Fighting the Behemoth 

Or 

The Alternatives to a Tired Mantra of Democracy 

By Joh Domingo 

This list has long been a clearinghouse for innovative strategy to fight
the neo-liberal behemoth and its creeping interventionist global spread.
We have many names for it, and each of us express it differently in
accordance with individual background and ideological bent: ZOG, NWO,
the Illuminati, Globalization, One-World Government … etc. I prefer to
call it simply neo-liberalism. Neo-Liberalism has many guises, in the
form of the secular liberalism of Europe, the Conservative liberalism
(AKA Libertarianism) of the United States, to the neo-fascist secular
movements of the Middle East and Israel. It includes offshoots like ‘new
Labour’ of Britain with its Thatcherite policies and Clinton’s
interventionist ideologies that mirrored those of Ronald Reagan. It
continues to swallow up entire territories in Eastern Europe and most
European Parliaments are today ruled by neo-liberals. It has long been a
dominant global ideology, subscribed to by the ruling global elite. Even
the official opposition in many places is neo-liberal. If you are not
neo-liberal, in most countries you are marginal – even if you are the
majority. 

This neo-liberal design to integrate World governance extends to all
facets of societies and incorporates a regimented hierarchical framework
that is implemented consistently wherever it finds a foothold. It does
not require the mass conversion of the population, nor does it seek
consensus about its implementation. It simply invades the space and
installs its structure. In doing so it concentrates its energies on core
constituencies depending on the framework under which it is working. 

On a transnational scale, in the economic sphere, it embeds itself
within multinational corporations - ensuring the capital mobility vital to
the international business elite. At the political level it institutes a
global regulatory framework through the World Trade Organization,
International Monetary Fund, The World Bank and the United Nations that
is designed to overcome national resistance to unfavorable trade
circumstances. Culturally, it concentrates on transforming national
populations into consumer citizens, with rights dependent on ones
ability to partake in the market. It equalizes the rights of an
individual consumer citizen in a First World country and a Third World
one, provided they have an equal capacity to feed the market. 

Within the national framework, on an economic level, it concentrates on
facilitating competition between local economic sectors – each competing
to win favorable trade terms against the other. On a political level it
strives to limit national political entities to the global periphery
while simultaneously promoting individuals within the local political
sphere to its core global elite network, thereby promoting internal
competition between local political players to aspire towards membership
of the core global elite. To regulate this sector, a quasi requirement
of national citizenship is imposed, which is discarded once membership
to the global elite is achieved. 

It is within Nation-States that localized grassroots movements pose the
most difficult challenge to globalization and neo-liberalism. Within
this sphere originates the most vocal and organized structures opposing
capital hegemony. Most of these resistance groups are associated with
Non-Governmental Organizations (NGO’s). In order to influence these
groups, neo-liberal discourse assumes a ‘liberal’ facade; seeking to
exploit differences in race, class and religion, co-opt ‘progressive’
causes and marginalize groups that fall between the cracks of a
political discourse that is accurately described as ‘political
correctness’. 

Increasingly, efforts are underway to establish a global hegemonic
resistance to global capitalism, often dominated by first world consumer
citizens of countries that contribute the bulk of the membership of the
global elite. This essay questions the requirement for a hegemonic
global resistance, bound by rigid ideological constraints, that excludes
major components of the grass roots resistance to global neo-liberal
colonialism. 

Neo-liberal global hegemony is ascendant and proving able to innovate
and bypass any attempt at curtailing its implementation, yet we delude
ourselves that the alternative is to impose a global hegemony of our
own, and organize under the rubric of a ‘progressive’ dialectic.
Substance in resistance terms is the ability to thwart neo-liberal
goals. Since neo-liberalism utilizes strategies that circumvent
traditional restraints, promoting traditionalism constructs roadblocks
in the path of implementing neo-liberal structures and policy. Yet, many
traditionalist movements have all but been banished from the global
hegemonic construct of resistance to neo-liberalism. They are not
represented at forums that organize against global neo-Liberalism, nor
does it seem that they are welcome there. 

Part of the reason for this is a perceived requirement for a victim
class, beyond challenge, in the discourse. Almost by definition, the
victim class should be non-white, supine, and helpless in the face of
aggression. Preferably, they should be indigenous, non-adherents of a
troublesome religion, or better yet, pagans. Even within the secular
humanist framework that most western NGO’s operate within, pagans
deserve salvation. 

But this has also been a double-edged strategy that positions the victim
class as victims of progress, rather than victims of global hegemony. It
lacks clarity and fails to create a sense of solidarity within
communities that essentially face similar, but not the same, threat.
Nobody in their right mind opposes ‘progress’, even if it’s processes
along the way unfortunately creates a few victims. It is the surrender
of the attribute ‘progress’ that more or less defines the failure of the
anti-neo-liberal resistance. 

Led by staunchly western liberal activists and abetted by a core of
indigenous western educated leaders, the anti-globalization movement is
firmly entrenched in secular humanist dialectics with its contradictory
discourse that defines the struggle within liberal humanitarian
essentialism, with its emphasis upon legalistic, state-centered
democratic procedure. Such processes bind them to western secular
humanistic standards – best described as a neo-civilizing mission. To
qualify for solidarity and global assistance, victims are judged by
whether or not they pose a threat to secular standards or the ‘cause’ as
defined by secular humanitarian ideologues, and whether such assistance
enables the victim to ‘progress’ within a carefully constructed ladder
of civilized standards. Victims are then classified using a yardstick
that is weighted, and takes into account the standard of ‘civilization’
achieved to date. Using such standards, it is possible to mark down
victims because of a perceived failure to conform to societal norms that
are thus subjectively configured. Disaffected White American rural
farmers and radical religious Muslims, Hindus, Christians and Jews
therefore find themselves beyond the framework imposed for assistance
from the global anti-colonial movement. There are quite a few problems
with such an approach. 

Chief amongst them is a failure to recognize the economic resistance
that underpins many such marginal movements. Of concern to the
anti-globalization movement is a perceived reactionary element in
marginal religious, nationalist and cultural movements. Because social
activists are themselves seeking a ‘New World Order’, based on a social
democratic ideals, they often associate traditionalism as inimical with
those goals. This is especially true when traditional societies have a
substantial, well-developed, and diverse heritage that can legitimately
be described as ‘civilizations’. Tribal indigenous traditions pose no
such threat to the imposition of the humanitarian liberalism that
permeates western anti-colonial activism.

One such movement, bearing all the perceived hallmarks of a reactionary
movement, is the American mid-western militia movement. Because Militias
are attached to their firearms, and because a minute element has been
involved in violence, it is used as evidence of a goal that is separate
from any economic context – in the case of the Militias, it is assumed
that they project a white supremacist ideology. But a consciousness
about an unfortunate social condition that afflicts most societies
today, is a far cry from a declaration of superior genetic
characteristics. On Noel Ignatiev's left-leaning website
www.racetraitor.org, are many references to the militia in the mid-west.
An article published on the site by James Murray entitled ‘Chiapas and
Montana’ (http://www.racetraitor.org/chiapas.html), provides excellent
correlation between the spontaneous Zapatistas in Mexico, which had
become the darling of leftist western movements, and the militia
movement, despised by the left. In another article it declares: 

“From its first issue, Race Traitor has insisted that only the vision of
a new world can compete with the fascists for the loyalty of those angry
whites who think that nothing less than a total change is worth fighting
for. Abolitionists must draw a line between themselves and the 'loyal
opposition'. If they fail to do so, they will not be heard.” 

http://www.racetraitor.org/auxarmes.html 

It is estimated that almost 15% of the US population are members of a
militia. It is a large movement, and like any large movement is far from
homogenous. Most eschew any notions of Racism, and many have a
significant Jewish constituency and prohibit anti-Semitic rhetoric. The
vast majority is multiracial. Yet the focus is on a few that express
White supremacist ideology in order to delegitimize the whole. The
movement has a number of legitimate political economic concerns that
revolve around the right of local sovereignty, imposition of taxes, and
economic policy that favors multinationals at the expense of the local
economy. 

Because they are perceived to be relatively well off compared to most
victims of Global economic hegemony, they are dismissed by the
neo-colonial resistance because of these perceived peripheral issues
mentioned, that are at odds with a multicultural global
anti-neo-colonial movement. When Christian/Patriots demand their culture
and moral order back, they are saying precisely the same thing that
people everywhere are saying: their world has been invaded by voracious
multinational corporate capital. They are saying that theirs is an
economic struggle against the same forces that is at war with humanity.
By failing to recognize the economic dimension to religious national
movements, anti-neo-liberals de facto deny its utilization, and allow a
false picture to be presented about some serious economic resistance
activity. 

By monopolizing economic motive, it is then easy to separate religious
movements (e.g. Muslim radicals) from its declared goal: to prevent the
economic exploitation of their resources and the necessary domination of
their societies this entails. Their means are therefore substituted for
their goals. The unifying strategy of emphasizing traditional solidarity
in order to resist neo-colonial exploitation is misrepresented as the
goal. Echoing neo-liberalism, that posits that radical Muslims seek to
convert your children and colonize your societies, anti-globalism forces
shun Muslim radicals for much the same reasons. 

It is repeated with other religious groups, Hindu traditionalist, and
Jewish religious nationalist. Rather than work on strategies that co-opt
these movements, the global anti-colonial forces work to curtail their
activities and marginalize them. At the root of such a knee-jerk
response, is a fear that such movements embody elements of fascism, and
employ sensational violence. Ignoring that organized violence is one of
the primary diplomatic means of communication, such an outlook requires
a set of assumptions: that traditionalism makes fine distinctions about
what belongs to traditional societies and what is foreign. It assumes
that they are static, unable to identify beneficial progression, and are
rooted in space and time. 

Such assumptions derive from a worldview that presumes that pre-modern
societies were mono-cultural and exclusive, whereas the evidence is that
they were more multi-cultural and fluid than is commonly imagined. Many
societies that are considered to be particularly mono-cultural today
have proved to be highly heterogeneous upon closer examination. Ashis
Nady makes the startling observation that inter-communal violence in
India between Hindus and Muslims is a manifestation of modern secular
culture rather than a traditional communal norm. He states that less than
4% of the victims of inter-communal violence were from rural areas and
that the vast bulk of them occurred in urban areas. What he is saying is
that Indian traditionalism is extremely heterogeneous and is expressed
in terms of authentic indigenous multiplicity. It is when secular
leaders sought political power that they rejected multiplicity, and
inter-communal violence was activated. He argues that it was precisely
this move towards modernity that generated the need for a schism. He
provides evidence that Hindus worshiped Muslim Spiritual leaders and
that Muslims visited Hindu temples and celebrated the religious
holidays. He also points out that 5% of India’s Muslims were official
members of the BJP, the party that is accused of fermenting
inter-religious violence, and that the BJP never had a cabinet that did
not include Muslims, as well as Christians and Jews.
http://www.frontlineonnet.com/fl1911/19110710.htm 

Shiva Vandana http://www.vshiva.net/, relates many episodes that
reinforce the heterogeneous nature of Indian religious nationalism.
Echoing Mahatma Gandhi’s observation that religion contributed to
pre-modern Indian social cohesion because of the religious requirement
for pilgrimage to geographically widespread cultural/religious sites
that required long periods of travel (and an opportunity to meet a
diverse range of people), Vandana relates the story of the litigants in
the decades-old battle for the Ayodhya Mosque site. They travel to court
in the same car. Why? Because it saves petrol.
http://www.trabal.org/texts/panic.html 

Democratic political structure requires division – rulers and
opposition. Traditional societies are arranged to reduce conflict and
produce consensus. When ‘parties’ are formed to resemble a democratic
structure, ethnic and religious cultures are often the only visible
means of differentiation. Imposing democracies on heterogeneous
traditional societies invites schism, which is then represented as a
failure of traditional societies - when it is the opposite that is the
case.

It is quite possible that sectarianism in Lebanon is a product of
democracy when juxtaposed against the non-sectarian nature of Syrian
politics. If we consider that Lebanon was traditionally a part of Syria,
which has produced a stable minority government. It is telling that the
more democratic modern nation is beset by sectarian divisions, while
the supposedly traditional one is characterized by national unity,
despite a widely diverse population that consists of sizeable Christian,
Shi’ite, Druze, and Sunni Muslim communities ruled by an Allawite
minority. What is important in the traditional Syrian context, is that
the ruling elite demonstrate that they have the security and interests
of the entire community in mind when they make decisions. The focus is
on unity in the national interest, while the focus in democratic
societies is to produce strong opposition as a means of safeguarding the
national interests. The former is traditionally and systematically
implemented at the local level, while the latter requires a top-down
imposition that is intrinsically unstable. 

Similar examples can be found elsewhere. The former Yugoslavia,
consisting of Bosnia, Croatia, Serbia and Albania managed to maintain
social stability while under the supposed authoritarian rule of Serbs.
This was at odds with western secular democratic standards, despite
evidence that the various ethnic communities managed quite friendly
relations and co-existed peacefully for decades. With the demand for
democratic reform came a struggle for dominance, and formerly peaceful
neighbors began slaughtering each other. It is doubtful whether any of
it benefited anyone, but sectarianism was blamed. The arrival of
democracy has not produced a single day of peaceful co-existence, yet
traditionalism, which produced decades of peace, is blamed. 

It is time that alternatives to a tired mantra are examined. Democracy,
as championed by its protagonist, represents an alien construct to many
of the world’s people. Imposed from the top, it stimulates
inter-communal violence and undermines unity. Far from producing a
rational consensus, it assumes an imperious force that divides, and
produces that which it seeks to prevent. It has become a tool of empire.
Far more fruitful, would be an endeavor to mine the democratic impulses
of traditional societies. If the push of Globalism is to undermine and
dismantle local sovereignty, then anti-globalism must endeavor to
support it, and grow its consensus from within. There is nothing more
democratic than the exercise of local sovereignty, for the good of local
people. Anti-traditionalism undermines local sovereignty, and breaks the
cohesion of heterogeneous local communities.

JohD