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The Age of Globalization (1945-2001)

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THE AGE OF GLOBALIZATION (1945-2001)

Volume 8 of “AN ESSAY IN UNIVERSAL HISTORY”
From an Orthodox Christian Point of View

Vladimir Moss
© Copyright Vladimir Moss, 2018: All Rights Reserved

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The communists have been hurled at the Church like a crazy dog. Their Soviet emblem - the hammer and sickle - corresponds to their mission. With the hammer they beat people over the head, and with the sickle they mow down the churches. But then the Masons will remove the communists and take control of Russia…

St. Theodore (Rafanovsky) of Belorussia (+1975).

Capitalism has lifted the poor out of poverty. In 1918, 1.9 billion people lived in extreme poverty according to the World Bank’s statistics, or 52 per cent of the world’s population.
This has fallen to 767 million people, or 10.7 per cent of the population in 2013. This dramatic improvement coincides with China and India moving to market economies. Hence it is the capitalists who love the poor, not the socialists who condemn them to poverty.

Jacob Rees-Mogg, M.P.

In order to have a democracy in society there must be a dictatorship in power.

Anatoly Chubais.

The best way to shake people out of their inertia is to put them in debt. Then you give them the power to realize their dreams overnight, while ensuring that they’ll spend years paying for their dreams. This is the principle upon which the stability of the Western world rests.

A Serb.

Twenty years ago, we said farewell to the Red Empire with damnations and tears. Today, we

can take a look at the recent history with calm, as if it were a historic experience. It is important because the debate on socialism has not been settled. A new generation has grown up that has a different worldview; but many young people still read Marx and Lenin. Stalin museums are opening up in the Russian cities, Stalin monuments are being erected. The Red
Empire no longer exists, but the Red Man has been preserved. He lasts.

Svetlana Aleksiévitch, Nobel Prize Lecture.

The code of the Russian elite is: the privatisation of profit and the nationalisation of loss.

Anton Gromov.

Europe is currently being prepared to hand its territory over to a new mixed, Islamised
Europe… for the territory to be ready to be handed over, it is necessary to continue the de-
Christianisation of Europe.

Prime Minister of Hungary Victor Orban (2017).

The Christians are idolators, they commit acts of idolatry in the holy places... The commandment orders the idolaters to be persecuted and driven from the land of Israel.

Grand Rabbi of Israel, Eliahu Baqshi Doron.

Let no one deceive you by any means: that Day will not come unless the falling away comes first, and the man of sin is revealed, the son of perdition…

II Thessalonians 2.3.

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1. GLOBALIZATION AND THE EUROPEAN UNION 2. GLOBAL ECUMENISM
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3. RUSSIA IN THE 1990s: (1) THE GLOBALIST NIGHTMARE 4. RUSSIA IN THE 1990s: (2) THE SPIRITUAL CATASTROPHE 5. THE FALL OF YUGOSLAVIA: (1) THE BOSNIAN WAR 6. THE PROGRESS OF ROCOR’S MISSION (1) 7. THE NEO-PELAGIANISM OF JOHN ROMANIDES 8. THE PROGRESS OF ROCOR’S MISSION (2) 9. ORTHODOXY IN THE THIRD WORLD
29 50 71 80 88
102 124 129 139 150 164 180 187 193 205 218 242 244 256
89. THE PROGRESS OF ROCOR’S MISSION (3) 10. DIVISIONS IN THE GREEK CHURCH 11. THE SERGIANIST CONQUEST OF JERUSALEM 12. THE FALL OF YUGOSLAVIA: (2) THE KOSOVAN WAR 13. NATIONALISM AND THE MULTI-NATIONAL STATE 14. THE EVIL EMPIRE STRIKES BACK 15. THE MP’S “JUBILEE” COUNCIL 16. “THE SECOND OCTOBER REVOLUTION” 17. PUTIN’S REVOLUTION 18. REPENTING OF THE PAST 19. ALEXANDER DUGIN AND THE MEANING OF RUSSIAN HISTORY 20. ISRAEL, AMERICA AND RUSSIA

  • CONCLUSION. 9/11 AND THE APOCALYPSE
  • 272

273 276 281 284

1. The West 2. China 3. The Islamic World 4. Russia

APPENDIX 1. THE RUSSO-UKRAINIAN WAR APPENDIX 2. THE ABOLITION OF MAN APPENDIX 3. THREE PROPHECIES
293 309 333

  • 3
  • 4

Globalization is all about wealth. It knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.
Without borders the world will become – is becoming – a howling desert of traffic fumes, concrete and plastic, where nowhere is home and the only language is money.

Peter Hitchens.

What began in Russia will end in America.

Elder Ignaty of Harbin (+1958).

Communism must be worldwide, or it cannot be anywhere.

Heiko Khoo (2001).

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1. GLOBALIZATION AND THE EUROPEAN UNION

During the Cold War, there had been two very different worlds, Capitalism and
Communism, and a third world that swayed from one side to the other. By the end of millennium there was essentially only one world, the world of globalization. Even Russia and China became partially globalized: only North Korea and to some extent Iran remained outside the new global empire. While periods of globalization had existed before in human history – we think of the Roman empire, and of the world before 1914 – they had not truly included the whole world. Only now was there a single world – and therefore the real possibility of a single world ruler.

“I believe,” wrote Thomas L. Friedman, “that if you want to understand the post-
Cold War world you have to start by understanding that a new international system has succeeded it – globalization. This is ‘The One Big Thing’ people should focus on. Globalization is not the only thing influencing events in the world today, but to the extent that there is a North Star and a worldwide shaping force, it is this system. What is new is the system. What is old is power politics, chaos, clashing civilizations and liberalism. And what is the drama of the post-Cold War world is the interaction between this new system and these old passions.”1

But what is globalization?

Investopedia defines globalization as “the tendency of investment funds and businesses to move beyond domestic and national markets to other markets around the globe, thereby increasing the interconnection of the world. Globalization has had the effect of markedly increasing international trade and cultural exchange.”2 But it has eroded the power of national governments and increased those of multi-national corporations (150 MNCs now control two-thirds of the world economy). If national governments do not cooperate with the MNCs and the globalization process, they risk seeing factories and jobs removed to other, lower-wage-paying countries. This causes unemployment in some industries and therefore social unrest.

Moreover, while trade liberalization may provide comparative advantage, especially in a period when tariffs are initially high (as in the post-war period), it is quite another matter with financial liberalization. Dani Rodrik writes: “Perhaps the hyper-globalisers’ most egregious mistake after the 1990s was to promote financial globalization. They took the textbook argument and ran amok with it. Free flow of finance across the world would, it was confidently predicted, set money to work where it could do most good. With free-flowing capital, savings would be automatically channeled to countries with higher returns; with access to the world markets, economies and entrepreneurs would have access to more dependable finance; and, ordinary individual savers would benefit, too, as they’d no longer be compelled to put all their nest eggs in one national basket.

1 Friedman, The Lexus and the Olive Tree; in M.J. Cohen and John Major, History in Quotations, London:

Cassell, 2004, p. 944.

2 http://www.investopedia.com/terms/g/globalization.asp#ixzz4ZuLDrfAT.

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“These gains, by and large, simply never materialized; sometimes, the effect was the opposite of what was promised. China became an exporter of capital, rather than an importer of it, which is what the theory implied young and poor countries should be. Loosening the chains of finance produced a string of extremely costly financial crises, including that in East Asia in 1997. There is, at best, a weak correlation between opening up to foreign finance and economic growth. But there is a strong empirical association between financial globalization and financial crises over time, as there has been since the 19th century, when freely moving international capital would flow with gusto into the Argentinian railways or some far-flung corner of the British Empire one minute, only to flee away from it the next.

“Modern financial globalization went furthest in the Eurozone. Monetary unification aimed at complete financial integration, by removing all transaction costs associated with national borders. The introduction of the euro in 1999 did indeed drive down risk premiums in countries such as Greece, Spain, and Portugal, as borrowing costs converged. But what was the effect? To enable borrowers to run large current account deficits, and accumulate problematic amounts of external debt. Money flowed into those parts of the debtor economies that couldn’t be traded across borders – above all, construction – at the expense of tradable activities. Credit booms eventually turned into the inevitable busts, and sustained slumps in Greece, Spain, Portugal and Ireland followed amid the global credit crunch.

“Today, the economics profession’s views on financial globalization is ambivalent at best. It is well understood that market and government failures – asymmetric information, bank runs, excess volatility, inadequate regulation – are endemic to the financial markets. Globalisation often accentuates these failure. Indeed, in the 1997 East Asian crisis those economies that kept more control of foreign capital survived with less damage. In sum, unconditional openness to foreign finance is hardly ever a good idea…”3

Globalization is both a potential blessing and an actual curse… Samuel

Huntingdon made an important distinction between two different things that were becoming global: modernization and westernization.4 Globalization in the sense of the modernization of the whole world is not evil in itself. It could even work to the furtherance of the good - and not only economic good - in certain circumstances. If, for example, the True Faith could be preached globally, using global means of communication, as it was in the time of the apostles. What is evil is the globalization of westernization, the spreading of the apostate culture of the western world.5 And so if it is westernization that is being globalized - that is, the process leading to a single world civilization and a single world government under the banner of democracy and federalism in politics, free trade in economics, ecumenism in religion and human rights in morality, - there is no doubt about it: this is a great evil.

3 Rorik, “The Great Globalisation Lie”, Prospect, January, 2018, p. 33. 4 Huntingdon, The Clash of Civilizations, London: Touchstone, 1996. 5 Bandar bin Sultan: “We Saudis want to modernize, but not necessarily westernize” (New York

Times, July 10, 1994).

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It is easy to see that the world republic (or kingdom?) would have no place in it for Orthodoxy except as a kind of cultural museum, an exhibition of East European folklore, and could very quickly turn the propaganda of freedom into the reality of a tyranny worse than any that has gone before it. We have already seen such a transformation from democracy to potentially global totalitarianism in communist Russia and Nazi Germany in the first half of the twentieth century; and in the second half of the century the despotic power exerted by supra-national organizations such as the IMF, the World Bank, the United Nations, the European Union and the World Council of Churches was clearly mapping a more subtle path to the same goal…

The two most important political events in the western world in the 1990s were the continuing spread of globalization, and its terribly destructive effects on some major countries such as Russia, on the one hand, and the expansion of the European Union, on the other. We shall see that they are closely linked…

Opinions on globalization are sharply divided. Indeed, the debate between the globalists and anti-globalists is probably the sharpest debate in the contemporary world. Christians tend to believe that since the Tower of Babel, different languages and nations have been created by God to slow down the spread of evil, and as refuges against it; but for atheist globalists individual, sovereign nations are the evil.

Certain facts are indisputable, according to Yuval Noah Harari: “Since around 200
BC, most humans have lived in empires. It seems likely that in the future, too, most humans will live in one. But this time the empire will be truly global. The imperial vision of dominion over the entire world could be imminent.

“As the twenty-first century unfolds, nationalism is fast losing ground. More and more people believe that all of humankind is the legitimate source of political authority, rather than the members of a particular nationality, and that safeguarding human rights and protecting the interests of the entire human species should be the guiding light of politics. If so, having close to 200 independent states is a hindrance rather than a help. Since Swedes, Indonesians and Nigerians deserve the same human rights, wouldn’t it be simpler for a single global government to safeguard them?

“The appearance of essentially global problems, such as melting ice caps, nibbles away at whatever legitimacy remains to the independent nation states. No sovereign state will be able to overcome global warming on its own. The Chinese Mandate of Heaven was given by Heaven to solve the problems of mankind. The modern Mandate of Heaven will be given to humankind to solve the problems of heaven, such as the hole in the ozone layer and the accumulation of greenhouse gases. The colour of the global empire may well be green.

“As of 2014, the world is still politically fragmented, but states are fast losing their independence. Not one of them is really able to execute independent economic policies, to declare and wage wars as it pleases, or even to run its own internal affairs as it sees fit. States are increasingly open to the machinations of global markets, to

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the interference of global companies and NGOs, and to the supervision of global public opinion and the international judicial system. States are obliged to conform to global standards of financial behavior, environmental policy and justice. Immensely powerful currents of capital, labour and information turn and shape the world, with a growing disregard for the borders and opinions of states.

“The global empire being forged before our eyes is not governed by any particular state or ethnic group. Much like the Late Roman Empire, it is ruled by a multi-ethnic elite, and is held together by a common culture and common interests. Throughout the world, more and more entrepreneurs, engineers, experts, scholars, lawyers and managers are called to join the empire. They must ponder whether to answer the imperial call or to remain loyal to their state and people. More and more choose the empire…”6

This is certainly the trend. Whether it is truly irresistible – and irresistibly desirable, as Harari thinks, - is another matter…

*
Nowhere are the processes of globalization more clearly seen than in the “empire within the Empire”, Europe… After the events of 1989-91, both positive ones like the reunification of Germany and the Fall of the Soviet Union, but also negative ones like the outbreak of the Yugoslav wars, the European Economic Community felt that the time had come to go beyond their economic union – essentially the single market (or cartel) with its attendant regulatory institutions – and embark on the “everincreasing unity”, that is, political integration, that had been envisaged in the original Treaty of Rome in 1957.

This was, of course, America’s hour; but the Europeans were determined not to be placed in the shade by their mighty rival across the ocean. They thought they were superior to the Americans in some spheres – for example, in economic philosophy, where the destructiveness of the Anglo-Saxon model (i.e. the Chicago School’s shock therapy) was widely (and rightly) derided. In others, however, - for example, in democracy – they were (again rightly) felt to be inferior. A great prize was set before the two western superpowers: the primary participation in reshaping the vast territory stretching from Berlin to Vladivostok as it struggled to get out from under the rubble of communism and the nationalist wars that in some areas were only just beginning. The Europeans would need to reorganize themselves if they were to help reorganize and rebuild the former communist bloc and bring it into their own sphere of influence…

Let us briefly recap the stages whereby the European project reached this stage in its development, as outlined by Roger Bootle: “In 1957, the Treaty of Rome

established the EEC.

6 Harari, Sapiens. A Brief History of Humankind, London: Vintage, 2011, pp. 231-232.

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“In 1965, the Brussels Treaty streamlined European institutions, laid down the composition of the Council and set out which institutions would be located in the three Community centres – Brussels, Strasbourg and Luxembourg.

“In 1986, the Single European Act marked the watershed, since it extended qualified majority voting in council, making it harder for a single country to veto proposed legislation.”7

And this is precisely why it is at this time that we see the first determined effort by “eurosceptics” to reverse the surging tide crashing against the nation-state. Their leader was the British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, who in her famous Bruges speech of September, 1988 declared: “We have not successfully rolled back the frontiers of the state in Britain only to see them re-imposed at a European level, with a European super-state exercising a new dominance from Brussels.” As Norman Stone writes, “she said, about the tired metaphor of not taking the European train as it was leaving the station, that ‘people who get on a train like that deserve to be taken for a ride’.” 8

Moreover, she was inclined to believe the undiplomatic remark of her minister
Nicholas Ridley that the ERM, the proposed first step to European monetary union, was “a German racket designed to take over the whole of Europe”. Such a rebellion against the supra-nationalist ethos of the Europeans could not be tolerated, and Thatcher was duly ousted by her own party supported by the European leaders, whose hatred of her was proverbial.9…

The critical point came in 1992, with the signing of the Maastricht Treaty, more

precisely “The Treaty on the European Union”, by the member-states of the EEC (now EU) on February 7, 1992. As the Europeans themselves summarized it, this

Treaty “represents a new stage in European integration since it opens the way to political integration. It creates a European Union consisting of three pillars: the European Communities, Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP), and police and judicial cooperation in criminal matters (JHA). The Treaty introduces the concept of European citizenship, reinforces the powers of the European Parliament and launches economic and monetary union (EMU). Besides, the EEC becomes the European Community (EC)…

“The Maastricht Treaty represents a key stage in European construction. By establishing the European Union, by creating an economic and monetary union and by extending European integration to new areas, the Community has acquired a political dimension…”10

But it was precisely this political dimension, this openly declared drive to abolish the European nation-states and unite them into a single super-state, that caused the trouble. A referendum in Denmark refused to ratify the Treaty. However, alterations

7 Bootle, The Trouble with Europe, London: Nicholas Brealey Publishing, 2015, pp. 12-13.

8 Stone, The Atlantic and its Enemies, London: Penguin, 2010, p. 596.

9 President Mitterand said she had the mouth of Marilyn Monroe and the eyes of a Caligula.

10 http://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=URISERV:xy0026

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were made to the Treaty that enabled a second referendum to come to a more positive verdict. So the Treaty came into legal effect in Denmark after the royal assent was granted in June, 1993. A referendum in France in September, 1992 supported ratification of the Treaty - but only just (50.8% in favour). Although the United Kingdom did not hold a referendum on the Treaty, its passage through the House of Commons was very rough – in spite of the fact that the country had obtained several opt-outs from the Treaty, including acceptance of the euro. This was important because, in the opinion of experts such as the American Fed’s Greenspan, a common currency can be effectively managed only by a single political government. It showed that the British eurosceptics – correctly - saw the Treaty as a threat to British sovereignty.

In order to pacify so-called “nationalists” like the British, the Treaty contained a
“principle of subsidiarity”, which “specifies that in areas that are not within its exclusive powers the Community shall only take action where objectives can best be attained by action at Community rather than at national level.” However, to this day this principle has proved to be a dead letter: the movement towards ever-greater centralization of powers in the EU has continued unabated. And in view of the weakness of the democratic principle in the Union – the Treaty’s provisions to strengthen the power of the European parliament have proved as ineffective as the subsidiarity principle – fears were heightened that the European Union was gradually turning into a more sophisticated, less violent version of the Soviet Union than a democratic federation of states. For instead of the Soviet Politburo there was the unelected European Commission; instead of unfree Soviet republics – increasingly powerless European member-states; instead of the corrupt Soviet bureaucracy – the no less corrupt European bureaucracy. And the black cloud of atheism over both…

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  • UC Santa Cruz Electronic Theses and Dissertations

    UC Santa Cruz Electronic Theses and Dissertations

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    Essays on True Orthodox Christianity

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    I. F. Stone Encounters with Soviet Intelligence

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    7Th Grade I Am Yours, O Lord

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