Two worlds – not the same planet.

Year after year, month after month, I see two sides of the world; two extremes which are getting more and more disconnected:

I see great cities like Homs in Syria, reduced to horrifying ruins. I see Kabul and Jalalabad in Afghanistan, fragmented by enormous concrete walls intended to protect NATO occupation armies and their local puppets. I see monstrous environmental devastation in places such as Indonesian Borneo, Peruvian gold mining towns, or the by now almost uninhabitable atoll island-nations of Oceania: Tuvalu, Kiribati or Marshall Islands.

I see slums, a lack of sanitation and clean drinking water, where the boots of Western empires have been smashing local cultures, enslaving people and looting natural resources.

I work on all the continents. I never stop, even when exhaustion tries to smash me against the wall, even when there are hardly any reserves left. I cannot stop; I have no right to stop, because I can finally see the pattern; the way this world operates, the way the West has been managing to usurp it, indoctrinate, and enslave most of the countries of the world. I combine my knowledge, and publish it as a ‘warning to the world’.

I write books about this ‘pattern’. My most complete, so far, being the 1,000 pages long “Exposing Lies of The Empire”.

Then, I see the West itself.

I come to ‘speak’, to Canada and the United States, as well as Europe. Once in a while I am invited to address Australian audiences, too.

The West is so outrageously rich, compared to the ruined and plundered continents, that it often appears that it does not belong to the Planet Earth.

A lazy Sunday afternoon stroll in Villa Borghese in Rome, and a horror walk through Mathare slum in Nairobi could easily exist in two distinct realities, or in two different galaxies.

Even now, after I slightly misspelled “Villa Borghese”, my Mac immediately offered a correction. It is because Villa Borghese does exist. On the other hand, “Mathare”, which I spelled correctly, was underlined red. Mathare ‘is an error’. Because it does not exist. It does not exist, despite the fact that around one million men, women and children lives there. It is not recognized by my MacBook Pro, nor by the great majority of my relatively well-educated readers in the West.

In fact, almost entire world appears to be one big error, non-entity, if observed from New York, Berlin or Paris.

I come and speak in front of the Western public. Yes, I do it from time to time, although with decreasing frequency.

Frankly, to face European or North American crowds feels depressing, even humiliating.

It goes like this: you are invited to ‘tell the truth’; to present what you are witnessing all over the world.

You stand there, facing men and women who have just arrived in their comfortable cars, after having good dinners in their well-heated or air-conditioned homes. You may be a famous writer and a filmmaker, but somehow, they make you feel like a beggar. Because you came to speak on behalf of “beggars”.

Everything is well-polished, and choreographed. It is expected that you do not show any ‘gore’. That you do not call your public ‘names’. That you do not swear, do not get drunk on the stage, do not start insulting everyone in sight.

What you usually face is quite a hard, or at least ‘hardened’, crowd.

Recently, in Southern California, when I was asked, by a fellow philosopher and a friend of mine, to address a small gathering of his colleagues, some people were banging on their mobile phones, as I was describing the situation at the Syrian frontline, near Idlib. I felt that my account was nothing more than a ‘background, an elevator music’ to most of them. At least when I am addressing millions through my television interviews, I do not have to see the public.

When you ‘speak’ in the West, you are actually addressing men and women who are responsible, at least partially, for the mass murders and genocides that are being committed by their countries. Men and women whose standards of living are outrageously high, because The Others are being robbed, humiliated, and often raped. But their eyes are not humble; they are drilling them into you, waiting for some mistake that you might make, so they can conclude: “He is fake news”. For them, you are not a bridge between those who ‘exist’ and those who don’t. For them, you are an entertainer, a showman, or more often than not: a nuisance.

To learn about war, about the terror that the West is spreading, is, for many in my audience yet another type of luxury, high-level entertainment, not unlike an opera performance or a symphony concert. If necessary, they can even pay, although mostly they’d rather not. After a titillating experience, it is back to the routine, back to a sheltered, elegant life. While you, the next day, are often catching a plane back to the reality of the others; to the frontline, to dust and misery.

They, your public (but face it, also most of your readers) came to show how ‘open-minded’ they are. They came ‘to learn’ from you, ‘to get educated’, while keeping their lifestyles intact. Most of them think that they know it all, even without your first-hand experience, they are benevolently doing you a favor by inviting you, and by dragging themselves all the way to some university or a theatre or wherever the hell you are standing in front of them. They did not come to offer any support to your struggle. They are not part of any struggle. They are good, peace-loving, hardworking people; that’s all.

You know, like those Germans, in the late 1930’s; self-righteous, hard-working folks. Most of them love their pets, and recycle their garbage. And clean after themselves at Starbucks.

A few days ago, we stopped the coup in Venezuela. I say we, because, although deep in devastated Borneo Island, I had been giving interviews to RT, Press TV, addressing millions. Even here, I never stopped writing, tweeting, always ready to drop everything just fly to Caracas, if I were to be needed there.

To defend Venezuela, to defend the Revolution there, is essential. As it is essential to defend Syria, Cuba, Russia, China, North Korea, Iran, Bolivia, South Africa and other revolutionary and brave nations that are refusing to surrender to the Western diktat.

While the ideological battle for Caracas was raging, I was thinking: is there anything that could still move the Western public into action?

Have they – Europeans and North Americans – become totally indifferent to their own crimes? Have they developed some sort of emotional immunity? Is their condition ideological, or simply clinical?

Here we were, in the middle of a totally open coup; an attempt by the West to overthrow one of the most democratic countries on our planet. And they did almost nothing to stop the terrorism performed by their regimes in Washington or Madrid! At least in Indonesia in 1965 or in Chile in 1973, the Western regime tried to hide behind thin fig leaves. At least, while destroying socialist Afghanistan and the Communist Soviet Union by creating the Mujahedin, the West used Pakistan as a proxy, trying to conceal, at least partially, its true role. At least, while killing more than 1 million people in Iraq, there was this charade and bunch of lies about the ‘weapons of mass destruction’. At least, at least…

Now, it is all transparent. In Syria, Venezuela; and against North Korea, Cuba, Iran, China, Russia.

As if propaganda was not even needed, anymore, it as if the Western public has become totally obedient, posing no threat to the plans of the Western regime.

Or more precisely, the once elaborate Western propaganda has become extremely simple: it now repeats lies, and the great majority of Western citizens do not even bother to question what their governments are doing to the world. The only thing that matters are ‘domestic issues’; meaning – the wages and benefits for the Westerners.

There are no riots like during the Vietnam War. Now riots are only for the better welfare of European workers. No one in the West is fighting in order to stop the plunder abroad, or the terrorist attacks unleashed by NATO against non-Western countries, or against those countless NATO military bases, against the invasions and orchestrated coups.

How much more can the Western public really stomach?

Or can it stomach absolutely everything?

Would it accept the direct invasion of Venezuela or Cuba or both? It has already accepted the direct intervention and destruction of Yugoslavia, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and Syria, to name just a few terrorist actions committed by the West in recent history.

So, how much more? Would an attack against Iran be acceptable? Let’s say, 2-3 million deaths?

North Korea, perhaps? A few more millions, a new mountain of corpses?

I am asking; it is not a rhetorical question. I really want to know. I believe that the world has to know.

Has the Western public reached the level of the ISIS (or call them IS or Deash)? Is it so self-righteous, so fanatic, so convinced of its own exceptionalism, that it cannot think, clearly, analyze and judge, anymore?

Would provoking Russia or China or both into WWIII be acceptable to people living in Bavaria or South Carolina, or Ontario?

And if yes, are they all really out of their minds?

And if they are, should the world try to stop them, and how?

I want to know the boundaries of the Western madness.

That there is madness is indisputable, but how massive is it?

I understand, I have now accepted the monstrous fact that the French, Yanks, Canadians, Brits or Germans do not give a shit about how many millions of innocent people they kill in the Middle East, or Southeast Asia, Africa or in ‘places like that’. I accept that they know close to nothing about their colonial history, and want to know nothing, as long as they have football, plenty of meat and 6 weeks vacations on exotic beaches. I know that even many of those who can see monstrous crimes committed by the West, want to blame everything on Rothschilds and ‘Zionist conspiracy’, but never on themselves, never on Israel which its West’s outpost in the Middle East, never on their culture which expresses itself through the centuries of plunder.

But what about the survival of our planet, and the survival of humankind?

I imagine the eyes of those people who come to my ‘combat presentations’. I tell them the truth. I say it all. I am never holding back; never compromise. I show them images of the wars they have unleashed. Yes, they; because the citizens are responsible for their own governments, and because there is, clearly, something called collective guilt and collective responsibility!

Those eyes, faces… I will tell you what I read in them: they will never act. They will never try to overthrow their regime. As long as they live their privileged lives. As long as they think that the system in which they are the elites, at least has some chance of surviving in its present form. They play it both ways, some of them do: verbally, they are outraged by NATO, by Western imperialism and savage capitalism. Practically, they do nothing tangible to fight the system.

What is the conclusion then? If they do not act, then others have to. And I am convinced: they will.

For more than 500 years the entire world has been in flames, plundered and murdered by a small group of extremely aggressive Western nations. This has been going on virtually uninterruptedly.

Nobody finds it amusing, anymore. Where I work, in places that I care about, nobody wants this kind of world.

Look at those countries that are now trying to destroy Venezuela. Look closely! They consist of the United States, Canada, majority of Europe, and mostly those South American states where the descendants of European colonialists are forming majority!

Do we want another 500 years of this?

North Americans and Europeans have to wake up, soon. Even in Nazi Germany, there were soldiers who were so disgusted with Hitler, that they wanted to send him to the dogs. Today, in the West, there is not one powerful political party which believes that 500 years of Western colonialist plunder is more than enough; that torturing the world should stop, and stop immediately.

If Western imperialism, which is the greatest and perhaps the only major threat our planet is now facing, is not decisively and soon dismantled by its own citizens, it will have to be fought and deterred by external forces. That is: by its former and present victims.

[First published by NEO – New Eastern Outlook]

Andre Vltchek is a philosopher, novelist, filmmaker and investigative journalist. He has covered wars and conflicts in dozens of countries. Three of his latest books are Revolutionary Optimism, Western Nihilism, a revolutionary novel “Aurora” and a bestselling work of political non-fiction: “Exposing Lies Of The Empire”. View his other books here. Watch Rwanda Gambit, his groundbreaking documentary about Rwanda and DRCongo and his film/dialogue with Noam Chomsky “On Western Terrorism”. Vltchek presently resides in East Asia and the Middle East, and continues to work around the world. He can be reached through his website and his Twitter.