The Miserable Condition of the World

It has hardly gone unheard by anyone in Europe and the USA, that the latter recently, in their new security strategy, November 2025, has broken with Europe. Along with the other events during the year when the USA attacked Europe in one way or another: on the trade conditions, NATO, economical responsibility for various topics, such as Ukraine, and even on the territorial integrity, by claiming that Greenland should belong to the USA.

It shouldn’t be a big surprise either for anyone on the globe that China has grown as an economic power, and it’s increasingly also growing as a military power. Both Europe and the USA have been increasingly worried about both conditions, but both Europe and the USA have continued outsourcing just about everything to exactly China – thereby strengthening the foundation for these conditions that they don’t like.

And the USA is preparing, according to the above document and many other activities, to aim their military strength toward the Pacific instead of Europe – meaning, effectively, toward China.

The situation around Russia and their assault on Ukraine, plus threats and attacks on Europe, is getting more and more desperate as the USA has decided to support Russia and abandon both Ukraine and Europe – all for the sake of gaining an earning opportunity. Yes, it seems to be all about money, for the American president and his billionaire friends, and for the Russian president and his oligarchs.

The USA is aiming some of their focus on taking control of more parts of the Americas, including Canada, Panama, Venezuela, Argentina, and more – both to reduce the footprint of European countries and to gain additional profit. Trump freeing one drug criminal while killing dozens of fishermen in the claim that they are the drug criminals, should show clerly what this is all about: alliances and money.

It’s a soup of threats, betrayals, and reshuffling of power, money, and collaboration that is bound to end in a big explosion.

There is, everywhere now, apart from among the mostly passive people of the USA, a sense of urgency – a feeling that we need to react and change a lot of things, to meet the dangers face to face; or to escape from them.

But is this permanent? Should we act as if the existing/previous world order really is lost, and that we must prepare for both war and economic decline?

Couldn’t it be so that the USA is just now acting like madmen, and Russia too, while China is on a high just now but sooner or later will face that there is no such thing as eternal growth?

Could it be, that the best reaction to all this is to do nothing – just ride off the storm?

Strictly speaking, most of the state leaders who currently cause the trouble, are quite old. Before long, they will be out of the scene. Their followers could be doing anything – worse or better – as a continuation or a reversal of the current trends.

Also, much of what is happening now is by words only. Maybe “their bark is worse than their bite”? Maybe the USA doesn’t have the strength to change the world, such as they want, and maybe Russia or China can’t do it either?

It must be obvious to most that the ambitions, opinions, and threats, we see expressed every other moment now, aren’t shared by everybody. Of course, it doesn’t take a majority of a population to make a revolution – probably a tiny fraction is enough, like 5% or maybe 10%, who will then take control, and all the passive people will just follow their new leaders.

Same thing when the leaders are the same but want to change the way things work. Converting a democracy into an autocracy doesn’t take more than a limited amount of mindless or evil followers of the new dictator to dismantle democratic institutions and the courts and civil service agencies that were supposed to prevent such a coup.

So perhaps, across the world, it takes only a few billionaires to destroy everything most of us took for granted – such as freedom and safety?

And it does look like this is happening, sadly. It’s not just barking. We have, actually, during some years seen how some big capitals have grown and the people in power becoming increasingly ignorant to the negative effects of that, such as some business people becoming immensely powerful.

It is a terrible situation for the world by large. But some specific problems are already bad by themselves: such as the total control by a few USA-based companies of almost all computing and data processing in the world. Almost every bit of data is controlled by the USA – either directly, since the data is stored in American data centers and processed by American software, or indirectly, in that the USA as a nation has arranged for laws and procedures that can be used for the USA to gain access to all these data – which can then easily end up in the hands of American companies.

Even data connected to national security in any European country, can be accessed by the USA. And they can be deleted, the servers switched off, and the software made useless – all in a moment. At the press of a button, so to speak.

So, an attack on Europe should be extremely easy to conduct and require no soldiers, no loss of American lives.

Even if the USA is not entertaining such a complete attack and performing such a devastating deletion and unavailability-making of European data, it can still do – and does already – targeted espionage activities and harassments targeted at individual companies and people in Europe.

I’m not making this up – there are plenty of examples documented in the press, and most often, the local security services of the involved countries are assisting rather than trying to prevent it. The USA owns the world of data, in effect, just as it controls the European security agencies.

Europe can’t just switch to alternative infrastructure and software, because the USA has bought it all and made it all American. Except for some bits and pieces. Linux, European data centers (but often with American components), and various smaller pieces of software, along with Internet-based services that are not American do exist, but it is extremely difficult to plan for a complete data setup in a company or a government institution, that doesn’t involve American software, Internet infrastructure, cloud services, or hardware.

A typical company uses software and services from Microsoft, such as Windows, Sharepoint, SQL Server, Office, Teams, and Azure, to name just a few, and from Apple, in the shape of iPhones and Mac computers. Along with these, you’ll find Oracle software, plus all the security software and hardware in use also being from the USA. Cloud services by Microsoft (Azure), Amazon (AWS), and Google (GCP) are used for almost every situation that involves data collection, storage, or processing. And there are several more companies involved.

Now, if the USA was the only problem, it might be possible to find alternatives. But China is just as big a threat. Partly, because the USA has dictated that Europe shouldn’t buy Internet infrastructure from China, which then means that some of it is from the USA instead. Quite remarkable, as the claimed built-in spying mechanisms in the Chinese products haven’t been found in real life – but similar mechanisms have indeed been found in products from the USA.

But China is ruled out as a source for Internet technology. There is some production in Europe, but hardly any in the rest of the world, outside China and Taiwan, and perhaps a bit is still left in Japan.

So, effectively, much of it comes from American controlled companies in Taiwan, often produced in mainland China.

Russia doesn’t have much influence on the hardware market, but there is quite a lot of software that comes from Russia – or has been from Russia but moved to a USA-based headquarter, claiming that it is now American software.

Production of all other kinds of things require a world-wide collaboration between companies. A lot of production is done by very big companies, and their main interest is money, so they produce in or buy from any country they want, if that means earning more money. Moving all production of computers or software out of Europe and to a large extent also the USA, and into China, has been driven by this hunt for money. Security aspects have not been part of it, and indeed, big corporations often prefer to simply move their headquarters instead of working toward compliance with security rules that would lead to loss of profit.

There’s a worldwide hunt for “rare earth minerals” going on as well, leading to some countries behaving against all norms for diplomacy and global collaboration, and more like colonial powers previously did it: by threatening and conquering, destroying relations and arranging wars or war-like situations.

When Russia is trying to grab parts of Ukraine, and the USA, under cover of wanting peace, tries to grab the other parts, it is all about those minerals. Greenland is suddenly important as well, for that same reason, and various other geopolitical changes seem to be involved with that too.

Previously, other resources were wanted, and that led to the big powers of the world fighting each other, marrying each other, or whatever it would take to get control of what at the time seemed to be needed for creating bigger wealth for themselves.

Lots of people have died in colonial wars, lots of dreams have been crushed – lots of freedom lost. We haven’t moved an inch further from those terrible conditions of the history – we are still being pushed around by the greed of the people who are already the most wealthy.

And most of the world’s population isn’t planning to do anything against it – either because they are being bribed to take part in it, or because they are too weak to do anything. Or, as in the USA and some other nations, because they are happy to just watch Netflix and eat popcorn and then let the world’s problems be fixed by some others.

My take on it all is that we are letting a few people – national leaders as well as business leaders – destroy everything we trust and believe in, without even trying to prevent them from doing it. Indeed, we support them by buying their products and services, and by being fans, even, of these dominant and destructive people and companies: fans of Apple, fans of Microsoft, fans of Elon Musk.

Some of the fandom is based on these people’s and companies’ support of something we care about – and even if that is all just a marketing stunt, and always will be, when big money is involved, it’s easier for the individual to just flow with the stream than to swim against it. We know that we are being betrayed, and that our world is being ruined by the big companies and their owners, and by the world leaders who were supposed to be our leaders but have been bribed into being agents for the big companies instead.

We know it, and we are not objecting to it. Like pigs being grown in a farm to be eaten. As long as we are being fed, we don’t complain – when the feeding stops, it’s too late. Then we are about to die.

Image by Maleen Fotograpia on Pexels