The Revolt of the Pawns

by James Corbett corbettreport.com | July 23, 2023

In early 1980, as the diplomatic fallout from the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan began to play itself out on the grand chessboard, then-US President Jimmy Carter sent his National Security Adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, to Pakistan to rally the mujahideen fighters waging jihad against the Russian invaders.

In the footage of that incident, Brzezinski can be seen helicoptering to a spot in the Khyber Pass on the Afghanistan border to address the Islamic fighters taking up arms against the Soviets. Assuring the assembled “freedom fighters” that their struggle will succeed, he raises a finger in the air in the direction of Afghanistan, proclaiming: “That land over there is yours. You’ll go back to it one day because your fight will prevail. And you’ll have your homes and your mosques back again because your cause is right and God is on your side.”

This was, as we now know, pure manipulative hogwash. Uncle Sam couldn’t have cared less about the fate of these fighters. The US government didn’t believe in their God and it didn’t care if they had their homes and their mosques back again. In fact, as Brzezinski himself has since admitted, the Soviet invasion had, in a sense, been a Western operation, the successful culmination of a covert US plan to lure the USSR into Afghanistan and slowly bleed the Red Army in a years-long proxy war.

In the infamous 1998 interview where Brzezinski confirmed this hidden truth, he was asked whether he regretted his role in fostering the rise of the Taliban and Al CIAda.

Regret what? That secret operation was an excellent idea. It had the effect of drawing the Russians into the Afghan trap and you want me to regret it? The day that the Soviets officially crossed the border, I wrote to President Carter, essentially: “We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam war.” Indeed, for almost 10 years, Moscow had to carry on a war that was unsustainable for the regime, a conflict that bought about the demoralization and finally the breakup of the Soviet empire.

These are not the words of a pious believer in the righteous struggle of Islamic freedom fighters. They are not even the words of an earnest Cold Warrior, blindly supporting anyone who could strike at his Soviet enemy. They are the words of the man who literally wrote the book on The Grand Chessboard—the words of a self-proclaimed geopolitical grandmaster who cooly calculates several moves ahead as he manipulates his pawns on the grand chessboard as part of a grand strategy to checkmate his opponent.

Last week I revealed how the would-be rulers of the world see the grand struggle for geopolitical dominance as a type of chess game and how people around the globe (including the mujahideen in Afghanistan) are treated as mere pawns in that game, to be used, abused and sacrificed in pursuit of the grandmasters’ aims.

This week I will examine the growing political awareness of the pawns in the grand chess game and show what it looks like when they strike back against their masters.

Global Political Awakening

In December of 2008, The International Herald Tribune published an op-ed on an important new sociopolitical phenomenon: “The Global Political Awakening.”

For the first time in history almost all of humanity is politically activated, politically conscious and politically interactive. Global activism is generating a surge in the quest for cultural respect and economic opportunity in a world scarred by memories of colonial or imperial domination.

Now, if this were an op-ed by your average, run-of-the-mill political commentator, the prospect of a “global political awakening” would no doubt be celebrated as a hopeful development. Said commentator would then deftly transition into a pitch for how such an awakening could afford an exciting opportunity for the West to help human rights activists in Countries X, Y and/or Z overthrow their oppressive governments . . . with Countries X, Y and Z being prime targets on the US State Department’s regime change wishlist, naturally.

But this op-ed was not penned by your average political hack. No, it was authored by Zbigniew Brzezinski, the same arch-globalist insider (and arch-conspiracy theorist) who helped fund the mujahideen in the 1980s. For this grand chessboard grandmaster, the global political awakening is no cause for celebration. Rather, as he explained in a subsequent interview on the subject, it poses a threat to America’s global dominance and a challenge to all the kings on the global chessboard.

On the subjective level, this global political awakening is creating massive intolerance, impatience with inequality, with differentials in standards of living. It’s creating jealousies, resentments, more rapid immigration [. . .] Connected with that is a craving for respect for differentiated cultures and for individual dignity. Much of humanity feels that respect is lacking from the well-to-do.

Now, here’s the surprising thing: he’s not wrong. There is a global political awakening taking place. Fueled by the online revolution, impatience with inequalities and differentials in standards of living is rising. And, if the last several years of political history has taught us anything, it is that much of humanity is feeling a lack of respect from the well-to-do. This feeling has manifested in a worldwide populist movement that threatens to derail the globalist New World Order agenda, a point conceded by elitist institutions like the Bilderberg Group and the World Economic Forum, which have openly fretted about this rising populist movement in recent years.

In fact, Brzezinski’s “global political awakening” is not only as accurate a description of the global geopolitical situation today as it was when he first made it a decade and a half ago, it is—if anything—even truer today than it was in the bygone era of Hope and Change Obama.

Naturally, this awakening is informed by different issues in different countries and takes different forms in different corners of the globe, but there’s no doubt that the global political awakening is accelerating and people are reaching a breaking point.

Just take a look at France. The country has been on fire (literally) for months now as nationwide protests against proposed changes to the country’s pension system have spilled over into fiery protests against police violence that even targeted government officials.

Or take Israel, where Prime Minister Netanyahu is under the greatest pressure of his political career for trying to shove through a deeply unpopular judicial reform that would weaken the power of the country’s Supreme Court. Protesters have been in the streets, blocking roads and setting fires in opposition to Netanyahu’s efforts and, in the latest development, over a thousand reservists in the Israeli Air Force are threatening to stop serving if the reform goes ahead.

Or witness the turmoil in Africa, where weeks of antigovernment rallies in Kenya have culminated in deadly riots that show no signs of abating and where a crackdown on political opposition in Senegal has sparked similarly violent protests.

Then there’s the wave of farmer protests that, as I documented in a series of articles last summer, have swept around the world as the globalist net zero agenda starts to clamp down on the act of farming. The demonstrations have brought unrest and disruption not only to Sri Lanka—where protesters stormed the prime minister’s office and literally chased the president out of the country—but also to usually quiet countries like the Netherlands and Ireland.

Heck, you know there’s a global political awakening underway when Canada, of all places, becomes the site of a dramatic freedom convoy and an equally dramatic declaration of emergency powers by Trudeau’s increasingly embattled government.

Yes, Brzezinski was quite right when he pointed out that a global political awakening was underway. The real question, of course, is what such an awakening means for our future.

It is easy to see how the prospect of an increasingly politically engaged public (let alone an increasingly agitated one) is detrimental to the aims of geopolitical strategists like Brzezinski. After all, to the Brzezinskis of the world, the people are just pawns to be used, manipulated and, ultimately, sacrificed in service of a greater geopolitical agenda. (Or, in Kissinger’s infamous formulation, military men are “dumb, stupid animals to be used” as pawns for foreign policy.)

When the pawns begin to fight back, however, the chess game comes to a screeching halt. How can the self-declared grandmasters go about conquering squares on the chessboard, after all, when their own pieces are fighting against them?

One can just picture the war hawks observing this mass awakening and fretting over their carefully crafted grand chessboard strategems. “Why won’t these pawns simply shut up and do what they’re told?! It would make everything so much easier!”

Unfortunately for us, Brzezinski and his ilk not only saw the development of this global political awakening, they also envisioned a way to contain it.

And, even more unfortunately for us, the elitists’ plan for putting a lid on this populist awakening does not end well for us “pawns.”

Counter-Revolution

If the sight of these protest movements sweeping the globe seems familiar to you, that’s because it is.

As you’ll recall, I wrote an article in November 2019 about the political turmoil then engulfing nations around the world, from Bolivia to Chile to France to Hong Kong to Iraq. “Your Guide to a World on Fire” documented how the global political awakening seemed to be coming to a head and mused on whether the fiery uprisings signaled that “the Old World Order of neoliberal globalism under Pax Americana is finally coming apart at the seams.”

Of course, as we now know, that optimism was premature. The globalists always have tricks up their sleeve to fend off their demise. In this case, they chose to pull the scamdemic card and we all saw the immediate result: the fiery protests of 2019 came to a grinding halt at the beginning of 2020, when social distancing and locking ourselves in our own home were suddenly instituted as the prime civic virtues.

That the grandmasters of the global chessboard would unleash one of the largest psyops ever perpetrated on humanity for the purpose of containing the global political awakening should not be surprising. Actually, it should be comforting. It shows us that they’re still attempting to control the masses.

When and if that strategy begins to fail, however, there is a much darker option at their disposal.

You see, Brzezinski’s op-ed about the global political awakening was not written for the global press. It was a summary of a speech that he delivered at Chatham House. For those not in the know, Chatham House is the headquarters of the Royal Institute for International Affairs (RIIA), the Council on Foreign Relations’ sister organization in London.

The speech from which Brzezinski’s global awakening observation derives—titled “Major Foreign Policy Challenges for The New US Presidency” and delivered on November 17, 2008—was, like most of the RIIA’s proceedings, not intended for the general public. However, a recording of the speech was later leaked online. What it reveals about the globalists’ thinking on the matter of a people’s uprising is downright bone-chilling.

The lecture began innocuously enough, with Brzezinski mouthing the usual, trite foreign policy clichés about how American leadership “has been essential to global stability and to global development” and warning that Obama’s incoming administration faces challenges from a number of global crises. So far, so boring.

But then he transitions into the main theme of his talk: the global political awakening and what is to be done about it.

While the lethality the lethality of their power is greater than ever, their [the major powers’] capacity to impose control over the politically awakened masses of the world is at an historical low. I once put it rather pungently (and I was flattered that the British foreign secretary repeated this) as follows: namely, in earlier times it was easier to control a million people—literally, it was easier to control a million people than, physically, to kill a million people. Today it is infinitely easier to kill a million people than to control a million people. [Emphasis added]

And then, just in case his audience missed it, he reiterated the point: “It is easier to kill than to control.”

This blood-curdling pronouncement is delivered, as with most of Brzezinski’s pronouncements, in a detached way, as if he were reporting on the weather in New Delhi or the results of last night’s baseball game. And why should he become emotional when discussing the possibility of a global leadership losing its control of the people and deciding to unleash megadeath on the population? After all, he’s simply pointing out a self-evident truth about the way power operates in our society and the lengths to which the psychopaths leading the kakistocracy must be willing to go in order to maintain their power.

As the global political awakening starts to take shape and the masses can no longer be placated with QAnonsense or kept in their homes by scamdemic psyops, then the rulers of the grand chessboard always have the final option: mass murder. Whether that mass murder takes the form of a WWIII or the release of an actual bioweapon or some other method entirely is of little consequence. What matters is that if and when there is a true threat to the rule of the powers-that-shouldn’t-be, they will take Brzezinski’s dictum to heart.

Today it is infinitely easier to kill a million people than to control a million people.

Ending the Game

It is easy to see why geopolitical strategists find the grand chessboard analogy so appealing. It accurately embodies their vision of the globe as a space to be dominated by one team or another and it provides them with useful strategems for achieving their geopolitical goals. They can employ gambits, sacrifice pawns, formulate plans that involve anticipating their opponents’ next moves, etc.

Perhaps most important of all, the chessboard metaphor flatters these narcissists’ intellect. Only these gifted grandmasters understand this intricate game of geopolitics in all its multivariate complexity, after all, and only they are capable of crafting strategies for winning that game.

But in examining the war hawks moves on the global chessboard, we run the risk of forgetting that this is only a metaphor. People are not pawns. This is not a game. We are talking about real people living real lives, not plastic pieces on a chessboard.

In fact, when we adopt the chess analogy, we are unwittingly playing into the globalists’ hands. If the globe really is a grand chessboard and we really are engaged in a struggle for dominance over it, then we’re compelled to adopt that mindset ourselves and come up with a strategy for winning the game game.

“If only us pawns could form our own team! Then we could take over the chessboard, sacrifice the kings and queens and subject the rooks and the bishops and the knights to our will! Then we could run the global chessboard the way we want!”

But to begin thinking in those terms is to fall into a trap. We find ourselves playing the geopolitical game on the grandmasters’ own terms. Whether we adopt the “vote harder” strategy of the statists or the violent revolution strategy of the rioters or we start volunteering to become pawns for the “other” team—as those who promote the false BRICS-as-saviours narrative would have us do—we lose.

The political game is rigged. It is a contest for power where it is not the people who vote that count, it’s the people who count the votes. Even more to the point, it is a distracting puppet theater, a shadow play on the cave wall that is put in front of us to divert our attention from the ways that power really operates in society.

The violent revolution strategy is similarly doomed to fail. Brzezinski merely stated what many authoritarians already realize: it is easier to kill than to control. It follows that these autocrats will not hesitate to unleash the apocalypse if they ever feel genuinely threatened by a mass uprising. Given that the very forces we oppose are the ones sitting on the nuclear stockpiles and the bioweapons labs and the increasingly automated armed forces, and given that they have spent decades building up the machinery of technological tyranny under the “homeland security” paradigm in case of just such an uprising, is there any doubt who would win such a contest?

And the idea of “switching sides” and joining the “other” team on the grand chessboard? Even if the BRICS team were fundamentally different from the NATO team (it isn’t), we’d still be no more than pawns on the board.

No, none of these strategies suffice. The only winning move in this game is the least popular one of all: to reject the game entirely.

The planet is not a chessboard. It does not consist of squares to be divvied up and occupied by competing teams. It is not populated by chess pieces to be manipulated by this or that player in service of some grand geopolitical agenda.

It is a world filled with people who can choose at any time to start interacting with each other directly, free of controlling middle men, to transact in a currency of their own choice, for goods and services of their own making, without the need for any globalist power structure.

Life is not a win/lose struggle for domination of a fixed chessboard. Life is a win/win quest for cooperation on an ever-expanding pie.

Society does not require a top-down order imposed by an authoritarian elitist class who, by virtue of some magical political ritual, is able to impose its will on others without their consent. Rather, a thriving society requires the spontaneous order that develops when everyone is free to form voluntary relations based on mutual consent.

We are not pawns on a chessboard to be used in a struggle for political dominance and we do not need to win any grand chess game in order to take control of our lives. We are human beings finding ways to live with other human beings on a fertile, living planet. It is not until we completely reject the mindset of the Brzezinskis and the Kissingers and the other self-styled grandmasters of the so-called grand chessboard that we can truly begin to take our power back.

We do not need to take over the chessboard. Instead, we need to withdraw our participation from this “game” entirely. The would-be grandmasters can’t play their game if we won’t be their pawns.

The grand game of global geopolitical chess, it turns out, is a funny game. The only winning move is not to play.