BRICS: A Group of Diverse Economies and Countries \ Newslooks \ Opinion Like Athena out of Zeus’s head, the fuzzy notion of BRIC sprang out of a British economist’s brain at Goldman Sachs by the name of Jim O’Neill in 2001. In his paper entitled “Building Better Global Economic BRICs” he argued that Brazil, Russia, India and China together are economically already more powerful than the G7. Expanding on this tenuous assertion, he predicted that in the coming decades especially China’s GDP will grow exponentially, which shall lead to significant consequences about the global economic impact of fiscal as well as monetary policies within these four states and beyond. As a result, following eight years of superficial gestation, in 2009, the heads of state of these four nations adopted the acronym BRIC at their first summit in the Russian city of Yekaterinburg, famous for the barbaric Bolshevik annihilation of Tsar Nicholas II and his family as well as currently being the home of the Central Military District of the Russian Armed Forces. The stated objectives of this informal organization were designed to provide these four states with greater importance on the global stage and simultaneously establish a credible counterweight to the existing dominance of the industrialized Western economies. Renamed BRICS when the weakest state of South Africa joined the initial four in September 2010 in New York City, these five states since have met annually without any real progress toward coordinating their multilateral policies or geostrategic objectives. Moreover, adding a chain of reality-based insults to their informal organization’s self-injuriously negligible relevance, BRICS has internationally never lived up to the stated objectives of their overly ambitious politicians.
Keeping with BRICS’s historically moderate importance, the most recent 15th summit of this informal organization held between August 22-24 in Johannesburg, South Africa, was attended by the Presidents of Brazil, China and South Africa, the Prime Minister of India and the Foreign Minister of Russia. Russian President Putin stayed away because of the International Criminal Court arrest warrant of March 17, 2023, for war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide in Ukraine. In addition to the five member states, invitations to attend the summit by South African President Cyril Ramaphosa were also extended to sixty seven leaders across Africa, South and Central America as well as the Caribbean. As a result, over fourty states have sent representatives of various ranks who expressed tentative interests in eventually joining BRICS, according to the tallying by South African officials. Finally, the Argentine Republic, the Arab Republic of Egypt, the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia, the Islamic Republic of Iran, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates were officially invited to join BRICS.
The speeches given by the leaders of the five member states were a discombobulated mixture of self-serving egotistical analyses laced with intentional distortions and outright lies about their domestic situations and international challenges as well as utopian dreams bordering on Marxism concerning the furtherance of regional developments, the construction of permanent bridges between developing and developed nations, the as of yet nonexistent contributions to the development of all humanity, and the creation of a more equitable cum fair world.
Clearly, in the wake of the Chinese-generated COVID-19 epidemic and the resulting painfully negative economic developments across the globe, the 15th BRICS summit was too badly organized and coordinated. More importantly, the Russia and China led abuses of military forces, the dangers of which are becoming more and more apparent in the actions of both historically imperialistic states, were not even touched upon in Johannesburg. To this shameful neglect of the leaders of the five member states, the Chinese President Xi Jinping hypocritically added the praise of BRICS as an instrument of promoting peace and greater democracy in the world, boosting nonexistent ubiquitous economic growth, while allegedly improving global governance, whatever this last statement meant. Naturally, the obligatory denunciation of the “evil” United States of America could not have been omitted from President Xi’s speech, delivered in his absence by China’s minister of commerce, Wang Wentao. Describing an “unnamed country,” the speech described America as “obsessed with maintaining hegemony (and) has gone out of its way to cripple the emerging markets and developing countries.” The Chinese strategy of painting everybody as a victim of American supremacy in order to take over and dominate BRICS as an extended international arm of the Chinese Communist Party was most evident in President Xi’s aggressive push for a common currency. Demonstrating the utterly divergent interests of the five countries, this Chinese drive was dead on arrival. Thus, in spite of the sunny propaganda surrounding the Johannesburg summit, it was an almost complete failure on all fronts. In light of President Xi’s collapsing model of “Socialism with Chinese Characteristics” and President Putin’s imperialistic megalomania, BRICS is steadily marching toward a catastrophic abyss.
Unless a keenly observant person of the joint pathetic attempts of China and Russia to defeat the United States of America and its allies by creating their own anti-Western alliance through a combination of lies and force has gotten irredeemably drunk on Kool Aid or just successfully escaped from a closed mental institution, cannot fail to notice the utter lack of any moral principles of humanitarianism or a genuine attempt at creating a peaceful cum prosperous world amid the barbarism and brutality that both President Putin and President Xi have established domestically as well as internationally. On the contrary, the orgy of systematic and institutionalized corruption in both countries has already destroyed the prospect of any meaningful improvement in the political, economic and financial lives of both societies. And unless India, Brazil, South Africa and all the other invited as well as prospective member states realize that they walked or are about to walk into a Chinese cum Russian trap, in which they will be turned into Lenin’s proverbial “useful idiots,” the presently existing BRICS and its eventually expanded variation will end up on the Marx/Engels’ envisaged infamous “ash heap of history.”
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