Has Globalisation been Co-opted by the Bad Guys?

Is World Peace and Harmony really on the Agenda?

As a dyed-in-the-wool alternative type who “dropped-out” age 21, and who has lived communally the majority of my adult life, I consider myself very pro globalisation. The idea that the whole world could live together in peace and harmony seems like a pretty cool ideal to me. I’m all for getting rid of borders. I think patriarchal autocracies have had their day. I think women and men should have equal rights. I support gay rights. I now live as a digital nomad. I’m super keen on Digital IDs, cryptocurrency, reducing bureaucracy and decentralisation. I’m down with it!

I think it was the philosopher, Karl Popper, who first seriously laid out the concept of a global community with his idea of The Open Society. Though Popper himself dialled back on it a little, towards the end of his days, it still sounds beautiful - people listening to and respecting each other’s right to autonomy and self-determination. A whole planet living in mutual respect. Unless you’re a total authoritarian or a patriarchal type… what’s not to like?

And, right up until we got hard into the Covid thing, in 2020, I was still basically down with it. I got vaccinated because I thought it was the right thing to do for society. (I’d already had Covid and it wasn’t so bad for me). I obeyed the rules, even though I was skeptical. It was clear to me that a lot of propaganda was being used to get people vaccinated but I thought, well, maybe that’s justified. I was still down with the whole globalisation agenda, as I perceived it.

Then, when the vaccine passports and vaccine mandates started appearing, in 2021, I began to question things. There didn’t seem to be much scientific justification for these strategies. It seemed to me that they were just being used as a way of leading into Digital ID - the idea that your identity, medical records, tax records, online identity and potentially banking details could be integrated into one QR code, backed with biometrics.

I was down with Digital ID. But I didn’t understand why the agenda needed to be pursued with such subterfuge. Surely, you could put the idea out to people and over time they would see the value of it. This was more how I envisioned things proceeding.

Then we had the Canadian truckers episode, where Trudeau’s government began to block access to banking for some of those involved. At the same time, the Canadian Bankers Association began telling people how Digital ID was coming!

Underneath it all, I just didn’t understand why these pro-globalisation policies needed to be pursued with such aggression. Couldn’t they simply be allowed to manifest more slowly, and with less censorship or propaganda?

When Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, I started to get very concerned. I felt like I had no clue what was really going on in the world any longer. I’d lived for a while in Kyiv in 2021, so I had a feel for the people and knew some of the history. No one I knew really expected Putin to invade. He was always bringing troops to the border, and complaining about NATO potentially invading his space. But it seemed like he was pursuing a slow, threatening approach over time. Not getting ready for actual invasion.

In the West, the media (MSM) went into anti-Russian overdrive. But I was skeptical. I instinctively felt that something else was really going on, beneath the surface. I felt like I needed to understand the “drivers” behind recent world events, Covid strategies included. And that I was not going to get this information from mainstream Western sources.

Having been into the whole “conspiracy” scene, two decades earlier, I also believed that the overwhelming majority of that was just manipulation and fantasy. Thousands of YouTube videos made with confirmation bias and heaps of people with huge, unresolved issues with authority.

So I started to look for better information. I wanted especially to understand what it was that was driving Putin to behave the way he was. I also wanted to understand the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) better too. In the media, these people were portrayed as simply the “bad guys,” like something out of a James Bond movie. But what I wanted was to understand was how guys like Putin and Xi saw the world. How did they frame what was happening? What were their concerns? What vision of world events was driving their behaviour?

For China, after some research, I decided that listening to Rush Doshi’s The Long Game was the thing to do. Rush was active in the US National Security Council and his book was widely acknowledged as mandatory reading for anyone interested in modern Chinese affairs.

For Russia, I chose Aleksandr Dugin’s The Great Awakening and The Great Reset. Dugin was known to be Putin’s friend and philosophical guide, and had been an advisor to the Kremlin.

What I discovered was that the perceptions of the world that the CCP and the Kremlin had were remarkably similar! Both were very concerned about one thing… US global hegemony via globalisation.

Both feared that their cultures and political structures were under threat from invasion by an advancing, Neoliberalist agenda from the West. They believed that this was being pushed by the Western media, Big Tech, the US Democrat party (and especially the Neoconservatives who migrated there post-Bush), the World Economic Forum (WEF) and to a lesser degree, the EU.

This interpretation of world events had driven the Chinese CCP to embark on a decades long, behind-the-scenes strategy to create and control the world’s largest supply chain. By doing this, they ensured that their hands were on the reins of Industrial Capitalism, higher up than those of the US. They can now, if they want, start to call the shots.

Whilst Russia is a far less industrialised country, nevertheless, the same vision of what was happening in the world drove Putin and the Kremlin to articulate the concept of a Eurasia Movement. The idea is that Russia would take back former USSR territories, that it believed the West had sneakily lured into independence, and thus strengthen itself to oppose the Atlanticists - those agencies mentioned above that pursue globalisation.

In addition, both the Kremlin and the CCP, in their public broadcasts, spoke frequently and at length about Multipolarity - the idea that different nation states or superpowers should retain their own sovereignty and not try to invade others, neither physically nor culturally.

Aleksandr Dugin also proposed that the rise to power of Donald Trump was a manifestation of a desire for multipolarity amongst many Americans, in the face of the perceived excesses of the globalist movement - minority rights, gender rights and cancel culture.

For me, all of this came as an Ah-hah moment. Now I felt that I understood what was really going on. I could breathe out. It was Unipolarity vs Multipolarity. This was the real driver behind recent world events.

Let’s take a closer look at this polarity thing, because I now find it by the far the best way of understanding the big stuff that is going on in the world. And certainly a great deal better than anything I’ve seen being pushed by the media, East or West. In the fields of Geopolitics, International Relations and similar, there are four basic polarity situations that we might find described:

• Non-polarity, or decentralisation. A global situation where there is no hegemon - no individual state or region which has dominance.

• Unipolarity. A global situation with one clear hegemon, one dominant power. In the post-Soviet world thus far, the US has been the clear hegemon.

• Bipolarity. A global situation where there are two, relatively equally balanced hegemons. The world after the Yalta conference at the end of World War 2 was such a place. The US and USSR both developed sufficient nuclear weapons to maintain a standoff.

• Multipolarity. A global situation where three or more relatively equally balanced hegemons exist.

In considering especially bipolarity or multipolarity, it is important to note that these global situations cannot be achieved by either philosophising or diplomacy alone. It doesn’t really matter whether two or more states agree on multipolarity. It will only actually be multipolar when they each have sufficient military and economic might to create a no-win situation in a potential conflict.

Armed, so to speak, with this polarity thing as an idea, we might now consider the two situations through which globalisation might occur - non-polarity or unipolarity.

We started with Karl Popper and his Open Society, which incidentally has been the philosophy espoused by global financier, George Soros, throughout his career. He was a student of Popper’s back in the day. An “open society” of the type thought up by Popper is clearly a non-polarised structure. No one has dominance. Most alternative or new-age types, when they consider globalisation, hopefully envision something like this. It is not a dictatorship of one hegemon, however benign.

But when we use the term “globalisation” these days, mostly what we’re actually referring to is a unipolar structure where the West is the hegemon. What we’re generally imagining is an extension of Western neoliberalism - a fully-deregulated free market democracy, spread worldwide. This is important, because it is this that the Russians and Chinese, along with many others, are concerned about.

I suspect that the real opposition to unipolar globalism, coming from the Russian and Chinese administrations, is that it threatens their existing patriarchal autocracies. They are concerned that their own citizens might get down with this type of globalism and push back against them. This is why they are fighting back and moving towards developing the economic and military might to assert multipolarity.

However, taking in the perspectives of a great many other countries, autocratic or otherwise, it is clear that a lot of them are concerned about the further advancement of US, or Western, hegemony.

Taking all the above into account, let’s now have a look at how the various political and cultural camps line up:

Non-polarised Globalism

• The majority of Big Tech that is not engaged in social media

• Crypto, decentralisation, web3

• New-age, alternative

Unipolar Globalism

• MSM

• Big Tech Social Media

• US Democrats, esp Neocon elements

• WEF and TBI (Tony Blair Institute for Global Change)

Multipolarity

• The Chinese CCP

• The Russian Kremlin

• Increasing-allied countries, such Muslim states and North Korea

• The followers of Donald Trump in the USA

Hopefully, it is now getting clearer as to why so much drama and conflict is now being stirred up in the world. Although globalisation seems like a great idea, for many of us in the West, outside the West it is generally perceived as unipolar globalisation. Thus, there is inevitably a lot of push-back. It is seen as just more colonialism.

This widely-held perception outside the West is not unreasonable, I think. When we consider the level of propaganda, censorship, manipulation and narrative warfare currently being indulged in by MSM, the WEF and elements of the US Democratic Party, it certainly does seem like they are engaged in a battle for dominance. As opposed simply trying to make the world a better place for all.

As these unipolar globalists push harder, so they experience more resistance. The Chinese, the Russians and the followers of Trump double down on their positions in response. We find ourselves more and more entrenched.

For me, the way out of this increasing global tension, is to allow a more genuinely democratic form of non-polarised globalisation to slowly manifest over a far longer time-scale. Instead of trying to forge a truly global society, one that everyone can feel a part of, regardless of race or gender, it’s so far been a lot about doing it the Western way.

As soon as we had the technological possibility of creating a global society, so those elements seeking the advancement of US hegemony - MSM, Big Tech Social Media and the Neocons - set about trying to drive things in that direction. It is simply that which is creating the issues.

This being my current understanding, I now feel it is important to push back against those Western agencies who are pursuing unipolar globalisation so strongly. I believe they are only doing it for their own ends. Genuine globalisation will take a long time and we need to ensure that it is not just Western cultural imperialism. But rather a genuine global society.

I do hope you have found this piece useful and please feel free to comment below.

Thank you for reading.