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 1 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. 2 1. GLOBALIZATION AND THE EUROPEAN UNION 6 2. GLOBAL ECUMENISM 24 3. RUSSIA IN THE 1990s: (1) THE GLOBALIST NIGHTMARE 29 4. RUSSIA IN THE 1990s: (2) THE SPIRITUAL CATASTROPHE 50 5. THE FALL OF YUGOSLAVIA: (1) THE BOSNIAN WAR 71 6. THE PROGRESS OF ROCOR’S MISSION (1) 80 7. THE NEO-PELAGIANISM OF JOHN ROMANIDES 88 8. THE PROGRESS OF ROCOR’S MISSION (2) 102 9. ORTHODOXY IN THE THIRD WORLD 124 89. THE PROGRESS OF ROCOR’S MISSION (3) 129 10. DIVISIONS IN THE GREEK CHURCH 139 11. THE SERGIANIST CONQUEST OF JERUSALEM 150 12. THE FALL OF YUGOSLAVIA: (2) THE KOSOVAN WAR 164 13. NATIONALISM AND THE MULTI-NATIONAL STATE 180 14. THE EVIL EMPIRE STRIKES BACK 187 15. THE MP’S “JUBILEE” COUNCIL 193 16. “THE SECOND OCTOBER REVOLUTION” 205 17. PUTIN’S REVOLUTION 218 18. REPENTING OF THE PAST 242 19. ALEXANDER DUGIN AND THE MEANING OF RUSSIAN HISTORY 244 20. ISRAEL, AMERICA AND RUSSIA 256 CONCLUSION. 9/11 AND THE APOCALYPSE 272 1. The West 273 2. China 276 3. The Islamic World 281 4. Russia 284 APPENDIX 1. THE RUSSO-UKRAINIAN WAR 293 APPENDIX 2. THE ABOLITION OF MAN 309 APPENDIX 3. THREE PROPHECIES 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). 5 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. 6 “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.