image: Wikimedia Commons (link).
The complete text in English can be found here as well as in other locations on the web.
The subject matter of this address illustrates quite dramatically the assertion which Professor Michael Hudson has been making over and over in his recent interviews and articles, that there is presently a massive struggle between diametrically opposed economic visions: one vision characterized by (in Professor Hudson's words) "the idea that any rent-yielding resource -- banking, land, natural resources, and natural resource monopolies -- should be in the public domain to provide basic needs to everybody freely" and the opposing view promoted by invasive neoliberalism which involves "giving power to the monopolists, to the oppressors, to violence [. . .] where armies can come in, take over your country, impose a client dictatorship like Pinochet in Chile or the neo-Nazis in Ukraine [. . .] a world centrally-planned by the American military and finance."
You can find the above quotations in Professor Hudson's recent conversation from March of this year entitled "What flavor oligarchy?" and which you can watch and listen to on a video here.
You can find Professor Hudson addressing the same theme and the same dichotomy in several other recent interviews and essays, including this one, in which he declares:
What China and Russia found out very quickly is what initially seemed to be an economic rivalry between America and China and other countries was not really an anti-China rivalry as such. It's a conflict of economic systems. The conflict is between neoliberalism -- a financialized world order that wants to privatize all infrastructure and create monopoly rents for transportation, education, healthcare: like what occurs in the United States -- and having these basic investments in the public domain, to be subsidized and their services provided at minimum cost. The question at issue is what kind of economy the world is going to have. Will it be a neoliberal economy, a privatized economy -- Reaganized, Thatcherized, and financial: organized by central planning in Wall Street -- or is the government going to plan?
In addressing this dichotomy, the President of Russia primarily did so indirectly -- first, by devoting the bulk of the speech to a discussion of social support at the national level for critical infrastructure concerns such as higher education, healthcare, and transportation infrastructure, and secondly by making a literary analogy to figures in Kipling's Jungle Books (first published in 1893), without identifying exactly who corresponds to which characters (although the thrust of his analogy is plain enough).
The brilliant use of the Kipling analogy is found towards the end of the speech, after the extended discussion of infrastructure and social spending. The critical points are found in this passage of the address:
The meaning and purpose of Russia's policy in the international arena -- I will just say a few words about this to conclude my address -- is to ensure peace and security for the well-being of our citizens, for the stable development of our country. [. . .] At the same time, unfortunately, everyone in the world seems to be used to the practice of politically motivated, illegal economic sanctions and to certain actors' brutal attempts to impose their will on others by force. But today, this practice is degenerating into something even more dangerous -- I am referring to the recently exposed direct interference in Belarus in an attempt to orchestrate a coup d'etat and assassinate the President of that country. At the sam time, it is typical that even such flagrant actions have not been condemned by the so-called collective West. Nobody seemed to notice. Everyone pretends nothing is happening. [. . .] You can have your own opinion of President of Belarus Alexander Lukashenko's policy. But the practice of staging coups d'etat and planning political assassinations, including those of high-ranking officials -- well, this goes too far. This is beyond any limits. [. . .]
In this regard, we behave in an extremely restrained manner: I would even say 'modestly,' and I am saying this without irony. Often, we prefer not to respond at all, not just to unfriendly moves, but even to outright rudeness. We want to maintain good relations with everyone who participates in the international dialogue. But we see what is happening in real life. As I said, every now and then they are picking on Russia, for no reason. And of course, all sorts of petty Tabaquis are running around them like Tabaqui ran around Shere Khan -- everything is like in Kipling's book -- howling along in order to make their sovereign happy. Kipling was a great writer.
In Kipling's book, a central theme involves a Law of the Jungle which all the various animals must observe. But the ferocious tiger Shere Khan was a serial violator of this law, acting as though he was a law unto himself. He preferred to feed on domestic cattle rather than to hunt for himself, as well as to eat beetles and frogs and fish. In addition to these forms of food, for which the Free People of the wolves (who worked for their food) held Shere Khan in contempt, the tiger would even eat Man, "the weakest and most defenseless of all living things, and it is unsportsmanlike to touch him."
The text says that the Jungle Law teaches that such behavior leads inevitably to degradation: "man-eaters become mangy, and lose their teeth."
While we might think that the reference to Shere Khan in the recent speech refers to one specific nation, it is actually more accurate (per the quotations from Michael Hudson given above) to identify Shere Khan the man-eater, the violator of all accepted law, with the proponents of the financialization, the privatization, and (when other means fail) the seizing by force of resources given to the people.
These devourers of the cattle of others -- and devourers, ultimately, of the lives of men and women -- don't distinguish between devouring the people of other lands or devouring the people of their own land, and thus it is imprecise to identify Shere Khan with any single specific country, even though it is certainly the United States which has had its economy and its foreign policy hijacked to the greatest degree by the forces of neoliberalism, and whose military has been used as the primary means of seizing the resources of other nations and of laying waste to any who stand in the way of neoliberalism.
Rather than representing a nation, then, I would argue that Shere Khan personifies the trans-national (and indeed anti-national) force of oligarchy and opposition to any restraint by the accepted Law of Nations.
The speech of the Russian President also mentions another character, who always accompanies Shere Khan in the Jungle Book stories: Tabaqui, described in the original texts as "the jackal -- Tabaqui the Dish-licker." This figure is equally despised by the Free People of the Jungle because he similarly feeds on the scraps left by the work of others, while acting as an agent and a lackey for Shere Khan, and showing a similar disdain for the proper Law.
In the speech above, the Russian President points to the fact that no one in the so-called West has so much as condemned the illegal attempt to assassinate the head of state of Belarus (a Russian ally). In fact, the controlled media have ensured that the people of the United States (for example) know absolutely nothing about it. A curtain of total silence has descended upon this failed assassination attempt, as far as the media enablers of such behavior are concerned.
And yet this silence cannot cloak the plain and obvious fact that the assassination of a head of state (or the attempt to do so) is inherently an act of war -- and in this case an act of aggressive war. As I have written previously (on the occasion of the assassination of Iranian General Soleimani and the Iraqi General Al-Muhandis), the Nuremberg Trials declared that "to initiate a war of aggression is not only an international crime: it is the supreme international crime."
Thus, every man and woman in every nation should condemn such acts of international crime. That the controlled media in the so-called West has refused to do so -- and even refused to discuss the crime -- is despicable, and merits inclusion with whomever else Vladimir Putin had in mind when he referred to Tabaquis who run along with Shere Khan, hoping to feed on his scraps.
In the Jungle Book stories, there are some other important characters who remained unmentioned in the speech cited above, but whose identity is almost implicitly raised by the reference to Shere Khan, the outlaw who devours what belongs to others and who also devours Man.
The first of the Jungle Book stories relates how Mowgli ("the man's cub") arrives among a pack of wolves -- a pack who are referred to as the Free People. The pack, when presenting a united front, is capable of standing up to Shere Khan. However, some of the younger wolves are tempted by the lifestyle offered by Shere Khan and his jackal companion, Tabaqui, and end up siding with the tiger.
The bigger threat to Shere Khan's reign of terror, however, is Mowgli himself -- the child who finds himself among the wolves, and is adopted into the pack (in the scene shown at the top of this post, from a 1910 illustration).
When we first meet Mowgli, he is just an infant, unable to even perceive all the dynamics described above -- but Shere Khan already hates the child, and fears what will happen if Mowgli is allowed to grow and mature.
And, sure enough, as readers of the Jungle Books will know, as Mowgli develops -- under the tutelage not just of the wolves but also of Baloo the Bear and especially Bagheera the Panther -- he demonstrates that he is indeed more than capable of defeating the tiger, despite the fearsome power and unrestrained aggression of Shere Khan.
I would offer this interpretation, then, of the characters in the Jungle Book analogy which was initiated in the speech to the Federal Assembly of Russia one week ago:
- Shere Khan, the lawless, mangy man-eater, corresponds to the international forces of oligarchy, who are equally willing to devour the people of any nation, including their own, whose ideology Professor Hudson describes as "neoliberalism -- a financialized world order that wants to privatize all infrastructure and create monopoly rents for transportation, education, healthcare, like what occurs in the United States."
- Tabaqui, the Dish-licker, corresponds to the enablers of neoliberal imperialism, especially including the controlled western media cartels -- and who also corrupt some of the "younger wolves" who should actually be standing with the Free People against Shere Khan but who instead go over to his side.
- The Free People of the wolves, who are capable of standing against the tiger and his Tabaquis but who are often divided -- including by those who defect to the blandishments of the tiger and his way of life. These wolves who, when united, can resist the tiger may perhaps best be seen as corresponding to the nations who still stand against neoliberalism and neoliberal imperialism.
- Mowgli, the "man's cub" who at first has no idea what is going on, but who actually has the power to defeat Shere Khan -- a fact which Shere Khan knows full well, and a fact for which Shere Khan always seeks to destroy Mowgli, before the boy can come into his own. I would suggest that Mowgli actually corresponds to the people themselves -- not the nations, but the rather the people themselves -- who, if they can just become aware of their own power, are more than a match for even the fearsome international criminals who disdain the Law of Nations and who correspond to the dreaded man-eating tiger of the stories.
- Baloo and Bagheera, Mowgli's primary teachers in the tales, can be seen as representing two somewhat different possible paths of development for the boy. Baloo represents the temptation to abdicate responsibility to some degree (a kind of "drop out" approach), while Bagheera rightly explains that unless Mowgli actually stands up to Shere Khan, dropping out and following the carefree path of Baloo will eventually end in disaster -- but, as Bagheera knows and as he helps Mowgli to realize, Shere Khan actually fears Mowgli because Mowgli is actually more than capable of stopping the tiger. And this holds true for the people of the world, including the people of the United States, who are in fact the most responsible for stopping this tiger which is intent upon devouring them and devouring the rest of the world as well.
