The Empire loses Brazil and gains Serbia

As ever it's very difficult to find out from mainstream media what is happening in Brazil but Senator Bolsonaro's passports were suspended immediately after the announcement of the election results because he is facing very serious corruption accusations - see this thread on X. 

On the other hand in the past there have been plenty of corruption allegations against President Lula. He spent 580 days in prison for corruption before the sentence was annulled and in the last two years there have been corruption allegations against his son, who is accused of influence peddling. 

Brazil is not Protestant Scandinavia.

Senator Bolsonaro was presumably spirited out of Brazil by the CIA as part of a carefully planned operation to the United States, where he declared he was the legitimate Brazilian president. 

The United States has a history of overthrowing Brazilian presidents and I hope they do not plan to do the same thing again. I rather doubt they can because Brazil is much more powerful than Venezuela. 

Lula represents a threat to the United States because he intends not to sell rare earths to them. 

He has aroused the enmity of Israel by sharp criticism of Israel's behaviour in Gaza, likening Israel to the Nazis. This remark is considered anti-Semitic. 

The presidential election in Serbia seems to have had a good outcome in getting rid of a very questionable and corrupt president by a spontaneous movement of students but only a naïve would imagine that the CIA were not involved as well. 

The support the new election result received from the European Union, from the Financial Times, etc., means that the new people are expected to be "pro-Western". Whether or not that's a good thing it is another victory for the American empire, whereas being on good terms with Russia and China might have been in Serbia's best interests. I don't know enough. 

A Serbian historian friend told me that having a free trade agreement with China was a very good thing for the Serbian economy. It will, of course, have to be scrapped if Serbia ever joins the European Union. Serbia has been a candidate since 2012. 

China has poured over €5.5 billion into Serbian infrastructure under the Belt and Road Initiative, financing trade corridors like the Belgrade-Budapest high-speed railway. 

Meanwhile the Americans are taking the opportunity to destroy Chinese-funded infrastructure in Iran and have succeeded in preventing governments in the Philippines and Central America from taking advantage of the assistance offered by China. 

If you believe the propaganda China gives loans to corrupt dictatorships, with cruelly onerous repayment terms, but in fact China has been generous about forgiving debtors. It is true that China does not care about the human rights records of countries to which she lends money but American human rights policy is a way of controlling countries that receive aid. China is, in this respect, laissez-faire. 

Large Chinese firms such as Zijin Mining and Hesteel have invested nearly €8 billion into Serbia's heavy industry, sustaining roughly 40,000 jobs.

Russia’s Gazprom supplies up to 90% of Serbia’s annual natural gas needs via the TurkStream pipeline at heavily discounted prices. Compare the expensive American gas which Hungary is forced to buy and which Kimberly Guilfoyle was trying to sell to neighbouring countries such as Albania, Romania and Greece. 

All this is not to say that Serbia is better off with the friendship of Russia and China than in the European Union. I have no means of knowing for sure and the EU is very problematic but I would imagine that the long-term future of Serbia in the European Union would be more prosperous than outside. 

Certainly European Union states like Bulgaria and Romania are a lot more prosperous than Serbia. When I first visited Serbia in 1992, by contrast, Belgrade was very much more prosperous than Bucharest or Sofia, despite the war. 

I simply want to explain some of the real dynamics underlying the story in the news about democrats winning in Serbia. 

History can only be understood by understanding current events (it's not the other way around). Looking back the Cold War now seems to be a way by which America extended and exercised power rather than fight communism for idealistic reasons, the proof of which is that the American-Russian struggle, after a pause of 10 years, has continued to the present day. Nowadays, of course, the primary struggle is between America and China, although quite why America and China need to be in conflict I don't get. 

We need, I think, some kind of grand compromise between America, Russia, and China before we have a third world war. Who is proposing this? Nobody, least of all the European Union countries. Viktor Orban would have approved of this but he is gone.