Friday, October 29, 2010

Review of Marshall's "Crisis is an Opportunity"

“Crisis is an Opportunity”: Engineering a Global Depression to Create a Global Government By Andrew Gavin Marshall, Global Research, October 26, 2010

www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=21632

This article may be the easiest explanation of the debt crisis I've ever read. It's so well written and informative I almost missed the author's most important omission. But to be sure I did not, the author assures me in his closing paragraph, that the people of the world must: ".. work together to promote true progressive and humane change.."

Throughout the article Marshall provides quotes that show global financial leaders expressing their "concern" about the instability and chaos the state austerity programs already caused in the EU and around the world. He quotes economic thinkers who say they are worried what these drastic measures (higher taxes on the poor and middle class, cuts in public services, etc) will cause in North America. Almost to a man the experts foresee a time when Americans choose Marxist street chaos and protests as a way of redress. Prediction or prophecy, all the soothsayers agree, social unrest leading to riots and street protests is going to happen here next.

What I find interesting is that no matter how many writers tell us this breakdown of our sovereignty is inevitable, whether they are for the fall or against it, their arguments on both sides are based in Hegelian thinking. The writer's parting words are a call to "fight" for our freedoms (in the revolutionary tradition) , and his last line is an either-or, false dilemma. Go
read it right now. He sounds almost just like Bush saying, "you're either with us or against us," doesn't he?

The communitarian's economic and social solution to the financial dialectic is truly progressive and humane, and the use of these terms raise a giant flag with me, almost as much as the progressive UN term Human Rights.

And yes, I've heard more than once about my "obsession" with my "little pet peeve" (called communitarianism) and that it's egotistical of me to judge others based on my pet theory. Maybe that's all true. But isn't is strange that Marshall opens with a description of the banker's Hegelian dialectical method yet he never mentions Hegel or explains false dialectics at all? (He did quote List, as if List were an advocate of universal unions aka globalization?).

Marshall's purpose for warning us of the dangers to our financial freedom does not include how they are being curtailed by the established supra-national model for global governance.

I don't know Marshall and I'm fairly certain he could care less what I think of his work. Being anti communitarian doesn't make me many friends or associates, and probably loses more for me than any gains I might have, that's for sure. As much as I want to champion the writers at global research, I can't trust anyone who so openly asks me to embrace a Hegelian solution.

Maybe to Marshall and so many other great writers of our time, the word communitarian is just not important. The fact that it's a key word in rebuilding a true progressive, humane society may be part of their avoidance. Why bother to mention that the trade union/EU/WTO laws that successfully destroyed the European and global economy are called, in the EU court records, communitarian laws? Is it only a coincidence that violent street riots are considered to be the best avenue for effecting radical social changes? Or did Hegel really teach that violent conflict is the ultimate human evolutionary tool?

The engineering of a social system that has a name and a philosophy is never very important.

5 comments:

stanley said...

Maybe the "C" in communitarianism should be capitalized to make it a proper name. With a small c it sounds like a generic reference to community, and thus not threatening.

Anonymous said...

I always capitalize it. In fact I write it in all caps. And I write it every chance I get, commenting daily at my local newspaper's website.

Anonymous said...

Found this in the publication put out by nearby town listing classes locals can take in the COMMUNITY.
POWELL CITIZEN POLICE ACADEMY
Age 18 and over. This is an excellent opportunity for citizens in the community to better educate themselves on what police officers do and how the Powell Police Department serves the community. Graduates will be better educated on crime awareness and prevention, while at the same time, it will give the citizens an "inside look" at the Department. Topics will include crime prevention, CSO, criminal law, laws of arrest, use of force, and many more. This is an 11-week course, ... this program is FREE.

(I wonder if students will get dossiers by enrolling?)

Stanley said...

"citizen" and "community are very innocuous terms. Put them together in the same sentence and they appear harmless, though put together they also destroy the individuality of the individual citizen and make him part of the collective community- a Communitarian.

Niki Raapana said...

Sometimes I capitalize Communitarianism as if it were a proper noun and I was a German. I'm not sure there's any one thing I can do to the word to convey what it really means. Jerri Lynn Ball usually wrote it with a slash /communism. But that leaves out the essential ingredient that I know makes it more dangerous than communism, which is free market corporate capitalism.

It is almost clearer when one writes communitarianism/community, as most ALL communitarian programs and plans come under the COMMUNITY label, as in COMMUNITY POLICING, COMMUNITY DEVELOPMENT, COMMUNITY LAW, and COMMUNITY SPIRIT.

Citizen Police are communitarian spies and they are trained to give out tickets for violations of COMMUNITY LAWS. The whole idea of crime prevention is communitarian, the only way they can "prevent" crime is to "predict" who will be the criminals, and for a good idea of how that works in the west we need look no further than England, where the govt is already taking children away from parents because they have the "potential" for crime. In the global kibbutz system, the "community" raises the children.