If you cannot be your own master, others will master you. Sometimes you struggle your entire life only to find you’ve spent it fighting to break free from a trap someone else set for you. This is why all human effort ultimately serves one purpose: to claim sovereignty over one’s own destiny. This applies equally to individuals and to any collective.
Before the First World War, Britain served as the world’s dominant power. As its grip on the world began to loosen, it started planning for what came next. Britain controlled the world and ruled the seas for four hundred years from three small islands — achieved through two strategies: divide and conquer, and a global colonial economic system built before anyone else could. The former fragmented others into pieces too small to resist; the latter made Britain’s own position ever more secure — the more players drawn into the system, the stronger Britain’s footing, and the greater the profits extracted through the system’s built-in bias.
All great businesses are monopolies. Competition only emerges when monopoly is impossible.
The Dutch colonized Indonesia for 350 years, adopting the British strategy of divide and conquer. They made Europeans the first tier of local society, occupying the upper and middle ranks of the colonial government. They made Chinese the second tier, holding lower government positions while granting them access to power-serving resources, allowing them to accumulate wealth. The local indigenous people became the third tier. At the same time, the Dutch deliberately stoked resentment among locals toward the Chinese clerks who dealt with them in daily life and toward those Chinese who had built wealth through economic activity. When Dutch colonial rule became unsustainable and they withdrew, they left behind a minefield embedded in that society. The internal conflicts that followed could still be exploited — fishing in troubled waters from the outside. And so the Chinese Indonesians get harvested at regular intervals — and when it’s over, they have to wipe away the blood and tears and smile again.
A group that holds great wealth but cannot protect it will inevitably become a target for plunder, again and again. This is why these tragedies recur at regular intervals. And this is precisely why groups that control social wealth will use every indirect means available to seize power and claim influence and a voice. This holds true in every society. A piece I wrote several years ago, “Looking East with Longing — What We’re Waiting for Is Time,” predicted this trend, and it is now becoming reality: control the wealth, control the narrative, control the critical positions in the machinery of governance…
After the First World War, four great empires collapsed: the Austro-Hungarian, the Ottoman, the German, and the Tsarist Russian — all crumbled, fragmenting into clusters of nation-states. There was once a film called Lawrence of Arabia that depicts events set against exactly this backdrop: to dismember the Ottoman Empire stretching across Asia, Europe, and Africa, British intelligence officer and archaeologist Lawrence went to the Arabian Peninsula to contact tribal chieftains, persuading them to rise up against the Ottomans and promising British protection for their independent states — Britain would not only provide aid but would be among the first to recognize their newly formed nations. Britain has always been a masterful agitator, stirring up conflicts everywhere, yet each time timing its moves with precision, consistently achieving outsized impact from minimal effort.
If you spread out a map and look at the distribution of nations before the First World War, you would be astonished to find that though the Ottoman Empire was already tottering, the territory it occupied and the scope of its rule was truly remarkable. Even after its eventual collapse, the simple fact of its existence would remain as a shared historical memory. There might come a day when a great leader rises in that region, unites everyone under a single banner, and uses that ancient collective memory as a rallying flag — and it would inevitably form a unified force, one impossible to ignore in both economic and geopolitical terms. To prevent this from happening, Britain’s elites once again used their remarkable foresight to engineer a staggering scheme: establish a real-world Zion in Palestine — plant a Jewish state there.
Without Israel’s existence, that entire region would have been contiguous. At the time, Egyptian leader Nasser proposed the establishment of a unified Arab Republic, and it nearly succeeded. The national flags of Egypt, Syria, Yemen, Iraq, and other countries share similar designs — modeled on a single flag. And that near-unification happened even with Israel already present.
Without Israel in the picture, during that wave of anti-colonial nationalism and liberation movements, there was real potential for an unstoppable momentum to form a unified entity — one that could have become a genuine pole in the world’s geopolitical contest.
Right after the First World War ended, Zionism began gaining momentum. At first these forces were small, conducting acts of sabotage and disruption. Every form of terrorism you can imagine today — early Zionists had done it. They were, in a sense, the founding fathers of modern terrorism. And it was precisely this capacity for disruption that caught the eye of the world’s power brokers of the time. So they were funded, supported, and encouraged to grow. Then after the Second World War, exploiting the emotional weight of tragic victimhood, these destructive activities were reframed as nation-building, and a wedge was forcibly driven into that land. At the time, not only did Britain and the United States support this — the Soviet Union did not oppose it either, and in fact actively flew Jewish people from its own controlled territories to Palestine. Why do you think the Soviet Union not only didn’t object, but proactively relocated nearly the entire population of its Jewish Autonomous Oblast to Palestine?
When something is unanimously seen as beneficial by all the major powers, it will inevitably produce effects far disproportionate to its apparent scale. And such effects will benefit all the major powers alike — much like the saint who received collective praise from all the great powers after South Africa, once the world’s sixth-largest economic and technological power, dismantled its own capabilities…
Those who designed this layout knew from the beginning they were creating an arena — or rather, they deliberately built this hellscape. Because they understood clearly: when survival is at stake, anything can happen. And once it does, every party needs allies. This gives all sides a pretext, while the whole region gets thrown into perpetual chaos. All divide-and-conquer strategies stem from the fundamental position of being the minority facing a majority — once that majority unites into a single body, the minority has nowhere to stand. Divide and conquer effectively achieves fragmentation and self-consuming internal conflict.
After the Second World War, national liberation movements swept the globe. When this tide became impossible to stop, the early-industrialized wealthy nations, upon withdrawing from their colonies, began aggressively promoting their own high-cost social operating systems.
The Western social model, while inclusive and diverse, requires one essential precondition to sustain that inclusivity and diversity without collapsing into disorder: money.
Once the money runs out, a system with such high overhead simply cannot function. Many post-colonial developing nations were not only nowhere near industrialization — even their agriculture was at a prehistoric level, with societies still entirely organized around tribal structures. Look at Myanmar: 75 years after independence, it remains fragmented internally, each faction its own warlord — cannot be defeated in battle, cannot be governed, no money, no industry, no order. Add in periodic rounds of street-level “democracy,” and there is truly no hope to be seen.
You know who the biggest buyers of luxury goods are? The people who just had their first full meal.
Some things cannot be said too directly. If by this point you’ve found yourself reflecting on the situation in Palestine, then you’ve grasped most of what I’m actually saying: When I was young, there was a man on our street who had become addicted to drugs. When the cravings hit, he would beat his own mother. I remember once the police tied him to a chair and forced him to detox. Someone described his suffering to his mother and suggested she beg the police to let him come home to detox instead. His mother actually went — and under extreme pressure, forced the police to agree. The local precinct had no choice but to relent and tied him up at home. That night his screams were terrible, and his mother secretly cut the rope and let him escape. In the end, her son died on the streets. Later, the person who had urged her to threaten her own life to get the police to move her son home was arrested — it turned out he was a runner for a drug trafficking ring.