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However ironic or sinister, multipolarity is now the basis for a whole campaign, systematically spread on RT in English, French, Spanish, and Arabic, repeated by information-laundering sites such as Yala News, stated again and again by a thousand other cutouts, think tanks, and paid and unpaid pro-Russian journalists, as well as other spokesmen for Autocracy, Inc. Xinhua celebrated the African Union’s membership in the G20—the Group of 20 conference of the world’s largest economies—as evidence of “the aggressive emergence of the multipolar world.”16 The China Global Television Network, in a web article illustrated with a photograph of the Syrian dictator, Bashir al-Assad—who massacres his own people—informs its viewers that “China’s diplomacy injects vitality into the multipolar world.”17 President Maduro of Venezuela has spoken of “the multipolar, pluricentric world that we yearn for, and that we are united for, with our flags of struggle with all of the peoples of the world.”18 When he visited China, he tweeted that his trip would “strengthen ties of cooperation and the construction of a new global geopolitics.”19 North Korea has expressed its desire to cooperate with Russia “to establish a ‘new multi-polarized international order.’”20 When the president of Iran, Ebrahim Raisi, in 2023 visited the three most important Latin American autocracies, Venezuela, Cuba, and Nicaragua, he said that the purpose of his trip was to “stand against imperialism and unilateralism,”21 by which he meant he wanted to solidify their opposition to democracy and universal rights. Slowly, the countries leading the assault on the language of rights, human dignity, and the rule of law are creating institutions of their own. Members of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization—China, India, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, Pakistan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan (Afghanistan, Belarus, Iran, and Mongolia have observer status)—all agree to recognize one another’s “sovereignty,” not to criticize one another’s autocratic behavior, and not to intervene in one another’s internal politics. The group of countries known as BRICS (the acronym stands for Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa, and was originally a term coined by a Goldman Sachs economist to describe emerging-market business opportunities) is also transforming itself into an alternative international institution, with regular meetings and new members.
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