A Preamble to the Raging Twenties w/ Pepe Escobar

On this edition of Parallax Views, the long-time, sometimes controversial, and always fascinating geopolitical commentator Pepe Escobar joins Parallax Views to discuss some of the events the lead up to his the current decade we face, which he calls "The Raging Twenties". Although this conversation was initially intended to cover Pepe's new book Raging Twenties: Great Power Politics Meets Techno-Feudalism, Pepe and I ultimately went in a different direction. Our conversation became less focused on the details of the book and more an overview of the events, geopolitically, that lead to our current moment where tensions are rising between the U.S. and it allies against China, Russia, and Iran. As Pepe put it in the course of our conversation, our conversation serves as a preamble to many of the topics discussed in his new book (which is basically Pepe's coverage of the year 2020 from the death of General Soleimani to the COVID-19 pandemic).

Among the many topics we discuss:

- The Russia/Ukraine situation
- The Nordstream II pipeline, Germany, and Russia,
- The Iraq War and neoconservatives
- Pepe's interest in the ideas of Felix Guattari and Gilles Deleuze; Deleuze's concept of the rhizome
- Zbigniew Brzezinski and The Grand Chessboard of Geopolitics
- The Quad, India and Modi
- Euranianism, Putin, and China
- COVID-19, Giorgio Agamben, and the surveillance society
- The decline of the American Empire; Pax Americana and the Mongolian Empire
- Why Pepe references and uses imagery from David Lynch's Twin Peaks in his work
- The Belt and Road Initiative; the New Silk Road
- The multipolar world and what it means; the failures of the War on Terror; the corrosion of the Empire