I find it truly amazing, the conceited, hypocritical babblings of nationalists and “anti-globalists”. They seem to have lost the ability to reason, lost the ability to see the world from anything other than a distorted perspective. We can see them in many European countries, France, Germany and Greece to name a few, and then there is the USA. What these mentally deficient people don’t realise is that globalism didn’t start in the year 2000, 2010 or 2018, but in fact a long time before that with colonialism giving birth to global capitalism and the systems of interconnectedness of trade and communications that once were stacked so heavily in favour of colonisers that they were far enough removed from the ill effects of their dominance over other countries, they just reaped the rewards in an endless and rather one way stream ox exploitation.
In this system people are capital, people are tradable and indeed people sell their skills for the best price they can to assure a future for themselves and their families. It has been this way for a long time. America has vibrant communities of Hispanic and Irish settlers, England has many black settlers from the West Indies that migrated to England after WW2, and many other countries have established communities of migrant workers.
What seems to be happening now, is that with freedom of movement, the intake of new communities into many countries is accelerated. For some people this is alarming, for some people it is an opportunity on both sides of the equation, and it can be relished and celebrated, IF people treat each other with respect.
However, what these fascist “anti-globalists” don’t realise, and I really wish I could kick them right up the arse and make them understand, is, they are cherry picking what they are “anti-globalist” about. They are blind to the hundreds if not thousands of years of globalisation that has left large chunks or other countries infrastructure and business in the hands of their very own countrymen, destabilising the nations in their grip – and causing the very influx of migrants they want to stop, as people in countries under the yoke of globalism want to escape to live; they need to escape political and religious persecution, civil unrest, conflict, economic distress, hunger and disease.
The privileges that we enjoy, from reasonably priced food (lots of stuff we can’t grow in our countries, or can’t grow enough of), to fuels, the raw materials that go into components for electronics, right the way through to gemstones and precious metals. Globalism secures them for us, all too often at the expense of the countries that we exploit to get them. But it seems now, that because the effects of what we do in our exploitation of other countries is all to visible, we not hate it and claim to be victims of the very system we control. Indeed, has globalism come home to roost!
Pulling in a scripture that captures this perfectly “The righteous care about justice for the poor, but the wicked have no such concern.” (Proverbs 29:7 NIV) Knowing God means caring for other people, and even if you are not religious surely caring for other people is an integral part of what makes us human, and all citizens of a planet that we have to care for and manage for the benefit of us all.