Perilous crossing

In his book America and the World Revolution (Oxford University Press 1962), a transcript of conferences given at the University of Pennsylvania in the spring of 1961, Arnold Toynbee wrote:

“If we wish to avoid massive suicide, we have to have our world State as quickly as possible, and this probably means we will need to install it in a non-democratic form to begin with.”

This was not a prophecy, it was a proposal. Or rather, it was a reaffirmation of a proposal that had already been under development in the upper echelons of the Anglo-American establishment at least since 1928, when Herbert George Wells published the first popular version of the plan, under the highly suggestive title The Open Conspiracy. Some historians trace the project back to the end of the 19 th century and list its presence as one of the causes of World War I, but we need not go back that far. The best studies on the life and work of Wells (W. Warren Wagar, H. G. Wells and the World State, Yale University press, 1961; Michael Foot, H. G.: The History of Mr. Wells, Washington, DC, Counterpoint, 1995) leave no doubts as to the role played by the author of The War of the Worlds in the transformation of a general idea into a viable political project. Like Wells, Toynbee was not only an intellectual but also an activist, an intimate collaborator of the British government and globalist circles. His monumental work, A Study of History(1939-1961), provides a unified vision of world historical development indispensable for preparing the ground for the advent of world government.

The most recent state of implementation of the plan drawn up by these visionaries can be appreciated from the following paragraphs published in the Taipei Times of February 2006, to which no Brazilian political commentator paid much attention, even though their author was no less than Richard Haass, president of the CFR (Council on Foreign Relations), the most powerful think tank in the United States and practically an antechamber of the US presidency:

“In the age of globalization, states should give up some sovereignty to world bodies in order to protect their own interests.

Some governments are prepared to give up elements of sovereignty to address the threat of global climate change. Under one such arrangement, the Kyoto Protocol, which runs through 2012, signatories agree to cap specific emissions. What is needed now is a successor arrangement in which a larger number of governments, including the US, China, and India, accept emissions limits or adopt common standards because they recognize that they would be worse off if no country did.

Globalization thus implies that sovereignty is not only becoming weaker in reality, but that it needs to become weaker…. Sovereignty is no longer a sanctuary.”

Observations:

1. The success of appealing to examples of commerce and “global climate change” shows that the world State plan can, on the one hand, be legitimized as a unified response to problems of an international scale and, on the other hand, in itself supports an alarmist trend regarding nonexistent problems in order to legitimize itself by false and fraudulent means. In 2006 the slogan “global warming” still might have looked like a friendly warning. Two years later, not only do thousands of scientists openly contest this dogma, but even school children are capable of debunking the legend foisted on the world by the billionaire campaign in which ex-vice President Al Gore serves as the poster boy (see Al Gore’s global warming debunked – by kids!).

2. The procedures used to impose global list reforms bypass normal democratic channels via decisions made in secret sci-tech and administrative commissions whose activity can hardly be understood by the public (see Golpe de estado no mundo). The speed of the changes makes it impossible for the ordinary citizen to make sense of the events. “Public opinion,” which, generally speaking, is now little more than a set of vague impressions with little connection to reality, then becomes a mere tool for instituting changes that it will never be able to understand or influence. Toynbee’s program emerges, quite plainly implemented: the world State does not suppress democracy, it engulfs it. Democracy continues to exist, but as an organ in a larger body that embraces and controls it without its being in the least aware of this.

3. If other facts that I have cited in my articles have not abundantly proven it, the case of the Kyoto accord will suffice to show an obvious fact that many Brazilian nationalists refuse to understand, namely, that the control centers of globalist power are not found in the American government, nor do the interests of the global State identify in the least with those of good old “Yankee imperialism.” From California to New England, from Florida to Oregon, no one is unaware that submitting to the extension of the Kyoto accord implies destruction of the American economic base, reducing the United States to the status of a second-class power. Nor is it lost on the general public that other globalist projects proposed by the CFR, such as the Treaty of the Law of the Sea, or the dissolution of the borders with Mexico or Canada, would complete this destruction and close the chapter of the American nation in history. Curiously, the most lucid left-wing intellectual in the world, Antonio Negri, has explained and repeated a thousand times that the “Empire” and “United States” are not one and the same thing, that the global empire that is taking shape is supranational not only in its objectives but also in its only internal constitution (not that Negri was the first to discover anything. With minor differences, the essence of his concept of the Empire, published in 2000 by the Harvard University Press under the title Empire, was already all in my book O Jardim das Aflições [The Garden of Afflictions], of 1996). But the fact that not even the word of a renowned leftist suffices to unravel the confusion of globalism and Americanism shows in itself that much of Brazilian nationalism is only a form of morbid atavism rather than intelligent patriotism. The everyday discourse of politics reflects this. Indeed, while the only empire that exists in the world is the one referred to by Negri, in Brazil, the term “empire” is used as a synonym with “United States,” taking its cue from Fidel Castro’s communist rhetoric (see “Nuestro espiritu de sarificio y el chantaje del Imperio,” of April 25). Thus, the great true Empire, with the Latin American left as one of its chief instruments, is spared public hostility, which is turned specifically against the one nation that, ironically – but not coincidentally – is precisely the one offering the greatest obstacles to Imperial designs.

4. The globalist scheme fostered by the CFR is not the only one out there. There is a Sino-Russian globalism consolidated under the Shanghai Pact, which operates essentially by two routes: the financing of terrorism and the control of entire nations by means of the most formidable corruption machine that has ever existed in the world. And then there is an Islamic globalism, which expands by immigration, which is used as a weapon of cultural warfare, in a highly efficient strategy of occupation from within. The relationships between these three schemes of control are extremely intricate and subtle. The Shanghai Pact, for example, is ostensibly a reaction of the left to “imperialist globalism,” but in reality, does not oppose it in any way, opposing only the United States, and thereby helping globalism undermine American resistance (the faulty Brazilian language pattern mentioned above is a local example of this phenomenon). The Islamic and Sino-Russian schemes can be seen, to some extent, as competing with each other, but here as well, a web of caveats and ambiguities renders any schematic simplification prohibitive.

5. No country can “confront” oppressive globalism, but each one has the obligation to integrate itself into it as beneficially as possible for its own people, without in any way compromising its vital interests. However, this calls for a highly trained intellectual elite capable of navigating the twists and turns of the most advanced and complex historic change of all time. In Brazil, this elite does not exist at all, and the assumption that our institutions of “higher” learning can provide it is so ridiculous it does not merit discussion. The courses that have not been reduced to the level of training centers for militants are dominated by the most rudimentary of economic pragmatism, or by academic formalism that can only reason in terms of institutions and doctrines without ever getting down to basic issues. As far as I know, the only Brazilian concerned about training this elite is yours truly, but as you know, I can only work on a very small scale in proportion to my resources, or rather, to the lack thereof. Brazil seems doomed to go through this perilous time without understanding where it is headed or who is leading it.

Translated from the Portuguese by Donald Hank