What is globalization? Globalization is the diverse interconnecting of economies and cultures on a global scale. It is a video chat room where you can converse with a lawyer from Israel, a Chilean student and a Russian secretary within the same hour or minute. Globalization is the working-together of peoples of different nationalities to sustain and expand the global economy. It is French cargo ships passing through the Panama Canal bearing goods to be sold in the EU Free-Trade Zone. It is American corn sold at more convenient prices for a Mexican clientele. It is India opening herself up for international businesses to compete with Indian home-grown chains for the patronage of the Indian consumer. Globalization is the international community uniting to provide for law, order and humanitarian aid in the Country of Haiti after the 2010 earthquake disaster. It is the deployment of charitable aid organizations to fight hunger, poverty and disease in African nations stricken by war. It is the deployment of the Mexican Army during Hurricane Katrina to help the people of New Orleans in their hour of need. It is the uniting of Europe, the Arab Nations and the West to oust Muammar Qaddafi and to protect a helpless Libyan population. Globalization is the imported coltan necessary for the functioning of the TV screens and laptops people around the world receive their news on. It is the IMF and World Bank helping Third World countries not only get back on their feet, but participate in the international community.
The world we live in is more interconnected than ever before. However, while we are more interconnected than we have ever been in human history, we are also more divided. Given our capacity to interact, communicate and trade with each other there should also be an accompanying degree of unity. And while globalization is all of the above things, it, also, is not.
Globalization is the people of the world deceived into believing that true political struggle is over century-old lines in the ground. Globalization is the European and American arms companies that finance both sides of every conflict. Globalization is the ousting of democratically elected leaders for the sake of international elites that know no borders or peoples. Globalization is the democracy that exists between the television screen and a choice between millionaires. Globalization is the herding of all of the peoples of the world into a gas chamber where they are commanded to consume or die. Globalization is the value of your life determined by your ability to consume. Globalization is the death of space exploration and the birth of the “Private Military Contractor.” Globalization is the god that threatens the end of times unless it is given human sacrifice.
Unless it is given Mexican campesino farmers whose livelihoods were destroyed by cheap, American, NAFTA free-trade corn.
Unless it is given child soldiers that carry rifles reading “Colt” and “Heckler and Koch” on their barrels.
Unless it is given Chinese laborers, trying to fill the black hole of American hedonistic consumerism, whose employers have to put up nets to catch suicide jumpers.
Globalization is the Greek people being treated like children for refusing to make themselves even more beholden to international bankers who are the greatest purveyors of disorder and indebtedness the world has ever known. Globalization is the wars Americans fight to benefit companies that have not only the right to sell arms but the right to buy Senators. Globalization is the accumulation of fortunes beyond reason, in sums that were once astrological numbers but have become economical numbers. Globalization is the Libyan struggle for democracy reduced to Western arms companies losing the Iraqi market and needing more growth. Globalization is the argument, not of whether we should destroy the natural world, but at what rate. Globalization is the Syrian Civil War reduced to a trade war between Western arms manufacturers and their Russian counterparts. Globalization is the system that calls for continual growth on a planet with limited resources. Globalization is the sociopathy that knows this and continues anyway. Globalization is the destruction not only of our history, but our dignity and freedom, one bought-and-paid-for “democratic” politician at a time.
We are coming to a point of no return where we, as a species, must choose between Beijing smog on a global level by 2030 or something better. The Nations of the Earth stand for only varying degrees of the rape of this planet. The peoples of the Nations are further deceived into believing that the true fight, if there is one to be had, is amongst the Nations, when the means by which they are controlled know no borders. The international banking system, the international military-industrial system and the international commercial system all work together like the fighters of a hand while the peoples of the earth, on an opposing hand, are deceived into believing it is a fight amongst the fingers, the Nations. The Nations have made themselves irrelevant. They serve as proxies for a global order that enriches itself, through the political machinery of the Nations, at the expense of the people.
The international class of people that rule this world has come to the conclusion that there are no Americans, no French, no Egyptians -- there are only prospective victims. If they have come to the conclusion that there is no such thing as nationality then why shouldn’t we? Are we not struggling to make the world a better place on a field of play that is but a microcosm of the true field of play?
Our educational systems are aimed at making us into consumers and those that sustain and expand the consumption. Our history is taught to us not with urgency but with nostalgia, as though it is something we don’t have to care about anymore now that liberal democracy has triumphed. Liberal democracy does not exist. We live in an oligarchy, controlled by international elites we have no means of combating within the context of the Nation. Here, in America, and all over the world, our schools are making us dumber and our jobs are making us poorer.
In economic crises money does not disappear; in politics there are no coincidences.
Those that manage the international military industrial system, the international financial system, the international commercial system – they are not subject to a common law with the peoples they disinherit, rob and make subjugate to other peoples far away. Americans are dependent upon foreign production. Chinese are dependent upon the American market for their goods. American electronics companies are dependent upon African coltan. Africans are dependent upon Western aid and arms. The West is dependent upon Middle Eastern oil. Middle Eastern oil companies (and monarchies) are dependent on Western consumption of oil. Who are the intermediaries between peoples of distant lands in globalization? Who are the middle men that profiteer from this process? The international elite. Who are those whose position is never one of dependence on foreign lands? The arms companies, the central banks and manipulators of the financial system, the commercial juggernauts. But how is it that they are never in a position of dependence? They make others dependent on them. This dependence is not natural, it is fostered. Were it natural then the current capitalistic order would not need to bombard the people who participate in it with advertisements. They would not have to try to give capitalism a “green” side. They would not even have to address the topic at all were this dependence natural and not the end result of a global, cynical, nihilistic, coercive process that displays not only virulent disregard for the rest of humanity but for themselves and their own posterity. In all truth, there is more of a common law between the peoples that they victimize than there is between those of the Nation they originally hail from and themselves.
In a multi-polar world where there is no de facto victim on a frontier far from civilization, such as Africa or the Third World, they have to create victims. Whether by shocks to the financial system or wars or moving in after a natural disaster they intentionally engender conflict, misery and poverty. However, even people in their own countries are victimized, robbed and controlled to the maximum degree possible without inciting unrest… but even they were surprised when Western governments, in broad daylight, gave them hundreds of billions of dollars in bailout money, scared as we were of the economic apocalypse they swore would come if we didn’t. It is not that it is just a matter of time before these internationals turn on the Western Nations many of the come from; it has already begun.
What is the driving force of the hedonistic consumerism that is cannibalizing the West, and, indeed, the entire world? It is the control this class has over our minds and bodies. What is destroying morals, families and individuals the world over? It is not homosexuals. The figure of the European Jew was the harbinger of the international bourgeois world we live in today and the nationalistic bourgeoisie of many European countries did not take kindly to that. Gays, too, are harbingers of things to come. Homosexuality is not the result of some liberal conspiracy to destroy families (we can blame advertising agencies for that) for its increasing prevalence in the modern world is a genetic, evolutionary response to our species getting closer to our planet’s carrying capacity. Homosexuals have been victimized the same way Jews were victimized during the Holocaust as a scapegoat for the real issue. It is consumerism.
We are deceived into believing that material possession is the key to happiness despite endless statistics that prove the contrary. There are spaces within people that should be filled with ideas and feelings which are instead filled with meaningless things. Love of these meaningless things and not love of justice, family, truth, beauty, honesty and other meaningful words is what is destroying our people. In this pursuit of meaningless material possessions (houses, electronics, food, etc., all of which are constantly advertised to us in every space money can buy) we go into debt to the system which presents these items as escapes from the very misery it creates. Deprived of our history we are incapable of recognizing that humanity has not always needed every building the eye can see being controlled by a bank; every person and Nation sunk in an ocean of debt where the only way out seems to be to swim deeper.
It is impossible to separate democracy (at least the modern, liberal-democratic form of it) from this system. At every turn these internationals seek to foist parliamentary or democratic forms of representation on the peoples they encounter and to make governmental power-structures as top-heavy as possible so that there are fewer politicians to bribe (or whose “campaigns to finance,” whichever euphemism one prefers.) We must distance ourselves from the short-term, quarterly report mindset that cannot provide for long-term concerns such as the destruction of our biosphere by a system that mandates constant growth.
Do you think that the great minds of the Enlightenment, whom those who adhere to the liberal-democratic tradition revere so greatly, would endorse this state of world affairs? Do you think Thomas Jefferson would endorse a society where everyone is beholden to their nearest bank and subtly coerced into consuming things they don’t want or need? Would the Philosophes buy stock in Exxon and participate in elections that are little more than political theatre? Would Sir Isaac Newton endorse the destruction, not only of our species, but of all of the flora and fauna that sustain it? Would they endorse this “order” which has taste of disorder, indebtedness, perfidy, murder and injustice on a global scale? I shudder at the thought of the shame with which they would behold humanity in its present state.
The true issues facing humanity today are the ecological crisis, population control, the financial crisis, the creation of new apartheids to divide and distract us and the control of the human and the natural genomes. The only issue our political process presents that has any substance today is the plight of homosexuals as our acceptance or rejection of them is indicative of our acceptance of the future of humanity (not to say that everyone will be homosexual but that, on a crowding planet, everyone cannot reproduce) or the rejection of it in the name of nationalistic attitudes that only empower those that seek to divide us in an age where the internet makes those divisions more artificial than ever before.
There is a saying in European history that when France sneezes, Europe catches a cold. During the Arab Spring Tunisia sneezed, then Egypt caught a cold, then the United States got sick and then Europe came down with it too. The largest Occupy protest was, in fact, in Rome. Tunisian protests against a governmental infrastructure controlled by internationals were continued in Egypt, New York, Rome and all over the world. The international elite is well aware that we have the capacity of acting with disdain for borders in the same manner they do, or else there wouldn’t be international treaties in the works to deprive us of freedom of the internet, signed off on by the very international corporations that opposed the laws on a national level to maintain their popular standing.
I, as an American, empathize with other Americans not necessarily because I share the same views about our history as them, but because we experienced those events together. In an effort to weaken us, to deprive us of a means of responding to their international hegemony, we have been systematically stripped of our history. Greeks are deprived of knowledge of an ancient history that produced some of the greatest political and philosophical minds the world has ever known, whose governments were qualified not by the economic growth they could create, but the justice they could uphold. Muslims are deprived of knowledge of a proud history of Caliphates that, while having their own internal power struggles, still recognized the humanity and oneness of their own people, in contrast to the monarchies and corrupt republics that stand where they once stood, that answer to and abet internationals that recognize only the oneness of humanity’s prospective victimhood. French are deprived of knowledge of the revolutionary tradition from which the Nations of today stem, as the French Revolution is taught by academia (in the last thirty years) according to universal moral standards as opposed to the understanding, subjective, revolutionary position it was traditionally taught from -- for that knowledge, that this order was created, is the key to understanding that it can also be destroyed.
The international elite, however, in depriving us of our history did something they did not mean to do. They created a shared history amongst us. I can sympathize with French, Egyptian, Greek, South American, Chinese – all of the peoples of the world that have been victimized and regimented by them share with me a history of no history. They have made a nation of us. They, in deceiving us into thinking that the fight is amongst the fingers, the Nations, unknowingly hinted at the truth of the entire hand. So, I ask again, what is Globalization? Globalization is the truth of the entire hand. But what is the clenching of that hand into a fist?
What is Globalization to us, the people who are victimized, regimented and robbed by it? Nothing. But what does Globalization have the capacity to become? Everything. There is the capacity to create a nation unlike any the world has ever seen, to fight not only for the soul of humanity but of all of the flora and fauna that sustain it, to safeguard the sustainable development of our species, to once more explore the space frontier and to provide for the education and health of our children who are the only guarantors of human progress and greatness. In stifling out the long-term progress of mankind for the sake of their short-term interests the powers at be have expressed the contempt for humanity due not to an enemy (for even our enemies deserve human dignity) but an animal. All too often when considering the ecological crisis people disregard it and remark “We’ll adapt when the time comes.”
The time is now to decide what Globalization will become and whether or not we are due the moral treatment of human beings or animals.
Or we can continue to eat the fruits they feed us to keep us in our place.
Your arguments seem to be more against the percieved status quo in general than globalisation (which at its heart is completely neutral; the term is used to mean anything from global free trade to establishment of a global dictatorship). They don't really work against free trade - the Chinese, for example, have seen their wealth increase dramatically since they started trading. The Mexican farmers were the victims of US subsidies rather than free trade but even if that wasn't the case would you rather have the people of Mexico paying more money for their food? And I don't think that those child soldiers freely bought weapons to go fight - I get the feeling that they might have been forced into it by a crazed warlord or something.
And you don't really make it clear why economic growth is a bad thing, or why globalization is the theme of the thread rather than fractional reserve banking and environmentalism.
(Original post by Nick100)
And you don't really make it clear why economic growth is a bad thing, or why globalization is the theme of the thread rather than fractional reserve banking and environmentalism.
Economic growth isn't a bad thing, holistically, but when it is taken as an indicator of the holistic well-being of all nations, in a time where we are on the verge of destroying out biosphere, it is a bad thing. I am not necessarily against all international corporations. I think those that maintain the new means of communication and interaction we now have access to, namely the internet, are not at fault. Nor is every company that participates in globalization. Globalization, however, is the means by which fractional reserve banking goes from afflicting people in a respective nation to afflicting people all over the world, at once. The lack of concern for environmentalism is actualized in globalization. Globalization provides means of interaction and communication that, in earlier times, would have been necessary for constituting a nation.
I think that this newfound capacity for interaction (which is only improving as time goes on) is the basis for a new form of global governance. Global governance already exists in a bastardized, disingenuous, secretive form. Who could have foreseen, a hundred years ago, that the EU would even exist? The EU, however, is a form of global governance that is not properly representative of the peoples it governs as it does not address the true concerns of humanity.
The reason why national politics are so distasteful for Americans is because what is presented to them as their nation can only be rationalized by Republicans that, in order to get on stage, must demonstrate immense wealth and a lack of historical knowledge. For the factors that go into the creation of nations are beginning to point towards overt global governance (which already exists in a subvert form) they wish to keep us as fragmented and easy to manage as possible, prevented from creating governments that provide for justice and the sustainable development of our species for the sake of their short-term interests.