? Okay, so basically, what certain researchers have done, they have done this experiment where they would literally put 100 red ants and 100 black ants into a jar and shut the jar. And then they would observe what happens. And basically, nothing happens. The ants just go around minding their own business, trying to get out of the jar, I suppose. And they don't fight. But then if you shake up the jar violently, then the ants start killing one another.
And what happens is that, I guess, you alarm them, you scare them. Their hormones, adrenaline, whatever they have, probably explode. And then they see, aha, it must be these other guys. And then the fighting begins. And I don't know how better to explain the eruption of war in former Yugoslavia than if somebody shook up our jar. And we are the perfect jar to shake up because, you know, in there, in Croatia, Bosnia, Serbia, you have three constituent peoples: Catholic Croatians, Muslims in Bosnia, and Serbians who are Serbian Orthodox. So, you know, very easy to divide people, and very easy to tell one side, these other guys are coming after you.
And then you tell the other side, these other guys are coming after you. And people get scared. And so, you know, back in the day when we depended on newspapers and radio and television for our information, there was no social media and podcasts, we bought into those narratives. And I promise you that 30 years later, I'm still not sure what that was all about. But what I'm absolutely certain about now, as a result of my research, is that the undead British Empire played the key role in getting that region into a war. And the rest was literally shaking our jar.
#Pascal
How? How did the undead empire do that? Because the narrative is that it was an internal collapse and, you know, the Communist Party disagreeing, and then some meddling. And I've had people on my podcast, especially David Gibbs, but then also, in conjunction with a few others, including Colonel McGregor, who then say, like, it was the hand of the Americans. The Americans didn't, I mean, were to a large part responsible for this not winding down much, much faster. Yeah. How do you bring in the British?
#Alex Krainer
Well, yeah, you see, that's the usual narrative. It was the Americans. And people perceive the American hand, and it's widely discussed, and it's in the, how do you call it, in the flow of information. You always come across it. But if you scratch the surface, you find that the pivotal role was played by the British, except they are very, very good at concealing their hand. They're very good at making sure that their role, for the historical record, appears as though they were bona fide trying to reduce violence, to bring the region to peace, and so forth. I'll give you a perfect example. When the war started, military structures of former Yugoslavia were completely under Serbian control.
So there was the Yugoslav National Army, and it was completely controlled out of Belgrade, the whole hierarchy, and most of the officer corps were Serbian or Montenegrin nationals. Okay. And so the republics that wanted to break loose of the federation, we had nothing. We had the territorial defense units, which were lightly armed and unable to resist them. And so Belgrade—so I'm not going to say Serbians, but Belgrade, the central government under Slobodan Milosevic—they got the signal that the West would support them to keep former Yugoslavia together by force if necessary, which means that all these independence movements had to be crushed by force. And so that's how the war got going.
#Pascal
Hey, just a very quick note. The best way to support this channel is by signing up for my free Substack. You can also help with a paid subscription there, or you can get some of our new merch on neutralitystudies.com. Links below. See you there.
#Alex Krainer
And then at the same time, the British were insisting that an arms embargo be imposed on former Yugoslavia so that no other country could acquire arms for resistance. So, you know, very often this conflict is compared to Russia invading Ukraine, okay? A much more appropriate comparison is Kiev invading the Donbas. And I'm using the word "invading" very loosely because that's not what happened. From Kiev, you had the anti-terror operation, but it was aimed at crushing the independence movement and the resistance. What we had from Russia into Ukraine, that was a special military operation. And I think it's important to respect those terms because they are precise 
military terms. And, you know, there are definitions to what is an invasion, what is a special military operation.
And, you know, Russians are not lying when they say that this was a special military operation and not an invasion, because an invasion is when you launch substantially all of your military assets at some region or some nation to overrun it. That's an invasion. So what happened in Ukraine never was an invasion. Anyway, so guess who armed the Croatian military when it self-organized? It was the Russians. We got weapons from Russia. Not because—you know, there's this great perceived sympathy between Serbia and Russia because they're both Orthodox Slavs. We are Catholic Slavs; they're Orthodox Slavs. But because I think that the Russian foreign policy people understood that this new unified Yugoslavia was going to be London's cat's paw in the Balkans. This whole thing was the making of a new political entity under the control of the Anglo-Zionist Empire.
#Pascal
Just for understanding, you said the Croats were armed by Russia? Did I get that right?
#Alex Krainer
We were able to procure weapons in spite of the Western embargo from the Russians. Okay, yes. It's not that the Russians said, like, "Here, Croats, here's the weapons," but they were willing to sell us the weapons very favorably and to disregard the Western-imposed embargo. And this is not even controversial. I happen to be personal friends with Admiral Domazet, who was basically top of the military command in Croatia and who organized the Croatian military. And this is a well-known fact. So if in Croatia you say, "Hey, it's the Russians who armed us and enabled us to defend ourselves," people don't say, like, "No, no, no, that's not true." Everybody knows that that's true. But it's one of those historical facts that ends up overlooked in favor of these big, large facade arrangements that end up in the, you know, Balkan History 101 narratives.
#Pascal
And here, sorry, the timeline is actually quite important. And we're speaking here about 1991, 1991, 1991. And then, so because 1991 is such a crucial moment, right? In December 1991, the Soviet Union ceases to exist, and Russia and Ukraine and so on are reborn, like, legally. So in summer 1991, when a lot of this got underway, it was actually still the Soviet Union. Yes, yes. And you're seeing that as a counter-movement to counteract, actually, what was coming from the Anglo sphere to start exerting control. But that would mean that the Brits had an interest in actually the Serbs crushing the Croat uprising.
#Alex Krainer
Yes, yes, yes. And the Serbian lobby in London was consistently very supportive of Slobodan Milosevic's policies. And, you know, Slobodan Milosevic shouldn't be perceived as this staunch Serbian patriot nationalist, because he was one of these very amoral apparatchiks. Not like Zelensky, but with a lot in common with Zelensky. He... He didn't really care about the Serbian people. He had his orders. Okay, just to give you an idea. He was recruited as president of the Serbian Communist Party by two brothers, Petar and Ivan Stambolic, who were basically the gray eminences of the Yugoslavian Central Bank. And he was sent to New York for four years as a representative of one of the largest banks in former Yugoslavia. And after he came back from New York, he suddenly became the leader of the Serbian Communist Party.
And he started setting the terrain for a takeover to centralize Yugoslavia under the rule of Belgrade. And he had consistent support from the Western power structures, but I wouldn't say Washington, D. C., because Washington, D.C.'s policies are difficult to interpret because they're all over the place. You know, they go one way, then somebody from the UK goes over to Washington, they have discussions, and then the United States says, like, "Oh yeah, okay, we'll support the British position on this." But my very strong impression from analyzing all this is that the British had a policy that was consistent and relatively easier to explain. The Americans kind of wound around and weren't really sure. And the policy of the British was consistently to empower Belgrade to try to create a unitary, centralized nation there in the Balkans and to make sure that it's under their own control.
The Balkans are strategically extremely important. You know, that's where World War I erupted. That's where the jar is relatively easy to shake. You have the Adriatic Sea, which cuts the deepest into the European continent, connects with the Italian Po River Valley, which is one of the most important industrial zones of Europe, one of the wealthiest enclaves in all of Europe. And so, you know, to control that area can be very important. And then you can always do another World War I and draw Russia into a conflict, you know, from the Balkans. So to this day, there's a tug of war between the British and the Americans for control of the Bosnian Federation. You'll notice it if you pay attention to the news, but it's difficult to interpret if you read the headlines. Then, you know, you can't understand anything at all.
#Pascal
But anyway, you know, you're interpreting it as a tug of war between the Brits and the Americans for Bosnia?
#Alex Krainer
Oh yeah, absolutely. I'll give you an example. So about a year ago, I was at a conference in Istanbul, in Turkey, and there was one of the members of the cabinet of the Republika Srpska there, present at the conference. Now, just to give your readers a little bit of context, one of the six constituent republics of former Yugoslavia is Bosnia and Herzegovina, right? And Bosnia and 
Herzegovina consists of three constituent peoples: Serbs, Croats, and Bosniaks, you know, Muslims. And it's divided into ten cantons. You have one entity, which is Republika Srpska, and then you have a bunch of Muslim and Croat cantons.
And this is the result of the Dayton Agreement, which was a mess, a complete mess. Basically, you rigged the place for a future conflict. And so now it has been very, very widely perceived in Bosnia and Herzegovina that basically the British are running the show, that Sarajevo is crawling with British intelligence assets. They are very close, in cahoots with the Bosnian security services, with the Bosnian intelligence agencies. They basically dominate Bosnian education. If you run a poll today in Bosnia and ask which is the greatest foreign threat to Bosnia and Herzegovina, I think close to 70% of the people will say it's Russia.
So this brainwashing was going on there. And then, let's say by the fall of 2024, a war between Bosnia, between Republika Srpska and the other Bosnian enclaves, was regarded as inevitable. What was going on? The government of Sarajevo, which is the federal government, which supposedly is Bosnian Serbs and Croats proportionately represented, blah, blah, blah. But it's dominated by an EU- appointed regent who can overrule anything, who basically rules by decree. So they were consistently harassing and antagonizing the leadership of Republika Srpska. And so the Serbs were saying, okay, if it's going to be like this, we're going to secede and we're going to join Serbia proper.
And so in the fall, I think it was in October 2024, they were about to have a referendum. The referendum was already planned for secession, for the breakup of Bosnia and Herzegovina, and then the Serbs were going to declare independence and very likely join Serbia proper to create a whole new place, right? And so this was—people were, okay, if this happens, it's war. It's inevitable. It's going to happen 100%. And so the British were very much favoring this policy of antagonizing the Serbs and pushing them, provoking them into going independent. Now, why were they doing this? If you read policy papers, gosh, I forget now what it's called, one of the British, one of the most powerful British think tanks. It's not Policy Exchange. It's called RUSI, Royal United Services International.
So what they were saying, as the war in Ukraine is now basically lost, the project Ukraine was lost, what they said explicitly is that the Balkans are certain to become the second front in the West's confrontation against Russia. I'll explain how that would happen. So basically, if the Serbs held their referendum, they would declare independence. The majority of the Serbian population would say, yeah, the hell with this, we're going independent. And then the war would be regarded as inevitable because the federal forces would have to move in and try to crush this. They already had a warrant for the arrest of the former president of Republika Srpska, Dodik. They banned him from running, like Călin Georgescu.
They basically banned him from running, even though he was the most popular leader and he would have won any election, right? So this kept going on. The war became almost inevitable. And then, in the beginning of 2025, Donald Trump walks into the White House, okay? And so things start 
changing, right? And I'll tell you what I learned from this member of the cabinet in Republika Srpska in Istanbul. Because I was hearing from journalists, from analysts on the ground there, and from one Croatian politician in Bosnia. I was hearing that everything changed suddenly when Trump came to power. And so I went and I asked him, and I said, "I'm hearing this."
Is this true, that things changed? And the guy just sounded like his face lit up. And he said, "Oh my God, it's like night and day. It's like a different planet." All the war pressures just kind of dissipated all at once. Donald Trump, through his support behind Milorad Dodik, the banned president of Republika Srpska, Trump administration officials coordinated with the Kremlin to persuade the Serbs to delay the referendum. So the tripwire that was perceived as the beginning of war was delayed indefinitely. Well, you know, they delayed it for a year, but now it didn't happen still. So basically what happened is that the Trump administration elbowed the British out of the way.
They basically disenfranchised them in Bosnia and Herzegovina. All the war pressures finally dissipated, and the war in the Balkans, you know, the second front in the West's confrontation against Russia, never happened. Now, I'll try to explain how this war was going to happen and what its effects would be. Basically, Croatia—there's a Croatian minority in Bosnia and Herzegovina, right? I think they constitute, I don't know the exact number, but let's say 20% of the population. And there are some Croatian cantons. And it's all mixed together to make sure that it's easy to pit people against people, right?
So it's a mess. But anyway, these people are there. They have their legitimate claims, their legitimate interests, a role in the government of the country. And so if the war took place inside of Bosnia and Herzegovina, inevitably the Serbs would be drawn into it because they would have to come in to protect the interests of the Serbian people in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Croatia would be drawn in for the same reason, to defend the interests of the Croatian people there. Now, Croatia is a NATO member country. So if Croatia gets drawn into this war and it's opposed to Serbia, who is a non-member country, then that could be grounds for Article 5. Now you might have the whole of NATO getting involved in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Well, if that happens, Russia can't just sit on the sidelines and watch. So then Russia gets drawn in. So it was a very, very clever scheme with a lot of similarities to basically the scenario that led to World War I. And now you would have another major war break out on the European continent, starting from the exact same location where World War I erupted and driven forward by the exact same power structure, which is the City of London, as always. And so the Trump administration— you know, we talk about Trump a lot, but there's a lot of competent people in the State Department, in the Pentagon. And so what this Croatian politician was saying, I watched an interview with him.
He said, well, you know, I went to Washington. This was very soon after Trump came to power. He said, I went to Washington, and I felt like, oh dear, you know, now I'm going to have to explain to them where Bosnia is on the map, and who Croats are, and who the Bosnians are, and what the hell the whole thing is. And he said, I got there, I went to the State Department, I sat down with the 
people there, and he said, I was stunned that they knew everything in small detail. They understood the situation perfectly. And so he said, well, the people in Bosnia have no doubts who was pushing for the war, for the outbreak of war.
And they have no doubts about who completely derailed this whole situation. So it was the American administration that derailed the situation. And it was the British interests through their NGOs, through their secret diplomacy. Britain, by the way, I think it was in February of 2024, Britain signed a military cooperation agreement with the government in Sarajevo. Not NATO, Britain. Britain. And they always do this when they're preparing a place for war. And so this all suddenly fell apart. And so this is one episode where you had the British trying to get one thing going and the Americans basically defusing it.
And this happened during the war between 1993 and 1995, where Americans were actually trying to get the Serbian side to abide by a peace, to impose a ceasefire. But the Bush One administration and the Clinton administration, I think, were very much still malleable to British influence. So they would go in one direction, and then you had Lord Peter Carrington, Lord David Owen. You had Sir Douglas Hurd, who were consistently pushing for war, for continuation of war. And in the end, the Americans always kind of lost their mojo. They lost their conviction. And then, you know, they were going to bomb Serbian positions, and then they were like, "Well, okay, okay, we're not going to bomb them." And then, you know, in the end, they had this Dayton Agreement, which is, I don't know who drafted it, but I suspect that the British had their hand in it as well.
And it was basically a disastrous agreement that only kind of swept the whole mess under the carpet to fester, and eventually, you know, where you could light the fuse again and have the whole thing explode. Long story, but that is the experience in just one little crisis flashpoint. And that little crisis flashpoint is just one of the little flashpoints in the archipelago of the arc of crisis that the British Empire surrounded Russia with, going from the Baltics down to the Balkans, to the Eastern Mediterranean, and across all the way to Korea. Basically, it's the exact same script that Halford Mackinder wrote up back in 1904. Back then, you know, there was no Yugoslavia. There was no Israel. There was no Ukraine.
But Halford Mackinder was talking exactly about surrounding the pivot area with these crisis flashpoints. And he was talking about France, Italy, Egypt. India, Pakistan wasn't there either, and Bangladesh wasn't there either. India and Korea, basically. Korea was still one country. But basically, now we have all these other countries, so it's even easier to create these wars. But the idea, as spelled out by Halford Mackinder—and just for context, Halford Mackinder was one of the leading minds of the British Empire. He was part of the imperial cabal. He was a theoretician of the empire. And he basically wrote up this geopolitical strategy of the British Empire. He didn't invent it. He articulated it in a series of books and papers and so forth.
And so the idea was to surround the pivot area, the pivot empire, which is essentially Russia, with all these crisis flashpoints where the maritime powers would be able to supply their proxy forces with 
materials, with advice, with troops, with ammunition, to always impose the war on the pivot power, again, Russia, and keep bleeding it perpetually so that it can never arise as a rival to the British Empire. And we still have this today, even though we think that the British Empire is gone, but it is not. It's just kind of reincarnated itself in this axis of, you know, London, Wall Street, with their, you know, they buy the politicians, the bankers buy the politicians, but it's a banker's empire. There's no doubt about that.
#Pascal
And it has gone incognito in this sense. And, you know, maybe one of the mistakes we make is to think of the political West. I mean, Richard Sakwa calls it that, or we call it the collective West sometimes, right? And we think of it as one amalgamation, but actually there's infighting within it. And is this maybe a case where we had some, you know, infighting within the empire of what to do? Because, you know, if Bosnia, if the scenario with Bosnia happened the way it did, I am pretty sure the Americans will get very jumpy about Kosovo, which is currently their, you know, footprint with NATO and so on there. Do you think that there was disagreement about what the right strategy is for, you know, the occupation of the Balkans?
#Alex Krainer
There may have been, but I'm not sure about that because, you know, all these things you kind of have to judge by observing the pattern of events, policies, then how they justify the policy, what they tell you, what they don't tell you. And then you kind of have to use your imagination to connect the dots because they never spell it out for you, because a lot of these strategies are secret. You know, like the run-up to World War I was very much secret. We only learned much, much, much, much later that the British were working on getting World War I going for almost 20 years, or maybe even more than 20 years, before they actually managed to, you know, get the whole show on the road. It seems to me that the ultimate conflict is within the United States.
Because at the turn of the 20th century, the British imperial networks, cabals, clubs, whatever we want to call them—yeah, just to clarify, you know, when you go to school, you study history, they tell you, oh, there was a Spanish Empire, and there was a Belgian Empire, and the Dutch Empire, and the Venetian Empire, and Ottoman—you know, like, the concept of empire is always conflated with the nation. And it seems that, you know, for some reason, these certain nations end up colonizing the world and creating an empire. But what is really happening is that you have an imperial oligarchy always centered around banking interests who basically co-opt nations together.
So they will try to use a nation that has wealth, military power, political, diplomatic power, and so forth, and let's say a strong intelligence network, to use all those assets to create a global empire of colonies. And so, as far as these networks are concerned, they don't care if the host nation is Holland or Britain or the United States or China, so long as they keep control of these key assets so that they can operate, force foreign policy solutions on other countries, hold them in a subservient 
position as colonies, and dictate terms of trade and who's going to fund their development and who they will pay their debts to.
It's basically the modern colonial system for the last two centuries has been basically to plunge nations into debt. And then they pay... So, okay, just to go back to the United States, I think that the conflict is within the United States because, for the last 100-plus years, the British have infiltrated and co-opted the structures of power within the United States. So you have this deep state, which is loyal to this imperial cabal, which basically—that's their employer.
They're like the Praetorian Guard of the empire. But the United States emerged as a reaction to the British Empire, as a rejection of the British Empire. No, the Declaration of Independence was independence from the British Empire. And so people in the United States who are patriots, who deeply care about their Constitution, about the American republic, they still harbor resentment against the British, and they particularly harbor a resentment of being the second fiddle in that relationship and basically serving as the military enforcement arm of their empire. So I think that—I don't know who these people are—but they are there in the bowels of the Pentagon, of maybe the State Department, maybe the government. And occasionally they will formulate policies that are against the interests of the imperial cabal.
And then it's time to beat them back into submission. But it seems to me that with the Trump administration, this expression of resistance to the British Empire has reached a kind of the FU moment, you know, where they're not even pretending that the special relationship is something anymore, and they're openly defying the British. The most recent example, just from the other day, is the deal, the historic deal between the Trump administration, between the United States and Russia. If you read the reaction from the British establishment people, you will notice that they're absolutely livid. They're hysterical about it. And this is where this conflict is kind of, you know, the wedge is being pushed again between the United States and the British Empire. And the British are very, very extremely unhappy about it.
#Pascal
You know, what you're describing here is something very close to how Radhika Desai, from a Marxist perspective, understands what is going on. That's why she and Marxists, they use terminology of imperial setup, not as a way to say, like, "Oh, these people just want to rule over a vast territory." No, it's very precise in the way that the capitalist structures then create these institutions that then, out of the logic that they work on, will need this kind of imperial expansionism in order to leech onto these colonies and feed themselves, because they need to maximize—not just maximize, but they need to return profit back home, right? So you need to grab things, and any kind of capitalist system, unfettered capitalist system, necessarily must be, by its very logic, imperial and colonialist, right?
And so the question, though, is whether, if that's the setup of the political West, right, how these different centers then actually come up with the decisions on what to reach for next and which ones of themselves to enrich more. And we've seen that also with Ukraine, right, how immediately BlackRock was there, and immediately there were these conferences, and immediately there was, like, this slicing up of the pie before it was even—dicing up of the bear before it was hunted down, and so on. And how this is going down now, the question is: who's going to end up holding the bag? Like, the $200, $300, $400 billion of losses, who's going to hold that? How do you see that, whether it is system logic or actually, you know, kind of bankers' way of messing with the global structure for their own behalf? I mean, what I want to say is, is it intentional or is it system-inherent?
#Alex Krainer
I think it's very much intentional, because basically the whole business model of the empire is always dressed up as something that's palatable to the public. At first, it was spreading the word of bringing intellectual enlightenment to the world. It was a mission civilisatrice.
#Pascal
White man's burden, mission civilisatrice.
#Alex Krainer
White man's burden to teach the savages the dignity of labor. Now the latest variant is freedom and democracy, right? I don't know what's next, what they might invent. I can't quite see it, but they're clever people. They fund all these think tanks. But basically, the business plan of the empire is to lend money both to colonized nations and to your own clients who go to that nation to develop it and create jobs. Because basically, if you take an oil-rich nation, call it Nigeria, it has a lot of oil underground. Now, you have to develop this, right? You have to build oil rigs and ports and pipelines and distribution networks. That takes a lot of money before this starts to flow out.
So maybe you need to make investments of some billions of dollars. So basically, it'll be the business for BP and Shell and ExxonMobil and, you know, companies like this. And they will lend the money— sorry, they will borrow the money from their bankers, which will be JP Morgan, RBS, UBS, Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, and so forth. And you see what happens is that first of all, to get those multibillion- dollar loans, there has to be collateral. So the moment you have political control over a nation, then you can make a contract saying that, okay, Nigeria's oil is that collateral. And now, against that collateral, we can lend Royal Dutch Shell a billion dollars to develop Nigerian oil fields.
And if Royal Dutch Shell, for whatever reason, is unable to pay back our loans, well, then we will repossess—we will take that collateral, and we'll have the right to sell it or give it to a different corporation, whatever. But we basically command this wealth inside Nigeria. Okay, and now what 
usually happens, first of all, from banks' point of view, the minute they issue that loan to Royal Dutch Shell, that's a $1 billion asset on their balance sheet. So from that moment on, their balance sheet has grown by a billion dollars. And the second part is that that $1 billion will be repaid at least double over its lifetime. So they will gain at least $2 billion.
But very often, you know, the bankers are very good at adding all kinds of fees and all kinds of clauses that, in many cases, the loan ends up repaid 10 times over. Okay, so like a billion-dollar loan ends up sucking out $10 billion of wealth out of Nigeria to pay back the bankers. And it seems legitimate because they'll say, like, well, it was a loan. We lent them money to develop their country, to develop their economy. Look how much better off they are. And of course, we have to charge interest because there's risk and blah, blah, blah, blah. But basically, the mechanism, the relationship, is like a conveyor belt sucking wealth out of the colony and towards the bankers. Yeah, go ahead. Go ahead.
#Pascal
So in this picture, Royal Dutch Shell is really nothing else but the conveyor belt. It's not even the one that's profiting the most. The ones profiting the most are the banks in the background that actually don't lay even a hand on that oil, right? They really just lay claim. And that's why you need legal structures that then can enforce these claims, right?
#Alex Krainer
Correct. Okay. Excellent point. Because first of all, you see, Royal Dutch Shell could send their representatives to Nigeria and they could say, hey, you know, we're going to buy your crude oil, and we're going to, you know, put our margin on, and we're going to resell it. We're going to refine it in our domestic markets and sell it to our network of gas stations. So, you know, for the same low price, they could just buy the oil from the Nigerians. They don't need to build; they can let the Nigerians build their own rigs or, you know, whatever.
They can do the same in Iran, in Russia, in any country. So they don't need to really go in there. They don't need to seize their collateral and put it under their control. They don't need political control of the country. They can just make a business. You're from Switzerland, right? Probably your whole life, if you went to a gas station, there was gas, there was diesel, there was everything you needed, right? You had coffee, you had cocoa, you had sugar in your stores. How many military bases does Switzerland have anywhere in the world? Zero, right? So you don't need to do that.
You don't need—you know, they keep selling this to the Americans like, "Oh my God, if we're not in their region, if we don't have control of the oil, then, you know, like, the gas stations are going to dry up." That's a myth. That's an untruth. You can just trade on an equitable basis. And in many cases, it'll turn out to be cheaper than doing it this way. So you're right. Royal Dutch Shell, in this case, represents, like, the mechanism, the conveyor belt of wealth. And I, you know, back in the 
day, some 20-some years ago, I was one of these geeks who read every issue of McKinsey Quarterly cover to cover. And I can admit it now. I've been to McKinsey Anonymous, and I'm fine now.
#Pascal
I recovered from McKinsey.
#Alex Krainer
No, no, I used to read it. I used to read it because I thought they had good analysis and good research and so forth. I thought they were smart people up until the Enron affair happened. Basically, I read something that absolutely stunned me. And so this was about risk management in the oil industry, like a long series of articles about risk management in the oil industry. And, you know, like, McKinsey people go and they talk to the executives, and they talk to many executives, and then they create all these figures and statistics and tables and charts and everything. And what they came up with—and this was, I would say, 2003, let's say 2004—they said that throughout most of its history, the whole Western oil industry barely covered the cost of capital.
Now wrap your mind around that one. Meaning that after they paid for all those loans, after they paid for the bankers' investment, usually there was nothing much left. That's not true now because the prices of oil have gone much, much higher. There's a lot more margin. So these corporations are making a lot of profits. But this statistic that throughout most of its history, the oil industry would barely cover the cost of capital implies that they were basically working for the bankers. When they paid all these fees and loans and interest rates and everything, nothing was left, or very little. So, which means that the whole setup is like a bankers' conveyor belt.
And so, you know, the incentive is amazing because the minute you issue the loan, your balance sheet grows, and it grows with a nice, spectacularly profitable asset that now belongs to you, so long as you keep political control over Nigeria or Venezuela or Iran or Iraq, or you name the country. And from that moment on, in perpetuity, because, you know, like a trade is a trade. You make a margin. If you steal the gold, you steal the gold. But this mechanism is like, it's every month, every month, billions of dollars all just coming from everywhere around the world to the City of London, to Wall Street, and other places like that.
#Pascal
But what I don't understand—I'm sorry, there must be a good explanation for this. What you're saying makes evident sense, but in order to build these oil rigs and so on, it's Shell, in this example, that needs to borrow the money, right, from the banks. But how is it that Shell can then put up this Nigerian oil as collateral? Because it doesn't own the oil, right? The Nigerian government makes a contract with Shell to dig that stuff out, and then, okay, you can go and sell. But until that happens, it's not—I mean, in order for me to put up a—no, that's not true. In order for me to put up a house 
as collateral, I need to own the house. Well, yes, I do. I do have to own the house. That's part and parcel of it. I need to make a contract that says you own the house as long as you pay the mortgage to the bank. How does that one work? So is it not the Nigerian government that makes a contract with the bankers to get the money to then pay Shell to do this stuff?
#Alex Krainer
I think that the way it works is that the Nigerian government opens the country to foreign capital and to foreign corporations for development. And then it says—it enters into a contract with the corporation, and then it says, "You may develop our oil sector." And they usually give them oil fields under their control. Not necessarily ownership, but maybe a 100-year lease or a perpetual lease or a 50-year lease. And then Royal Dutch Shell says, "This oil field, we have exclusive rights to exploit it. And we got the exclusive right from the Nigerian government, which is legitimate, which is democracy devoted to human rights. Everything is wonderful." And so this is all very perfectly legitimate.
And with all that, they go to their banker and they say, "We need a billion dollars to develop this." And the banker says, "Thank you very much. Yes, here's a billion dollars." Oh, we created that billion dollars out of thin air, right? Because the bank didn't pull out their billion from other uses to say, like, "All right, we're going to give you this billion." They just write it into their balance sheet. That's all. And now it's their asset. It's Royal Dutch Shell's liability. And the whole corporation goes to work. The key note is that you have to have political control of the government in Laos, right? And that government has to give, like, a legitimate-looking paper to Royal Dutch Shell to say, "You have the exclusive right to develop this area." And then you're in business.
#Pascal
Why? Why can banks do this? I mean, why does Royal Dutch Shell not just set up its own bank, you know, Royal Dutch Shell Bank, and then give itself a loan? Why is it that these outside banks are so successful in subduing even the real economy? I mean, Royal Dutch Shell, in this example, is part of the real economy that actually serves a real purpose, which is getting the stuff out of the ground and into the cars, right, or being part and parcel of that. That's actually real. The bank part is the financial casino on top of it.
#Alex Krainer
Pascal, again, the perfect question. Thank you. Basically, if you are, let's say, you're the owner of Royal Dutch Shell and you need a billion dollars to develop this business, do you care whether that billion dollars comes from a Nigerian bank or a London bank or a Wall Street bank or a Russian bank or a Chinese bank? It's a billion dollars. You don't care at all. So you have no reason to give this asset to, I don't know, J.P. Morgan. This is why, when you look at the boards of directors of all these corporations, you will see that they will always have a guy there, or more than one guy or woman, 
from Goldman Sachs, from J.P. Morgan, from Citigroup, so that the corporation, the business strategy of the corporation, is subservient to the banking interest.
#Pascal
It's like a couple of friends.
#Alex Krainer
Yes. Otherwise, you know, you have the famous case of Enrico Mattei in Italy, which is very, very instructive. Enrico Mattei said, like, we're going to develop this business. You know, he developed the Italian energy sector, the refining, the pipelines, the ships. It was incredible what he did. But he did it on behalf of Italy, of the Italian people. He ran circles around the Seven Sisters, the big seven oil companies in the world. He was outcompeting them. He would go to Libya and make a deal with the Libyans, Algerians, Egyptians for exploitation. And he would do it on a very equitable basis. He would say, let's do something that's good for you guys and that's good for us. You sell us your oil, we build a refinery in your country, and you employ people and you refine the oil, and then you sell us the refined product and we take it to Italy.
He went to Russia, made a deal where Italian steel plants produced like two million tons of steel pipes to sell to Russia in exchange for Russian crude oil exported to Italy. And so the deal was so advantageous that by the time this Russian oil was on the Italian market, it was a whole dollar cheaper than Royal Dutch Shell and Exxon and so forth. And I'm not talking a dollar cheaper from like $100 to $99. I'm talking like from $2.50 to $1.50. So the American oil in Italy was $2.50 by the time it came to the Italian market. The Russian oil that the Italians got for the steel pipes that Russians needed to build their extensive network of pipelines everywhere, that oil was $1.50 a barrel. And so what happened?
Enrico Mattei's plane went down. They killed him, right? And it is almost certain that it was the CIA that shot him. The American embassy in Rome, they wrote many reports about this troublesome Mattei who wouldn't play ball, who was, like, doing his thing independently, that his company is growing more powerful, more prosperous, more profitable, that they were basically taking control of the Italian market. Well, we can't have that. We can't have that because, you know, next thing he's going to do is going to get a loan from an Italian bank. Well, he was already, but that was the whole problem. So he had to go. So they assassinated him. He was flying from Palermo to Milan, I think, one day in 19... whenever that was, early 1960s, I think.
And his plane went down, and then either the same day or the very next day, the CIA station chief in Rome—he had a weird name, I think, or something like this—he filed an extensive report about the assassination of Enrico Mattei. You know, like, the next day, practically, he had like a 20-plus- page report that he filed with the CIA, with his bosses back home. And then he vanished. He left Italy, never to go back again. And he was gone from the scene from the day after Enrico Mattei was 
killed. So there's no doubt about who did it and why and on whose behalf, because you just have to look. Okay, so Italian wealth under one equation accrues to the Italian people, the Italian banks, the Italian companies and employers. And in this other one, you have the conveyor belt sucking out wealth from Italy to the Wall Street and City of London banks.
#Pascal
You step into very, very dangerous waters if you try to actually fight against this system, which then indicates, of course, that all the ones that operated in it successfully, stuff like Switzerland's UBS system and all the others, they are part and parcel of the oligopoly of the class that makes it happen and turn around in the first place. So you do need this kind of—probably you do need the Epstein class at some level that passes.
#Pascal
It doesn't necessarily intermingle the entire time in order to keep the thing floating and stable.
#Pascal
Otherwise, you would have a lot of states coming up and blowing it up for everybody. So you need to keep a tight-knit network over there. But it's an international network to start with, or a globalist network to start with, isn't it?
#Alex Krainer
Correct. Absolutely. And I think that, you know, everything I tried to explain in our conversation today—let's say if you treat it as a framework and you say, okay, maybe Alex is right, maybe Alex is wrong. But if you take it as a framework, I guarantee you, the more you pay attention to what's going on, the more coherent the picture becomes. So it's like, let's say that the real-world evidence solidifies the picture rather than blowing it up. And then the reason why we have to understand these things is because if you kind of look at the system of incentives within this mechanism, and if you extrapolate it into the future, let's say that over time, they eliminate all resistance to them, all obstacles.
They just take one obstacle after another. Bosnia and Herzegovina, the Balkans, Enrico Mattei, this other guy, whoever. So whoever doesn't cooperate, whoever doesn't work as a well-oiled cog in their wealth transfer conveyor belt, if you extrapolate that line, it gets to the point where all the rest of humanity actually have to become slaves to this system. And it even— even if you pay attention to what they're talking about, when they talk about their Fourth Industrial Revolution and the Great Reset, they actually say it, that the future entails changing what it means to be human. And then you have Mr. Yuval Noah Harari who says, yeah, you know, this whole business about you being like a divine soul and a sovereign being, that's all over.
From now on, you're going to be hackable animals. And basically what that means is you're going to work for them until they decide. And from that moment on, they might say, like, oh, guess what? Medical assistance in dying is the best treatment for you at this stage. So see you later. Sayonara. You become a net consumer of capital, and we need net creators of capital. So see you later. So it's going into a really, really ugly dystopia, which I would say makes George Orwell's 1984 look like a walk in the park by comparison. And they're talking about this. The mindset is going in that direction. This is why they're saying you're going to be hackable animals.
We're going to have complete control over you. You're going to get CBDCs. You're going to get a chip under your skin. You're going to be vaccinated every six months. On and on. And you're going to live in the 15-minute cities. And guess what? You're not going to eat red meat because insects are just as good for you. So you're going to have to be happy with that. So, you know, like, if we don't study carefully this matrix that we're being forced into, then our future generation, our children, their children, and so forth, might actually be slaves in 15-minute cities, eating insects for, like, basically a human feedlot.
#Pascal
And Alex, like, I'm sorry to say that, I think that depiction of the future is the optimistic version. Because—I'm an optimist. Because, you know, my worry is that what happens—because what we talked about here is kind of, you know, the worst of the worst of the capitalist class, right? Of the Epstein class and the capitalist network on top that sits there, because the system is that which lets it not bubble up but pushes it up, right? And then it sits there. What happens? The one thing that keeps you and I safe, and most other people safe, is the sheer necessity that these people have to live off our labor, right? You need labor. I mean, you cannot live a multi-billion-dollar life. You cannot have a beautiful big yacht and all of that stuff, and golfing, without the slaves, right?
You need the slaves that slave away for a couple of, what is it, $40,000, $50,000 a year, even in the U.S., right? I mean, this is peanuts. These people don't get up for $50,000. They wouldn't even set an alarm bell for $50,000, right? The class we're talking about. But that's because they need those. We are getting closer to the moment when the dream of this kind of robots and AI-driven future becomes a reality, when these human animals are not needed anymore in order to keep up with all of the luxurious life. And my big worry is, what do they do at that point? You know, because we are currently 8 billion on this planet. Maybe not sustainable. Maybe they would want something rather closer to 8 million, just to have more golf courses. I mean, I do seriously worry what happens once the AI boom and the robot boom actually coincide and physical manual finger labor is not needed anymore.
#Alex Krainer
I'm sincere when I say that I'm an incurable optimist, because I'm not terribly worried about these things. And the reason why I'm not terribly worried about these things is because I think that the 
only way that we could actually fail to overcome this system, to transcend this period of slavery, is if we either surrender and we say, like, okay, we'll be slaves, fine, we agree to that, or if we allow ourselves to be misled into some kind of a catastrophic nuclear Armageddon. That's the only two ways that we could fail. And the reason why I believe that is because there's an awakening happening among people all over the world that is unlike anything that we've ever had in all of history of humanity.
And that's because for the first time ever, we have these amazing things like social media, like the internet, podcasts, these types of conversations. And the powers that be are no longer able to control the narrative by controlling the TV, the newspapers, and the radio, right? And so this is a completely new element in the social equation that was never there before. And so we cannot account for it. We don't know. We simply don't have any precedent. But if you look at the strategies, if you look at the agenda that they have formulated for the future of humanity, you see that all these ideas are very old, in fact. They've been formulated 30, 40, 50 years ago already. And none of them anticipated the internet and social media, or none of them anticipated the unintended consequences of this.
Maybe they anticipated, like, "Oh, this is going to be an even more efficient control grid." But the fact that it allows us to have these types of conversations, they didn't anticipate. And so now, if you look at it, suddenly, suddenly we had this urgency to start a war against Russia in Europe. And the reaction was, you had the explosion of these posts online: "Russia is not my enemy. I'm from Germany, Russia is not my enemy. I'm from Spain, Russia is not my enemy." And so it's very important for them to create the impression that everybody agrees, to say, like, "Oh, Russians are terrible. They're coming for us. They're going to destroy our way of life," and so on. "We have to unite and go to war." And then you give everyone the impression that everybody agrees on this because it's obvious.
And if you think otherwise, there's something wrong with you. But if you see, like, tens of thousands of posts that say, "Russia is not my enemy," and you see that it's liked and retweeted by hundreds of thousands of people, or maybe millions of people, then you realize, I'm not alone. We all don't want this war. Nobody agrees with this. And so then you have these—Friedrich Merz, this guy in Britain, I can never remember his name, the one who came after Keir Starmer, Andy Burnham, whatever, Emmanuel Macron—they're absolutely hated. They're hated in Europe. And so if Emmanuel Macron, Andy Burnham, Friedrich Merz, one of these hollow people, tells the countrymen, "To war, let's go kill Russia," people are not going to be following with much enthusiasm at all.
#Pascal
I hope so. But they're really working overtime at trying to instill all of the Russophobia and the hatred and all of the images of the bloodthirsty Russian in order to get to that point. And they did not— they're halfway there. I mean, hating Russia today is mainstream in Europe. Wanting to go to war is not yet. I agree.
#Alex Krainer
Well, that's the impression. I think that the impression is coming, again, from the mainstream sources or from these paid accounts in social media. But I remember when the war started. When the war started in February of 2022, a friend of mine works for NATO in one of the NATO member nations. And this person told me that, you know, we monitor the public mood in Europe very carefully and we conduct these opinion surveys. And even at that moment, when Russia launched its special military operation in February of 2022, when the level of outrage was maybe at its highest, this person told me that in countries like France, Italy, Spain, these early Western European members of NATO, they weren't talking about the Northern.
They weren't talking about Britain, Germany, and so forth, but, like, Italy, France, Spain, and so forth, that about two-thirds of the people surveyed sympathized with Russia and not Ukraine, and that in the former Soviet bloc nations—Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Bulgaria, Romania, and so forth—that it was about three out of four. And that's my experience. You know, I come from Croatia, and Croatia has this, let's call it, mild Russophobic culture. It's not rabid. It's not rabid like Western Ukraine or even Poland. But, you know, we kind of grew up perceiving Russia as, like, this cold, rusty, dark place that, you know, didn't gel with us, basically.
And, you know, I never had much interest in Russia at all into my 30s. And basically, three out of four, in my experience speaking with Croatian people, kind of think like, no, Putin is the good actor in this drama. Zelensky is the wild card, the idiot, the guy who's going to set the world on fire. And, you know, because of this cultural cloud, people aren't terribly open about this. But if you speak with them and they realize which side you stand on, then you suddenly get them, like, they open up and they tell you everything they think.
And three out of four cases, my experience is they are very highly suspicious of Ukraine, and they are not afraid of Russia. They don't fear Russia in the same way that we're being persuaded that we should. So that was four years ago. Today, I think the situation is even more in favor of Russia and against Ukraine. But, you know, they can't let you think that that's the state of affairs because they have to let you think that everybody understands that Russia is a problem. Everybody knows that they're a threat. So everybody knows that we have to unite behind our beloved dear leader Macron or Merz or this guy in Britain and go to war.
#Pascal
I would hope that that is true. That would be very interesting and hopeful indeed. My counterexample is that recently in Switzerland we had a referendum on Swiss neutrality, but the counter side successfully made it about Putin. And the 70-30 split, 70 against, 30 pro, is what I would gauge the situation is. It's about 30% who would say, like, Russia's not my enemy, and 70% who would say, like, well, you know, we still want to hurt the guys as much as we can, but we don't 
want to go to war. I mean, you know, sanctions. Sanctions are good because sanctions are going to hurt Putin. Therefore, they're good. That kind of simplistic BS that they did. So I take that one as my measure, at least for Switzerland. But it would be very hopeful if it actually was in a very different proportion in other European countries.
#Alex Krainer
You know, there was an official poll that ran by one major French polling agency. I forget exactly which one it is. And I think it was done about two weeks after the special military operation began. And basically, the result of the poll—and they worded it in a strange way—but basically, it was: do you think that Russia had legitimate reasons to invade, to intervene in Ukraine? And 56% of the French people—and I think that this one can still be looked up. At any rate, I have it somewhere in my notes—56% of the French people said yes, that Russia had legitimate reasons. And that was right then, back then, you know. You know, they rig elections. They rig polls too because they need legitimacy, and they need to say, like, oh, look, well, 70% of the people supported this.
#Pascal
Yeah, yeah, no, no, you're right. You're right. And perception management. And we know that. So, Alex, this was fascinating. Again, I usually do one hour, but I just can't stop because this is great. So thank you so much. And we will certainly have to do a third installment in order to get further. But people who want to follow you and find your work, where should they go?
#Alex Krainer
Oh, yeah. I'm easy to find on X. My handle is @NakedHedgie. I have two publications on Substack. One of them is my personal publication called Alex Krainer's Substack. I publish about an article a week. And I have a daily market newsletter called iSystem Trend Following. It's basically a trend- following market newsletter covering 19 global financial and commodities markets. And then I also launched my YouTube channel. I relaunched it this year, and I think it's called Alex Krainer Simply. Yeah, Alex Krainer Official is a fake AI imposter, so it's not that one. It's just Alex Krainer.
#Pascal
I will make sure that I find the real channel, and I'll put it into the description box below. And everybody, go and support Alex Krainer and subscribe if you want to get his updates. We'll have him back on this show again. Alex, thank you so much. Great time today.
#Alex Krainer
Pascal, thank you. And until next time.