Ilya Chernyshov

A.Panarin on the Modern Globalization

Half a year ago an outstanding Russian philosopher, the head of the Politology department of the Institute of Philosophy of Russian Academy of Sciences, Alexander Sergeevich Panarin, died. He is not with us today, but his analysis of the events happening in the world nowadays is so actual that I think it useful to present some theses of his work “The Agents of Globalism” on the conference.

The politics and ideology of the modern globalization under command of the USA should be named neoracism. The problem at issue is the ambition of the influential western political and financial circles for world domination, as they consider themselves, with the western mentality, to be superior to all the others whom they treat with a barely concealed contempt. Contrary to their liberal rhetoric about the human rights and democracy, the globalists try actively to establish a one-pole world, the world of economic and political monopolism where the mankind is divided into the elect and the non-elect, into the race of masters and the race of the untouchable, into progressive civilized people and retarded barbarians and terrorists.

They try to convince us that the only true progressive way is the way of the western civilization, and that all the others civilizations and mentalities are originally imperfect, and all the endeavors to raise them to the western level are doomed to fail. They say, enlighten those ‘natives’ as you might, their heredity will anyway make itself felt and they will stay as clumsy as they are used to be. That is why the segregation of the world into “the adapted” and “the non-adapted” is quite natural. The strongest survive. Such are the grounds for the existence of the world race of the elect contraposed to the criminal mass of “halfmen”.

In fact, there is only one thing the western globalists care much for: to make all the world resources global, i.e. available for the peculiar people, the golden milliard. Their global ‘open society’ or global market means the prohibition to hide national resources from the global competition which aim is to pass the resources over from those clumsy non-adapted people into the hands of the more skilled. It goes without saying that the circle of those more skilled is restricted to the most reach, the winners in the today’s world economic competition (who are the winners in the cold war as well). The global resources for the narrow egoistic interests of the minority – this is the true credo of the modern globalization.

The American globalism is a totalitarian economical power, the power of financial oligarchy first of all. Its ideology is related to the notion of commodity as a universal, overall category. Firstly, it goes about imparting qualities of commodity to literally all phenomena of life and culture, which means the qualities of exchangeable, alienable value. Up till now the cultures have been dualistic: together with what is bought and sold at the market they contained unalienable stock of personal and collective values. In any sound culture love, inspiration, truth and beauty have been considered unpurchasable. The proved collective values such as native language, sacred land of ancestors, national territory and national interests, civic and soldier’s duty came as unpurchasable as well. But the international economical power, being today the power of dollar, feels blind jealousy to those unpurchasable unalienable values. So far as they exist it feels restricted and incomplete: some unpleasant surprises and tricks may be expected from the people one can’t buy. The economic power can’t be totalitarian, undivided and universal until everything in the world is a commodity with its price which is to be sold. So it is clear that the first step on building the one-pole world is discrediting in every possible way any values which resist the expansion of the exchange principle.

It goes about a new global culture revolution crushing national sacred things. The leading sociocultural character is an economical man, homo economicus, walking through the world with a new mission: he gives a corresponding money equivalent to everything not exchanged before, he removes the variety of forms of power and the variety of world centers in favor of one form and one center. The business claims for spiritual power in the society, and this is grounded by a reference to the faultless authority of market dividing the useful from the useless, the wanted from the unneeded. They force us to accept the market as the higher authority not only in the field of economics but also in all other fields without any exception. The commercialization of culture with spreading of primitive and primitivizing mass pop-culture is happening now. The economical power wishing to be totalitarian brings intentionally down the potential of the national resistance nipping in the bud the ability of forming the critical reflection or high moral pathos. In its essence the mass pop-culture is a tool enabling culture expansion and mental enslavement. The same thing is the idealization of the American lifestyle, presenting it as the only modern one, and the mocking at the national history and national values as if they were outdated.

The main thing hindering the global depredation is national states, sovereignties, and everything is done to undermine them. First of all it goes about taking under close control the national elite. Fish goes bad from the head. The present-day globalization is the process of internationalization of elites behind nations’ back, where a nation cannot count any more on its elite. The hidden aspect of the globalization is the consistent removal from any local interest, norm or tradition. No democracy is any more in question. The democracy means that the power is implemented by those who are elected by nation. The elected persons must act according to the will of nation and must be fully controlled by the nation. However, nowadays the further the more the true centers of power and decision-making do not follow the will of electorate but follow the coordinated strategies of the international economic and political trusts. The paradox of the democratic America which is on its global attack lies in the fact that it consistently denies the key notion of democracy, the political sovereignty of a nation. The thing is, if such sovereignty exists, the national interests can’t be sold or bought by definition. To make it happen, the commanding elite must privatize that sovereignty and get full freedom of action on the international political scene. The national interest has to become an article of trade, and the commanding elite – its owner.

If there happen to be political leaders who are not ready to consider the national interests exchangeable commodity, the gigantic machine of discredit against those leaders is set into motion, whereupon the harder military-political technologies can be applied more easily. In this context one can easily understand the unexampled pressure on such national leaders as Byelorussia President Lukashenko or Yugoslavian President Miloshevich. They appeared to break the universal “value law”, bringing the national interests out of the field of financial exchange.

The break-up of big national states into many small ones is actively stimulated. At that the newest ethnic elites have a chance to get into cohort of the world financial elite through selling the most important strategic commodity which is national territory and resources.

The great-power globalism of America is a highly dangerous world experiment. The question what America really brings to the world is one of the key questions of the present. It is worth remembering how America began. In Belgium in commemoration of genocide in Rwanda a report “Genocides” is published where the most scaled genocide in the last 500 years is said to have taken place in North America. The paper says that since 1492, the discovery of America by Christopher Columbus, 15 millions of people were destroyed.

One of the essential factors of the American civilization is the complex of superiority and messianic mission. “We Americans are the particular, chosen people the Israel of our time; we bear the ark of the liberties of the world. God has predestined, mankind expects, great things from our race... The rest of the nations must soon be in our rear,” young Herman Melville wrote.

The American nation is now tempted by the idea of electness. The code of one-pole world builder involves a blind faith in an absolute superiority of America over all other societies and in its right to ‘bring up’ the world. The way it is doing it one can see in Iraq.