The full speech of Marwan Al Kasem, former Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Kingdom of Jordan, at the third meeting of the Strategic Vision Group “Russia – Islamic World” in Grozny.
Your excellency, dear ladies and gentlemen.
It is a great pleasure for me to meet with you here in Grozny to discuss the threats to the world’s peace and security. I hope that our discussion will help to determine the driving forces behind these global challenging trends and threats and to work out actions to tackle these increasingly complex issues.
Every time we meet I get additional, quite useful information on what we really care about.
It is key for our analysis with respect to the dangers that we are facing. I think the world is increasingly becoming a victim of a clash of civilizations, principles and ways of thinking. Oriental culture is underpinned by the nations’ collective interests which reveals itself in the depth of our religious belief and in the society as a whole. We share the same culture.
The Muslim and the Arab worlds are united in the so called Ummah. The Ummah is a group of people who share common values, a common vision and understanding of the world.
I see some of these features in Russia today. Russia has been developing and increasingly relying on principles of the Orthodox Church. These principles are in many ways like Islamic ones.
They are also linked with the principle of international prosperity and security. They serve for the economic integration within the BRICS in order to jointly develop the economic prosperity.
The Eastern values are the long-term values. They are stable and are reflected in the BRICS ideology. Our goal is to build a prosperous and stable future.
The Western countries, on the contrary, preach individualism. Financial considerations are dominant.
The West has a misinterpretation of what success really is. Financial success is becoming the key indicator. However, people increasingly realize that individual and financial achievements are incomparable with the progress and prosperity of the society in general. Western countries can’t play the main role relying on their decreasing middle class any longer. Western elites are relying on wealth which they can get from other countries like Afghanistan, Libya, and Syria. Thus, they create inevitable critical situations in these countries. This is what Western values are all about.
The focus on wealth is a zero sum game.
The middle class provides 10 percent of the wealth and it is then hijacked by big corporations and banks. It reveals a parasitic attitude of banking organizations and companies while individuals are struggling. Financial institutions do not share the same risks with those who have business interests. It means that financial institutions increasingly manipulate lending systems so that governments would support these financial institutions which benefit these governments.
In its fight against fascism during the Second World War the Soviet Union lost 26 million people.
Russians will forever remember it. It is necessary to avoid a bloody repeat of the past. Western elites seek new sources of wealth. In the past, this resulted in one countries stealing the wealth of other states. Such a method facilitated the construction of imperialism, colonialism and led to global instability. The lessons of the last centuries in India, Algeria and other colonial countries are being forgotten.
Meanwhile, the revival of fascism is quite possible. This ideology is based on financial support.
The US economy accounts for 27.3 percent of the global GDP. In 1945, the GDP of China was 4.5 percent of the global GDP. Germany, France and the United Kingdom together accounted for 15.6 percent of the global GDP. In 2016, China became a very developed country economically: its GDP was 21.3 trillion dollars against 19.3 trillion dollars in the EU and 18 trillion dollars in the US. The US was the leading industrial power in the world until the end of the 1960s. Now it is a rentier economy. China is the leading producer of goods in the world. In America, the main capital comes from dividends and interest on fixed capital. The US does not produce a sufficient quantity of financial values for its prosperity. Western economies try to control the global economy through financial and credit tools.
As Karl Max said, “When the economic prosperity relies on lending, it becomes parasitic instead of productive”.
BRICS has realized this and now tries to prevent itself from the US financial hegemony and perhaps from the influence of the EU after Brexit. However, first of all it is necessary to free the production base. It is possible but it requires more than a decade. In the short term, the US can still increase its wealth if more powerful economies such as China, South Korea and Japan help it. We see similar trends in Poland, Ukraine and other countries. The economic potentials of many international players are developing in a way that is becoming unacceptable.
Moreover, financial problems are becoming more apparent.
Capitalism and fascism emerges when companies and banks manipulate governments and politicians in order to force them to act in their favor. It creates a great gap between elites and people who have to sacrifice a lot.
Banks and bankers try to achieve benefits as soon as possible, which damages productive forces. Owners and those who have money cannot produce goods. Islam has tried to prevent the spread of parasitism of the banks through financing and lending regulations. On the one hand, scholars, ideologists and Islam specialists narrowly interpret the commandments of Islam.
Though, on the other hand, Islam has such approaches which are more productive and modern in the interpretation of the Islamic teaching. This could be the first step towards the creation of new economic alliances among the BRICS members.
What do we need to create such an institutional economic infrastructure?
It’s a fundamental economic foundation with the main guiding principles bequeathed to mankind in the form of religious teachings aimed to benefit the people.
We need to create an international council that will carry out an economic analysis of existing conditions and bring them in line with the principles of Islam and Christianity. It will be possible to create a system of guiding principles and rules and to accept and arrange them properly. We could apply them in the activities of financial institutions and for those who want to get loans. They will serve the long-term goals of prosperity. Such system could have an opportunity to change the system and to switch from the rentier system to the effective production system.
I spent my entire professional life trying to find ways to overcome the crisis in the Middle East. One solution is to exchange experience and information and fight against the ideological brainwashing by the mass media.
Today we need the truth about the current crisis. Modern approaches used by the mass media create this crisis themselves while the truth remains untold. We must make public global knowledge and experience and shed light on the truth and the realities that we face today. Without a clear picture of the reality and the hard facts we will continue to react to the symptoms but would not prevent it and the crisis will continue to unfold. That is the truth that we need. It is necessary to record all the facts so that we can understand how we can deal with these wrong narratives created by the international mass media. We must share it with the whole world in order to shed light on the reality.
The new world order is taking shape in quite a painful manner.
We hope for a peaceful resolution so that we can move on to a more equitable reality.
GSV "Russia - Islamic World"