Saturday, March 08, 2014

Pope Francis on globalisation

In a recent interview Pope Francis made the following criticism of globalisation:
The globalization that the Church thinks of does not look like a sphere in which every point is equidistant from the center and in which, therefore, the particularity of peoples is lost. It is, rather, a polyhedron, with its different facets, in which each nation keeps its own culture, language, religion, identity. The present “spherical” economic globalization, especially the financial, produces one thought, a weak thought. And the human person is no longer at its center but only money.

That's a welcome defence of the importance of particular relationships. The challenge for the Church is to follow through with this principle, by supporting the right of nations to apply border controls in order to maintain their own distinct existence.

5 comments:

  1. Agreed on the desirability of sane immigration controls; but why the seeming deification of the nation-state? Surely every virtue of the nation-state also exists with the city-state?

    After all, the greatest moral leader among postwar politicians anywhere in the world was and is a city-state leader. I refer of course to Lee Kuan Yew of Singapore, whose preferred method of dealing with welfare parasites was to starve them; whose preferred method of dealing with vandals was to cane them; and whose preferred method of dealing with communists was to hang them.

    I see no problem in Western societies' current midst which cannot be at the very least curbed, and probably solved, by applying LKY's policies. There really is no need to reinvent the wheel.

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    1. Neil, it's not the state, whether the nation or city state, that concerns me, but the nation as a people or ethny. Ideally, each nation would have its own state, but that doesn't always happen. Nor do I think the solution is authoritarianism. The problem or crisis in the West goes deeper than the existence of communists or vandals. The template of society held on both the left and right is hostile to the traditional family and nation. The first steps we need to take are political and intellectual ones, so that we are able to lead people out of the existing templates and into a more viable one.

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    2. What Mark Richardson said. The attack is explicitly racial and global, and then anti-ethnic and anti-national, and resistance and the positive assertion of better values has to encompass the same high levels.

      Regional, local, uncoordinated resistance doesn't do the job; it's easily over-ridden by higher authorities, and morally at a disadvantage if it doesn't fight the perception that "everyone" is on board with liberal values except these backward "bitter clingers" in some area.

      What does this mean, "purely local resistance is easily over-ridden by higher authorities"? The UN is one, the EU is another, and below them, "national" governments.

      In Germany, for example, your children will be given a mandatory education in accepting "alternative" sexualities, and you cannot "opt out" by home-schooling, because the children belong to the state, and they can even be taken from you to prevent you from fleeing the country with them. It doesn't make any sense to talk about local or city-based resistance to that; it's a federal matter, and so is the mass media that's the strong arm of liberal cultural power.

      The Pope is a prime example of a higher power that invalidates local resistance. If you say, we must prevent immigration to keep our Christian culture, and the Pope is on the opposite side of the argument, you are at a big disadvantage, and if you are Catholic you have lost before you begin.

      Racial separation (for whites) is generally barred by national and international law, as well as being made taboo by academia and the mass media, both highly global institutions. In the face of non-white mass immigration into all white countries and only white countries, whites can't survive collectively on an ongoing basis without separation (nor can any white cultures survive) so your options are to aim for global influence regardless of the odds, or accept genocide.

      Mass immigration is the supreme example of a problem for which there is no local solution. If you want to want to keep your national or regional culture (for example, Queensland's culture, which is not quite the same as New South Wales' culture) there are no other options than turning off the mass immigration tap. If you could keep your neighborhood the same - and you definitely would not be allowed to - you would still lose what it means to be an Australian and a Queenslander or a New South Welshman (or woman).

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    3. Titus, you are right in this. There needs to be separatism of sorts for long-term survival, but this isn't possible unless there is a major political challenge to liberal orthodoxy. There has to be a change of politics and that means, first, establishing a political template that is not simply a reassertion of either right or left liberalism. I'm optimistic that this will increasingly happen over the next few years, but for the time being opposition is still being expressed through a reassertion of right liberalism (free markets, individual freedom etc). At the very least, one day we need to have some sort of bargaining weight within the institutions (e.g. senators with a balance of power) and a greater presence within the media.

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  2. Excessive domination of international finance capital over the fully rounded human person in a world rendered socially "spherical" rather than "polygonal" is a real issue, a real problem. But it is far from being the biggest, most relevant problem, even from a strictly religious and destructively "race-blind" point of view.

    I saw a YouTube clip of a monastery being used as a first-aid station by the Ukrainian revolutionaries. Fools! Their monasteries will become mosques and madrassas!

    Off-topic, but I think the disaster in Ukraine shows how useless it is to challenge the prevailing powers with no positive, reasonable vision of a better society to put in place of the old one if you win. The "winners" are putting their country (or as much of it as the get to keep after it partly breaks up) into the nation-dissolving acid bath of the EU. What will be left of their future generations, their faith and their culture when they have physically ceased to exist and been replaced by non-whites with incompatible cultures? And if the answer is some variant of "who cares, since we all bleed red?" or "why worry about tomorrow?" then why struggle in the first place? "For power today" is not a good enough answer.

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