Sunday, January 22, 2017

Global Trends: What the Left and Legacy Media are not seeing in the arc of the Socialist Ideal

2017 marked not just a change of the political party governing the good 'ole USA, but also a vote of major importance for the western world on the other side of the Atlantic. I haven't commented much about Brexit, but if one looks at the bigger picture of the decline of Globalism and Socialism across the world stage, we can see the shift in its larger implications for the future of our planet Geo-politically, and yes, even environmentally. So, let's start with the United Kingdom's vote to fully divest themselves of the European Union.

England opted into the European Common Market system in the early 1970's to much ballyhoo, and the British people were promised all of the typical tropes nations bandy about when cajoling others into creative investment schemes. It was to be the beginning of a great period of growth, shared interest, mutual protection, and oodles and oodles of cash. Well, it didn't quite go that way in the big picture, and were it not for some brief periods of Conservatives attempting to stimulate the market micro-cosmically, the brakes were off and the globalists seemed to be at the wheel, steering England headlong into full membership in the European Union. But, there were, problems.

Here are just a few. 

Every year exports out of Great Britain to non-E.U. nations literally double, while they decrease by half to E.U. states. In the meantime the European Commission regulates British industries so they don't out-compete the less productive nations within the Union. In fact, the E.U. trades with very few nations outside of Europe.

The European Union is at its heart an inward looking system that is designed to limit trade and commerce, not stimulate it. Add to it that many of the weaker European nations (i.e. Greece and Spain) require financial aid from dominant members (i.e. German, France and England) to stay solvent. This all makes sense to those who are engaged in a romance with wealth re-distribution, but clearly this is recipe for financial disaster. It doesn't take a psychic to see that first world European nations will be dragged down bailing out the second, and arguably third world members of their alliance.

Tiny Iceland was the first to get out, much to the globalist controlled media's silence. The island's half-a-million or so citizens knew that their humble economy could gain nothing from giving charity to states like Greece, and opted out. Since then they have moved a step further into sovereignty, and are now in the process of implementing direct vote democracy. That's right, full representative rule by the people - one vote per person, via their computer. It's a paradigm that's not immediately foreseeable for implementation in larger populations, but, bravo Iceland.

England on the other hand needs a representative government, and a fine one they already have. And here lies yet another problem. In essence, the un-elected faceless bureaucrats in Brussels can pass into law policies that the government and people of England are not supportive of. The people are told that this is all for the best, because these un-elected faceless foreign bureaucrats just know better than them. They have degrees from important business and legal schools, didn't you know?

Well, for many, and spear-headed by Nigel Farage, this didn't add up, and a movement grew to get out of dodge. Of course the left love this paradigm, since it moves us all closer to their utopian ideal of a one-world-government, which by the way, I envision as one of the most terrifying possibilities ever conceived by man, barring it being guided into practice by the arrival of the Vulcan's, the Messiah, or some other coupled fantasy. So, no, it's a recipe for totalitarian control and oligarchic abuse. In response to the rejection of their preferred system, liberals who support the globalist notion have resorted to the usual tired emotional tropes to defend their ideals, claiming that those who voted for Brexit are "old people" who are "racist", etc., etc., and just like the SJW emotional breakdowns caused by the media's manipulation of leftists voters in the recent US election, they envision Farage and his followers as some kind of Hitlerian pretenders. Similarly to the US, leftists in England have called for a re-vote, a nullification of the referendum, etc., etc. They are sad, very, very sad. 

Inevitably, the United Kingdom will find its way out of the European Union. I suspect that France will follow, leaving Germany holding the ball. What happens after that I can't fully envision, but I imagine the burden of holding all of the other European states up by itself will be too much for the taxpayers of Deutschland, and they'll eventually opt out as well. So, bye, bye E.U.

Some may have noted that Brexit and Trump's election share some major commonalities, such as returning the power to citizens, and bolstering national sovereignty, particularly in regard to economic aspects, but what most don't connect is the increasing shift away from Marxist ideology in the east. We must remember that when the European Common Market was conceived, Russia was still the Soviet Union, a full repressive Communist entity, with "equality" enforced at the barrel of a gun. Russia may still be a corrupt oligarchy, powered by its military-industrial complex in league with corrupt mafia-like business principles, but it is fully Capitalist now.

India can now boast a middle class that now numbers about the same as the entire population of the United States. India's flirtation with Marxism is on the ropes, with some last minute re-shuffling of their fiat currency, but I suspect that this middle class will continue to grow, and slowly shrink the massive population of poor beneath them. Just a tad further east is China, whose burgeoning middle class is even larger than India's and growing even faster. They still define themselves as Communist, but I have always believed that Maoism has always contained a strong undercurrent of Confucianism, so, in essence they are really just "being Chinese". Unlike Russia, China has always maintained a strong Capitalist element, even at their most "Communist". I even envision that this Capitalist middle class in China will soon tire of having their children grow up in environmentally toxic zones, and will come to pressure the government to ameliorate the pollution produced by the machinery of Chinese industry. Thus, the free market will reverse the size of our global toxic imprint on the earth. It will not be fixed by Socialists passing endless condemnations at the U.N. which everyone ignores.  

So, what is the overall pattern here? I think it's really clear, but let's look at it step by step. After the Black Plague, the upward mobility created by the millions of deaths allowed for the creation of a huge middle class in Western Europe. In tandem with the further industrialization of these states, this in turn led to the economic exploitation of the Third World starting in the late sixteenth century. In response to this exploitation Marxism, Socialism and Communism evolved. As the Capitalist nations subtlety incorporated some these notions into their systems, the more open forms became more aggressive. In its most benign forms we can look to the emergence of labor unions in the US, and the evolution of the Kibbutz system in pre-statehood Israel. The polar opposites were the Russian revolution, followed by the rise of Communism in China, Korea, Cuba and Vietnam. As it turns out, Marx was absolutely wrong that Socialism would only take root in post-industrial western nations, and instead it flourished in largely agrarian lands, as long as their was not a competing philosophy, such as Islam, which took precedence over these secular notions, if not initially, eventually.

In the west the division seemed overt, with the Cold War pitting Capitalism and Communism as ultimate incompatible opposites. But Socialism was more dogged than that, and its proponents knew that education was the key, and slowly infiltrated the school systems of the west, and then the moderate left political parties, biding their time until they could put their measures in place to a chorus of agreement from a yielding public.

This process began in the 1970's, as the Hippies and activists entered the mainstream and, quite nobly, designed to instill in the powers that be their philosophic leanings. As universities, public schools, and increasingly, politicians on the left center continued to lean further left, this completely coincided with the birth or of the Common Market in Europe. As the torpor of the left's entitlement heritage destroyed inner cities and factory towns, the Conservatives took power in both the US and Britain (Reagan and Thatcher), and attempted to reverse the debacle. This led to an upswing in the global economy in the 1980's, much bemoaned by leftists as interfering with their entitlement state. The Anarcho-Punks in England called for the end of the Thatcher, the government and the class structure, but unsurprisingly, not for the dole.

On the other hand, the economies of the Communist states, for all their re-distribution of wealth, were flat-out tanking. In 1989 the Berlin Wall came down and shortly after, the Soviet Union fell apart, re-envisioning itself as the Russian Federation shortly after. Meanwhile, as the Communists incorporated more and more Capitalism, the western nations leaned left again with Labor in power in England, and the Clinton (Bill) White House deregulating stock market safeguards as fast they could.

Through the Obama years, the middle class, and the ultra-rich arose in Russia, China and India, and the other Communist states, and excluding North Korea and Cuba, they all embraced trade more and more. With the emergence of Trump and Brexit, the left became more desperate, and in light of their policies being clearly rejected not only by the voting populace, but also by nations that once championed full Communism, they promoted candidates leaning to the far left. Watching a Sanders-Clinton debate was like watching a contest of who could promise the most entitlements.

If you study this pattern objectively, you could almost ignore the right-wing reactions and see a clear rise and fall of the Socialist idea from its conception in the mid-nineteenth century, to a watershed in the early twentieth century, to peak in the late 1970's, and an overall decline since. Barring the flailing attempts of the left in response to Brexit and Trump, one could actually view their dismay as the emotional death throes of the larger movement.

As the European Union dissolves and the Republicans are realized to not be the dinosaurs liberals predicted they would be, the future may hold the ultimate demise of the Socialist-Globalist ideal. By this I do not mean that there will not be those who hold onto the theory, doggedly, or that social programs that were inspired by the left will not be incorporated by the moderates and right-wing. They certainly will, and that may be the catch. If the more moderate aspects of the left's agenda can be incorporated seamlessly into policy, with the more fringe elements disregarded, and the paths to globalism submerged (until the Vulcans do indeed land) then we will be very lucky.

In the end, it's all just theory, but in an ideal world, people on both sides will function in their best interest, and by extension, the best interest of the entire world. 
   

No comments:

Post a Comment