WORLD WORLDWIDE EUROPE ITALY SICLIA - news journal UPDATE - en) Italy, Sicilia Libertaria #466 - The Davos Drama (ca, de, fr, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

It feels like living inside the perfect script of a film simultaneously dystopian, demented, and catastrophic, starring Trump's America and its standard-bearer. The film unfolds amidst the freezing cold of Minneapolis, the snows of Davos, and the stages of global politics, and its conclusion could be the implosion of a world that appears, in many ways, adrift. What is happening in the Minnesota town has all the hallmarks of a dystopia in which squads in the pay of power operate with impunity, murdering anyone suspected of opposing them and arresting and deporting unwanted individuals (as I write this article, news broke of the murder of a young man in Milan by a plainclothes Italian police officer). This isn't the first time this has happened in recent history; we called them fascism and Nazism, but today they're back, using the same logic.

In the small Swiss town where the World Economic Forum, the gathering of the elite of global economics and politics, takes place every year at the end of January, the star this year has been Trump, with his swipes at Europe, his about-faces, the Greenland issue that appears to have been resolved within NATO, the surreal birth of the Peace Council that would mark the end of the UN, and the annihilation of the population of Gaza. Before and after Davos, the autocratic president continued to perform his favorite stunts: repeated threats to Iran, stances on South America, with the new Donroe doctrine, whose first victim was Venezuela, and the introduction of tariffs against anyone who opposes them, only to later retract them. Add to all this the (so far) long-distance confrontation between the hegemonic powers-the United States, China, and Russia-and the possibility of a more catastrophic conflict becomes not so remote. A feared conflict (and perhaps even hoped for by anyone) that no current government intends to openly oppose. Indeed, heads of state and government, politicians, and strategists declare themselves confident they can risk it, perhaps believing they can stop it before it escalates; just like the governments that plunged us into two world wars in the twentieth century.
To this disorder and confusion, geopolitics, now on everyone's lips, the art or science of "reality," offers answers that purport to be clear and straightforward; in reality, it actively cooperates to convince us that military force and the logic of power are the necessary backdrop against which we must confront and which we must harness if we are not to succumb. If geopolitics brutally but necessarily confronts us with the "reality" of today's world, many are led to believe that the current degradation has a primary agent: Donald Trump, who harasses, mocks, and imposes his decisions, whether right or wrong. Thus, one hopes that an electoral defeat in the upcoming midterm elections will put him in his place, while he waits for his political star to finally fall in the 2028 elections. But if we look closely, US policy over the last two or three decades-aimed at addressing the heavy foreign debt that plagues it, the trade deficit, and the rise of other world powers-is common to all successive presidents. Trump is simply interpreting this policy in his own way, with the brutality, arrogance, and bravado that distinguish him.

However, the internal problems of the United States are not sufficient to explain the current situation, while some general trends in the development of capitalism and the role of states could help us better understand. I will briefly touch on these here, without any claim to systematicity. Capitalism has always been international, even if it requires the state and the ability to exploit human, material, and natural resources, even through the use of force, to achieve accumulation. The acceleration of new technologies, including the new frontiers of so-called artificial intelligence, has accentuated the internationalization of capital and exacerbated competitiveness and the frantic pursuit of profits, achieved thanks in part to sophisticated financial instruments (futures, etc.), which have continued to drain resources from the bottom-the proletariat and middle classes-to the top, the wealthiest classes, who have become frighteningly rich, as demonstrated by the monstrous inequalities in income distribution. All this creates imbalances within societies-poverty, precariousness, insecurity-that states seek to mitigate to some extent to avoid widespread and radical protests. This is where the populisms, the new right, and the neo-corporatist nationalisms that characterize today's official politics arise. On the one hand, they offer an ideological way out of the crisis, based on homeland, identity, traditional values, and security policies; on the other, they ensure the perpetuation of the system and support for economic and financial elites. Today, all of this is further complicated by the ecological and climate crisis, the depletion of resources that accentuate competition and conflict (rare earths and so on), and it's not enough to imagine that everything can be solved with more technology and innovation, as both left and right would have us believe. Therefore, the only way out of the crisis of capitalism and states is inter-imperialist conflict. Corollaries could include the authoritarian drift underway in state governance, with the consequent erosion of the semblance of democracy practiced since the end of the Second World War; the demonization of grassroots participation (see the various security packages implemented in recent years in Italy by reactionary and progressive governments); The decline of Foucaultian governmentality, or more simply of twentieth-century liberal or socialist reformism, in favor of the assertion of force as the sole instrument of social control.
It is certainly a complex picture, but clear in its developments and directions. To all this, one certainly cannot oppose, as many do, the strengthening of Europe's common action, supposedly the bearer of values of solidarity, sharing, etc., but in reality a protagonist, like other imperialisms, of the current collapse. Nor can one elect Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, after his speech in Davos, as an anti-Trump champion, who does nothing but rally the middle powers to fight the big ones on equal terms. "We no longer rely solely on the strength of our values, but also on the value of our strength," he declared, among other things.
Between brute force and a self-proclaimed just and legitimate force, there is always that 99% of the population, mistreated, vilified, and marginalized, who could nevertheless speak out and write a different story, one that no longer contemplates exploitation, capitalist accumulation, and inequality.

Angelo Barberi

https://www.sicilialibertaria.it/2026/02/14/la-sceneggiata-di-davos/
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Link:  en) Italy, Sicilia Libertaria #466 - The Davos Drama (ca, de, fr, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

Source: A-infos-en@ainfos.ca