Lars von Trier’s The Idiots

By Tonio Kröger 

Ex: http://www.counter-currents.com

I. (Minor Spoilers)

The Idiots (Idioterne) is not an accessible film, and neither is it is easy to digest. The sexual content is so extreme that The Idiots is rated the same as any pornographic film in the United Kingdom, Spain, Australia, Norway, and several others. The depiction of mentally disabled individuals, both real and those merely acting as such, is alarming and controversial. During the screening at the Cannes Film Festival in 1998, film critic Mark Kermode was removed from the venue for exclaiming, ‘Il est merde!’ He was responding less to the actual quality of the film, and more to its remarkably provocative and unsettling subject matter.

Lars von Trier, of course, thrives on such reactions. His aim is to disturb and unnerve, to stir the viewer out of his seat and out of his comfort zone. This is done not simply for the ‘shock value’ in itself, as there is no legitimate artistic worth in managing to provoke or enrage the audience; instead this is done in order to communicate something through the shocking material. By knocking the viewer out of his ordinary perspective, where everything is comfortably perceived and organized according to a familiar worldview, Lars von Trier can assault him with a new perspective, a new challenge that might threaten his old way of viewing reality.

This is truer of The Idiots than any other LvT film, and that includes the psychological horror of Antichrist and the raw sexual trauma of Nymphomaniac. This is due to the highly abrasive nature of the film’s narrative, which tells the story of a group of people who act like they are mentally retarded as a form of rebellion against what they understand to be a constrictive, conformist, and sterilizing society. Their antics, which they call ‘spazzing,’ include going into town to sell Christmas ornaments that they have made, going to the pool to create mischief with the other swimmers, and eating at restaurants only to spazz and leave without paying.

It is during the last antic that the group comes into contact with Karen, a seemingly ordinary person who becomes drawn and intimately attached to the spazz community over the next two weeks. Karen initially provides the neutral perspective of the group, the backdrop of normality to their witting insanity; she is very curious, though, and constantly questions the reasoning behind their activities, allowing the viewer to get a keener understanding of what they do. She firstly represents the ignorant audience who nevertheless desire to know more, but later, as we will see, she represents the fulfilment of the ‘spazz way of life.’

The group is led by a man named Stoffer, who is clearly the one who takes their mission the most seriously, ostensibly giving it an ideological basis and a higher cause than merely acting like idiots. Karen asks Stoffer why they do what they do, and Stoffer replies, ‘In the stone age all the idiots died. It doesn’t have to be like that nowadays. Being an idiot is a luxury, but it is also a step forward. Idiots are the people of the future. If one can find the one idiot that happens to be one’s own idiot . . .’ Stoffer finds in idiocy an outlet for what bourgeois society has repressed or camouflaged, namely a kind of personal creativity that does not accord with social normalcy. It is a new freedom, one which was obviously unavailable in a more brutal time, but which is presently imperative in an era that prizes comfort, material luxury, and ostracizes everything that is not conducive to ‘making one’s way in the world,’ i.e., becoming rich and popular. Stoffer asks meaningfully, ‘What’s the idea of a society that gets richer and richer when it doesn’t make anyone happier?’ Stoffer’s idea is instead to make one happier regardless of riches.

The means of achieving this are chiefly to ‘find the one idiot that happens to be one’s own idiot,’ a demonstrably individualistic and interiorized path that cannot help but hearken back to the Dionysian nature of the Breaking the Waves heroine, Bess. The idea is to determine the other side of oneself, the side that society has dispelled and rejected from its embrace. It is in this sense that we are reminded of C. G. Jung’s conception of the ‘shadow,’ or the secret personality that is imbued with our darker elements, with everything that has been evicted from and cannot fit into conscious life. Stoffer’s aim is essentially to reconcile modern man with his shadow self in a radical way; he aims to reintegrate man with his inner darkness to create something that is once again whole, independent of outer definitions and social parameters. When one character wakes him up, telling him that another spazzer is breaking things on the property, Stoffer responds, ‘Sheds are bourgeois crap. Smashing windows is obviously part of Axel’s inner idiot.’ The smashing of windows is an act that is socially reprehensible, but, since it allegedly exists as part of Axel’s ‘inner idiot,’ his ‘shadow self,’ it is perfectly acceptable in spazzer society.

This opposition between consciousness and the shadow is present not only in the individual sense, where the characters play out this drama in themselves, but in the collective sense as well. What this means is that the bourgeoisie, which is invariably treated as a great evil and as something to be rebelled against, represents the conscious side, and the spazzer society represents the shadow side; they are the ‘reservoir of darkness’ that has spilled out from respectable society, and has come to life after society has failed to suppress it. They even use society’s own tools against it, inverting the logic of social machinations to serve immoral ends. In one scene, for example, Stoffer has one of the spazzers pretend to have tripped over a loose cobblestone near a well-to-do homeowner’s property, then pesters the man to pay them off in order to avoid a lawsuit. When the wealthy man asks whether the spazzer didn’t simply trip on his own rather than a loose stone, Stoffer answers, ‘Are you saying they drag their feet? that they are clumsy?,’ which forces the man to retreat, unwilling to be responsible for anything that might be considered ‘politically incorrect.’ Stoffer considers this to be a victory over the ‘fascist’ system that he hates, contemptuously gazing into its soul and mocking it.

There are other scenes, too, that reveal other ‘victorious’ moments against other, more typical members of society. The house where they are staying, for example, is that of Stoffer’s uncle, who has entrusted Stoffer to sell it. When he visits the house, he remarks that he take better care of it, saying that, ‘These floors have been waxed every day for fifty years,’ which of course exemplifies the hated bourgeois attitude. Later on, coming into possession of caviar, Stoffer shows his group how to ‘eat it the way they eat caviar in Soelleroed [their town],’ stuffing it into his mouth as though he were a child eating chocolate. Allured by the antics of her new friends, Karen also learns to spazz, and though she meaningfully does not participate to the same extent as the others, she says that, ‘We’re so happy here. I’ve no right to be so happy.’

II (Major Spoilers)

The ‘paradise’ of Soelleroed is largely an illusion, however, as the final third of the film reveals. It is in these segments that the real darkness of the shadow comes out, which altogether reflects the failure of Stoffer’s mission to reconcile it with their conscious lives. This is as manifest in Stoffer himself as in any of the others. In one scene, for instance, a city official arrives at the house to offer them a government grant and a new location where they might stay, somewhere that is further away from normal society and which therefore makes it harder for them to intrude upon normal people. Stoffer of course reacts violently to this, ripping off his clothes and chasing the official all the way back to town naked, screaming ‘Fascist! fascist!’ the whole time. The others drag him back to the house, but they have to physically restrain him, strapping him to a bed overnight as he has reverted to a purely irrational state, succumbing to an episode that was formerly merely an act.

Another character, too, after the girl he fell in love with is stolen away from the house by her father, chases after him, running into his car, gesturing wildly and speaking nonsense. Affected so deeply by his feeling for her, he is no longer able to bridge the gap between his conscious self and the primitive he used to play at but has now become reality. This is not a successful integration between consciousness and the shadow; this is the conquest of the former by the latter, resulting in the personality regressing to something animalistic and instinctual. Stoffer’s experimentation in human happiness has failed, because there is no longer anything human in his subjects.

There are more obvious instances of this darkness, too. After the night which Stoffer spends in straps, they have a party, and at the end of the party he requests a gangbang. Most of his fellows willingly participate, but some do not; this leads Stoffer and another to chase one of the unwilling women down, essentially raping her in a violently disturbing scene of spazz sex. It is significant that Karen retreats from this scene altogether, abstaining from the evil that has infiltrated the rest of the ‘shadow group.’ It is even more significant that she is not raped, for she has maintained her own sense of self in contradistinction to the others; her personality is still intact while those of the others have been overwhelmed and utterly ransacked of their humanity.

Nearing the end of the film, Stoffer comes to doubt the sincerity of his fellow idiots, suspecting that this is all just some sort of game to them. He orders them to play ‘spin the bottle,’ with whomever the bottle points at having to demonstrate his commitment to the cause by spazzing in ‘real life’ places such as at work or at home with the wife and kids. The first fails completely, refusing to spazz in front of his family; he elects a normal life instead of the idiot life and the mistress he kept among them. The second opts to spazz in front of an art class he will be teaching, but he fails as well, causing Stoffer to storm out of the class, saying, ‘You love this middle class crap. These old dames use more make-up than the national theatre.’ The teacher, Henrik, says, ‘I had no pride in my inner idiot.’ The shadow self was just an illusion for them, something to play at in an insubstantial expression of inward identity.

Stoffer himself comes no closer to the reconciliation between the shadow and the ego. Instead of being the romantic and anarchic hero revolting against the oppressive bourgeois system that he likes to consider himself, he  is infact a representation of it in its inverted sense; he is the ‘other side of the same coin,’ reflecting the absence of a genuine morality that extends to both the ‘middle class’ and the bohemian individualism. His ethos is fundamentally the same as that of his bourgeois uncle: ‘In reality, the acceptance of the shadow-side of human nature verges on the impossible. Consider for a moment what it means to grant the right of existence to what is unreasonable, senseless, and evil! Yet it is just this that the modern man insists upon. He wants to live with every side of himself — to know what he is. That is why he casts history aside. He wants to break with tradition so that he can experiment with his life and determine what value and meaning things have in themselves, apart from traditional presuppositions’ (C. G. Jung, ‘Psychotherapists or the Clergy’).

Stoffer is the epitome of the ‘modern man’ in that he wants to throw off all social inhibitions, not merely those of the 20th Century middle class, but the entire framework of human society. His revolt is the same as the student and hippy revolts of the sixties, revolts which were ultimately codified into the same bourgeois vassals that they originally reacted against. This is what makes Stoffer the superficial counterpart to the bourgeoisie; this is what makes him its useful idiot.

Karen is the only one who  volunteers to spazz in her own life. Taking along her friend Suzanne for company, Karen returns to her home, somewhere she has not been for two weeks. We soon learn that her son had died, and that her son’s funeral was the day after she joined the group. Her husband comes home, and they sit down to eat – and Karen drools and dribbles at her food, which causes her family to stare, and her husband to hit her. Suzanne takes her hand, and they leave together, smiling naively, innocently.

Earlier in the film, Karen says to Stoffer, ‘I just want to be able to understand why I’m here,’ to which he replies, ‘Perhaps because there is a little idiot in there that wants to come out and have some company.’ While that is true in a certain, limited sense, it is truer to say that Karen’s ‘little idiot’ needed to come out to save her conscious self. Besieged by an impossible grief and a mother’s mourning, Karen’s ego longed for an escape route from the world’s immense difficulty. That she alone found it amongst all the idiots testifies both to the extent of her trauma and her extraordinary capability of dealing with it; she alone could make real sense of what the idiots were only playing at. Their reactions (aside from Stoffer, who was overcome by his own shadow) were conditioned by their belonging to the bourgeois order, something from which they recoiled in theory, but which they nevertheless could not do without; Karen’s reaction, on the other hand, was conditioned by a more profound disorder, which demanded an extreme process in order to be able to cope with it. Her struggle was far more real than that of the others, which is why she was the only one to find the solution to it.

The Idiots reveals both the positive and the negative scenarios that are the consequence of a Dionysiac revolt against the Apollonian dream-world. In order to ‘revolt successfully,’ to truly indulge in Dionysian fruit, the individual’s actions must be founded on something universally real that transcends particular circumstances; he must determine himself based on who he really is rather than merely a perception or a projection of who he is. This is where most of the idiots failed: ‘The shadow is a moral problem that challenges the whole ego-personality, for no one can become conscious of the shadow without considerable moral effort. To become conscious of it involves recognizing the dark aspects of the personality as present and real. This act is the essential condition for any kind of self-knowledge’ (C. G. Jung, Aion). The idiots never really became conscious of their shadow; they acted it out either as a meaningless game that allowed them an illusion of rebellion against their bourgeois lives, or, in the case of Stoffer, as a license to perform whatever irrational and pernicious acts that occurred to him, as long as they did not agree with the prevailing social order. They never addressed the shadow as a ‘moral problem,’ as something that directly influences the person; they addressed it as a ‘social problem,’ and thus remained chained to the illusions of Apollo’s dream-world.

Karen alone represents Dionysus as the purveyor of dynamic, uninhibited truth. She refused the moral violations of the other idiots, she refused their pretensions of abandoning society, and she refused their needless and unlawful interdictions with the rest of the town; in a word, Karen rejected rejection, and she did so because her rebellion was founded on an affirmation of self rather than on its negation. Unlike Stoffer, who loses control when he is confronted with that which he hates and fears most (the bourgeois city official), Karen maintains perfect control as she releases her inner idiot in front of her family, again exemplifying a personal command that eluded the others.

Speaking of her return home, where she demonstrates her restored personal strength, she says to the idiots, ‘We’ll see if I can show you if it has all been worthwhile.’ This follows a farewell in which Karen expresses an open, authentic love for many of the idiots, and repeats her avowal of happiness to have been amongst them.  Karen’s family, cold, unfeeling, and uncomprehending of what it must be for a mother to lose her son, failed to ease her grief; it was only in her introspection, the confrontation with her ‘inner idiot’ as a lifeboat that carries her from the drowning ego, that actually saves the ego. By acknowledging her despair in this radical context, she could dilute and eventually sublimate it into something far more positive, to the extent that, all things considered, she does not even know why or how she can be so happy. In this sense, the freedom of Dionysus is attained not as a rejection of Apollo, but as a victorious affirmation of the reconciliation between the unconscious and the conscious; while the rest of the idiots founded their shadow-search on a rejection of Apollo, Karen had to be rejected by him instead. This is what led to her final freedom; this is what made it all worthwhile.

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NIETZSCHE - LA DÉTRESSE DU PRÉSENT

de Dorian Astor (folio) Ed. Gallimard

Pierre Lance*
Ex: http://metamag.fr

J’avoue avoir manqué de prudence lorsque j’ai promis à MÉTAMAG de rédiger une note de lecture sur cet ouvrage. Car je n’avais encore rien lu de l’auteur et je ne m’attendais pas à recevoir un pavé de 650 pages constituées de commentaires sur l’oeuvre de Nietzsche. 

Certes, je salue bien bas la performance. Noircir 650 pages de considérations d’une utilité très contestable, il faut le faire ! Pourtant j’ai un préjugé favorable envers tous les écrivains qui se passionnent pour Nietzsche, le plus grand philosophe et psychologue de l’ère contemporaine, mais j’attends d’eux qu’ils apportent un éclairage original et des réflexions pertinentes sur les écrits flamboyants du prophète de la surhumanité. 

A mon grand regret, je n’ai rien trouvé de ce genre dans aucune de toutes les pages que j’ai lues, soit environ le quart du total en différents endroits, car je n’ai pas pu m’astreindre à lire la totalité de ce pensum, indigeste au plus haut point. L’avant-propos déjà m’avait laissé perplexe. D’abord parce que l’auteur y abuse des mots «moderne», «modernité» et «post-modernité» qui sont pour moi des termes dépourvus de sens, du moins sur le plan philosophique. Car la philosophie s’attache à l’essentiel qui, par nature, est intemporel. Ensuite parce qu’une phrase de ce texte m’a fait bondir. Dorian Astor nous affirme en effet : «Il ne fait aucun doute que la lecture de Nietzsche est douloureuse». J’en suis resté pantois ! Car mes premières lectures de Nietzsche me plongèrent immédiatement dans un bain de joie et d’enthousiasme sans pareil. Enfin quelqu’un qui avait tout compris ! (Et je ne peux imaginer de douleur à cette lecture que dans les esprits congelés par une religion ou idéologie quelconque). Si bien que je n’ai eu de cesse d’avoir absorbé les oeuvres complètes de ce magnifique trublion, sans oublier les Fragments posthumes, ni, bien entendu, la correspondance. C’est dans cette dernière que Nietzsche renie sans équivoque sa vision de l‘Éternel Retour (dont les petits professeurs de philosophie se gargarisent encore à qui mieux mieux), dans une note relevée par son excellent biographe Daniel Halévy dans une lettre à Peter Gast du 10 juin 1887. 

Le biographe écrit et cite : «Sans doute Nietzsche a-t-il voulu, une fois de plus, mettre sa pensée au clair». Quelques mots, deux lignes à peine, jetés comme un cri, interrompent cet exposé. Les voici : «Le Retour éternel est la forme la plus extrême du nihilisme : le néant (l’absurde) éternel !». Quel soulagement ce fut pour moi de voir Nietzsche reconnaître à ce propos son erreur, laquelle ne cessait de me tarabuster. Tant il me paraissait évident que l’idée d’un éternel retour de toutes choses est absolument incompatible  avec un univers éternel et infini (ce qu’il est inexorablement), donc indéfiniment renouvelé. (Nous abandonnerons à leurs rêveries pseudo-scientifiques et crypto-théocratiques les ridicules adorateurs du Big-Bang). À vrai dire, Nietzsche avait déjà quasiment tordu le cou à l’Éternel Retour dans l’aphorisme 335 du Gai savoir, dans lequel il écrit : «Qui juge encore: «dans tel cas tout le monde devrait agir ainsi», n’a pas encore fait trois pas dans la connaissance de soi-même; sans quoi il n’ignorerait pas qu’il n’y a pas, qu’il ne saurait y avoir d’acte semblable, que tout acte qui a été fait le fut d’une façon unique et irréproductible, qu’il en sera ainsi de tout acte futur...».
Dorian Astor s’est fort empêtré lui-même dans l’Éternel Retour, mais je porterai à son crédit ce paragraphe de la page 518 de son livre, dans lequel il écrit : «... Il me semble que dans l’Éternel retour, c’est la question de l’Éternel qui est centrale, et qui forme le point où se nouent le problème de la connaissance et celui de la vie. Le Retour n’est «que» l’une des formes hypothétiques ou expérimentales d’un exercice ou ascèse de la pensée et de la vie philosophiques en vue de répondre au problème de l’éternité.»  (Soit dit en passant, je ne vois pas en quoi l’éternité est un problème. C’est au contraire son impossible absence qui en serait un). Cette tentative de «justification» intéressante et astucieuse de l’absurdité fondamentale de l’Éternel Retour ne saurait pourtant remplacer la vérité toute nue : Nietzsche a lui-même donné congé à sa vision première de ce Retour sempiternel et illogique. A la décharge de tous ceux qui l’ignorent (et qui sont trop pauvres en intuition philosophique pour découvrir cela par eux-mêmes), il est vrai qu’il ne l’a fait qu’en une seule courte phrase, alors qu’il avait consacré des pages et des pages à vanter sa «vision» de 1880. 

Toutefois je m’étonne que Dorian Astor, qui a manifestement lu et relu toute l’oeuvre de Nietzsche avec grande vigilance, autant que moi-même s’il se peut, n’ait pas relevé la dénégation nietzschéenne de l’Éternel Retour. Aurait-il négligé la correspondance avec Peter Gast, le grand ami et confident de Nietzsche ? J’ai peine à le croire. A moins qu’il n’ait pas osé diffuser cette révélation capitale ? Car l’on a tant glosé sur cet impossible Retour depuis un siècle et sur toute la planète que cette révélation tardive causerait une véritable secousse sismique dans le landerneau universitaire, où l’éternel retour de l’Éternel Retour constitue en quelque sorte la rente viagère des cerveaux dévitaminés. Il n’y a donc probablement qu’un chien fou de mon espèce qui soit capable de jeter un tel brûlot dans les cimetières de la culture.

Dorian Astor, Nietzsche. La détresse du présent, Collection Folio essais (n° 591), Gallimard 10,20 € . 

Pierre Lance fut en 1969 le fondateur de la «Société Nietzsche», qui publia jusqu’en 1977 la revue «Engadine». Il est l’auteur d’une vingtaine d’ouvrages, dont notamment «Charles de Gaulle, ce chrétien nietzschéen» (1965, épuisé), «Au-delà de Nietzsche» (1976, réédité en 1992, épuisé), «En compagnie de Nietzsche» (recueil d’articles, 1991) et «Le Fils de Zarathoustra» (Editions Véga-Trédaniel, 2006). Il publie actuellement un billet quotidien abordant tous les sujets sur le site www.nice-provence.info.

The Big Five, Eurasian Security and Other Projects

By Leonid Savin

Ex: http://katehon.com

Back in 2001, a leading analyst of the American banking company Goldman Sachs Group Inc., Jim O'Neill, used the acronym BRIC to describe the growing economies. Though he had used it in the context of a global neoliberal paradigm, Russia "coopted" the term, proposing Brazil, India and China to build up a multilateral cooperation. In a relatively short period, much has been done to develop mechanisms of interaction. Later, South Africa joined the four countries (and the acronym BRICS came to life).

Now, the five countries, which hold 26% of the planet's land area, represent 42% of the world population and generate 27% of the world GDP, are considered to be the new collective actor of the multipolar world based on the principle of decentralization and the ability to respond to the challenges of the XXI century. As the Russian Foreign Minister Deputy Sergei Ryabkov, in his briefing at the BRICS/SCO Summits in Ufa on July 9, 2015, said, "the practice of the BRICS has no precedent in international politics," and the group of states has become "an important factor in international relations." The BRICS is gradually becoming the new "Big Eight", but only on the basis of equality, transparency and consensus among all members.

The last summit in Ufa showed that the informal tone in which the cooperation was based did not prevent the creation of a full-fledged international association, more democratic than other alliances of the past century. In Ufa, a plan for future actions was approved─a kind of summary of BRICS' matrix operation of the near future. It includes a declaration of finalities, the strategy of the economic partnership and announces the opening of a virtual department─the official BRICS' website, which will publish official documents and relevant materials. The BRICS Bank was launched and a pool of foreign exchange reserves was formed. Their combined capital is 200 billion dollars. The first financed projects will take place in the spring of 2016, not limited to the five countries, but holding a global character. Essentially, it is a financial alternative to the International Monetary Fund of the Rothschilds, making investments in needed sectors of the countries' real economy, and not conducting speculative transactions and providing onerous loans, as do foreign banks, stock exchanges and funds.

Also, amongst the BRICS countries cooperation will be reinforced in financial and economic matters. Particularly, the director of the European and Central Asian Affairs Gui Congyou noted that Russia is a priority to Chinese investments, which will be made not only in infrastructure but in the construction of affordable housing and high technology as well.

The year of the Russian chairmanship of the BRICS has been very dynamic. As the President of Russia Vladimir Putin said on July 9 "in the year of the Russian presidency we have conducted the first meetings for BRICS' Civil, Parliament, and Youth forums. The creation of the BRICS Network University is in process as much as the establishment of the Council of Regions of our organization."

It should be added that the cooperation is happening now not only in the financial and economic fields of the block: ministerial meetings have been held on health, education, agriculture, taxation, science and technology, social security, communications, labor and employment and culture. Increasing co-ordination between the countries affected virtually all acute international issues, from regional conflicts and threats of narcotraffic to the space sector and maritime piracy. For this, all techniques that can make multilateral relations bureaucratic were deliberately avoided. The leaders of all the BRICS countries agreed on the opinion that the current anti-bureaucratic format must be kept henceforth.

This indicates the civilian side of the BRICS likewise. The issue, addressed at the summit in Ufa, was also discussed in the eve of the forum in Moscow with the participation of experts. In particular, through the BRICS Business Council many agreements were reached, while union leaders gave their recommendations to the BRICS' Heads of State. The Chairman of the Federation of Independent Trade Unions of Russia, Mikhail Shmakov, at a meeting with Vladimir Putin, also signaled the necessity to avoid any methods of neo-liberalism, who is to blame for all the world's current crises. This is an important observation showing that the BRICS is in consensus on the level of political ideology, one that will guide the participating countries.

The BRICS can also be regarded as a club where members follow the principle of reciprocity. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi during a larger format meeting of BRICS leaders indicated the importance of completing a reform in the UN and its Security Council. According to him, this will help to more effectively respond to any calls. Quite telling was the statement of the Indian leader about sanctions─that only UN sanctions have power, while all the rest is the attempt of some countries to dictate their terms, which is unacceptable. Dilma Rousseff, President of Brazil, also raised the issue of UN reform and the readiness to participate in various projects from harmonization of migration flows to climate change control.

It is significant that other countries are showing an increased interest in the BRICS. For example, at the financial forum BRICS/SCO, which took place on June 8, the vice-president of the Industrial Development Bank of Turkey Çiğdem İçel was also present; furthermore, the formal participation of the SCO's Heads of State at the BRICS Summit as guests greatly enhanced the status of the event. However, apart from the official agenda, the leaders could communicate in an informal setting, discussing a number of issues that are equally important for building a trusting partnership.

The West behaved on its characteristic manner of double standards and information war. For example, Bloomberg's publication was totally manipulated, as if the aggregate BRICS economy had almost caught up with the US economy. This is not true, once according to the IMF China alone has surpassed the United States already in 2014; the Council on Foreign Relations, speaking more realistically, pointed out that the BRICS is going to reduce the influence of the West. Stratfor added that the BRICS and the SCO have evolved to a sort of platform in order to deploy resistance against the United States. Ostensibly, USA analysts have not heard or did not want to hear the repeated statements of the first persons and ministers that the BRICS is not directed against any state or power, having an open agenda. Similarly, the SCO was established to resolve issues of regional security in Eurasia, as well as to engage in energy production and the creation of transport corridors.

But, of course, the two structures will adequately respond to the attempts of undermining sovereignty or interference in internal affairs. At the summit, the Chinese and Russian sides have time and again stated the importance of preserving historical justice and the need for immediate response to any efforts in rewriting history and justifying such phenomena as fascism and Nazism.

The SCO summit, happening immediately after the events of the BRICS on the same site, was also marked by important decisions. For the first time in the existence of the organization the reception of new members, India and Pakistan, took place. In addition, there was an agreement in the raising of the participation status of the Republic of Belarus to that of a SCO observer State. In the quality of partners of the organization's dialogue, joined Azerbaijan, Armenia, Cambodia and Nepal. At one of the briefings in Ufa, a Western journalist raised the question of the various problems between India and Pakistan and how they could cooperate, if differences and the potential for conflict remained. The point is that the SCO is working on a completely different paradigm than the West, which adheres to the school of political realism, with practices of elements such as deterrence, confrontation, conflict of interests and so forth. The SCO is developing an entirely new approach to collective security, while respecting interests and the sovereignty of all members of the organization. It is likely that, through this format, it could even be able to help normalizing relations between Armenia and Azerbaijan.

Very important is the fact that the adhesion of India and Pakistan to the SCO makes of this a four-nuclear-power alliance. Uzbek President Islam Karimov added that this could change the balance of forces in the world. Not less relevant is the question of the future membership of the Islamic Republic of Iran. While Tehran is under UN sanctions, it is not possible. But, as said by the Russian Minister of Foreign Affairs Sergey Lavrov, Iran has made significant progress in talks between the six countries and we can expect that in the near future this problem will be solved─if only the West does not try to review the framework agreements reached earlier, as has happened on previous stages.

At the SCO summit a program of cooperation in the fight against terrorism and separatism in the years 2016-2018 was also approved (it is worth noticing that, by then, the direction of the Executive Committee of the SCO will be on the hands of Russia) and the development of the SCO Convention on Combating Extremism was started, as well as the establishment of the Center for Counteraction to Threats and Challenges to Security of the SCO member states on the basis of the Regional Antiterrorist Structure (RATS). The terrorist organization "Islamic State" was reputed as a serious threat and all SCO members reiterated their intention to combat it and other international extremists.

The development strategy of the SCO to 2025 was accepted and Ufa Declaration for SCO, adopted. The strategy says that the SCO will work "in favor of the construction of a polycentric democratic system of international relations," referring also to the foundation of an indivisible security space. Also important are the designated principles and values of states and peoples, wherein the historical features and identity of all Member States are taken into account.

In his speech dedicated to the results of the two summits, Russian President Vladimir Putin showed that work is ongoing "to create the SCO Development Bank and the SCO Development Fund (Special Account). The idea of having institutions on the basis of the SCO Interbank Association of the International Center of Project Financing is very promising." In addition, the Russian leader called for more active use of the SCO possibilities inherent to the BRICS.

But apart from the pair BRICS-SCO, there is a lot of regional projects that will naturally join both formats. So, the leaders of Russia and China declared that they are ready to work closely on the implementation of the two projects of integration─the Eurasian Economic Union and the Silk Road Economic Belt. Added to that, there are trilateral relationships, such as Russia-Mongolia-China. On the sidelines of the BRICS summit, the leaders of the three countries settled to intensify works on a variety of fronts─from the creation of infrastructure projects to cultural and information activities. As the chairman of the government of China Xi Jinping put, "it is necessary to form a community of mutual destiny and promote multipolarity."

The BRICS will also coordinate the defense of their position within the Group of Twenty (G20). Besides, this platform will be used for different projects within the BRICS and the G20 summit in November this year, to be held in Turkey, continuing to discuss the preparation of the bank and other tasks identified in the Ufa Declaration.

All this automatically means that any try of external manipulation, even under plausible pretexts (for example, USA is actively promoting the project of a New Silk Road), will be doomed to failure. And the world with the assistance of the BRICS and the SCO will be more secure and harmonious.