They say it takes a village to raise a child. What can be said of our so called Global village now. I don't know about you but I do not see a village. I see bad neighbors, manipulative relatives, family feuds and neglectful parents. Constantly we here of here of how Globalization has brought us together and the world is a better place because of it. But is this really true?
Currently what I see is a village that has a hierarchical way of being run. Instead of a village consisting of relative equals helping to sustain each other we have chiefs who make most of the village farm and work for them. They have a monopoly on resources and means of production. As far as disputes go, things are not communally decided, rather the Council of chiefs presides over cases of interests and rules according to what is beneficial to them. If one chief doesn't like a certain settlement he votes it down and basically destroys it. Villagers borrow from the chiefs who give out resources in exchange for labor, loyalty and land.
Our village is structured in a strange manner. The council of chiefs and the richest villages occupy the middle of settlement earth and the poorer villages form the periphery which is most in danger of the elements, and their ability to defend themselves lacks. Often the villagers in the periphery fight amongst each other. A hungry man is an angry man right? They would also like to be at the core of the settlement and join their richer brothers and sisters. These fights amongst the villagers in the periphery are often ignored by the core, unless they threaten interests of the core, then it becomes a crisis. Unfortunately it may take a large death toll for these "scuffles" to get some attention.
We often have helpers from the richer villages though. People who have a better vision of what the village should be. These kind souls provide help to the people on the periphery but this help is undermined by those from the core who have a different vision of the village. You see they are not too bothered by the concept of village although they do throw around terms like "globalization,""sustainable development," "free trade," "multilaterism," "peace" and of course "the Global village." They seem to be well meaning but sometimes their actions undermine their words.
You see the conflicts in the periphery provide benefit to someone. Villagers in the periphery are desperately poor. So poor they cannot afford to make their own weapons, at least not most of them. Where would they get weapons from? This puzzled me for a while but then I realized that weapons are mostly produced in the core. Somehow they make it to the warring parties in the periphery. I am not going to speculate how they get there but I know the core can do a better job of preventing this sort of thing happening.
As you can see our village is not doing as well as it should. We really have no reason to call it that. We might want to name it a city. Which is a settlement which is unable to sustain its own population without outside influence. Our city is in need of some cleansing, including the values that make a village what it is, a self sustaining place where you may be able to raise a child!
Why not call it what it is?
"Dangerous world" works for me.
Even our so called "friends" on this planet are not our friends. They sometimes behave like friends because we protect them from countries that are even more threatening.
Too many are looking at the world through rose-colored glasses and missing the reality.
It is a dangerou world, I agree. Guess I wanted to stick with the metaphor and then people can figure it out.
http://www.progressiveu.org/blog/tinacho
I think the metaphor is dangerous because it causes people to think about the world in a totally unrealistic way that will cause our people to die.
what do you mean?
http://www.progressiveu.org/blog/tinacho
See my previous post. The metaphor is like looking at the world through rose colored glasses.
The world is nothing like a village. In a village you generally have like minded people that share a culture and generally have some common goals and large numbers of them are generally friendly. Of the 7 billion on earth, perhaps 1 billion kind of like us. Almost all of the rest either hate us or want what we have or what their neighbors have.
Looking at the world through a screwed up metaphor is dangerous because one tends to see the things that support the metephor and to ignore or not even see that which does not support the metephor. Rose colored glasses filter out everything except the pretty pink.
the "us"you refer to is the core I am referring to in the post. Yes the core has what everyone else wants, so you got that spot on. But what I mean by the whole metaphor is that we call the world a "global village" which it is not. I break it down such that at the end you realize that the world is far from a global village. the richest countries in the world are where they are because they gained from the loss of the poorest, think the use of natural resources and colonialism boosting industrialism. This is what the meatphor is about.
http://www.progressiveu.org/blog/tinacho
The United States is the richest country in the world and we have a very minimal history of colonialism except as being a colony ourselves. Our one colony in Africa was Liberia formed by ex-slaves and we have supported it pretty consistently. Our one "colony" in the Carribean is Puerto Rico and they are free to cease being a colony anytime they want with a simple majority vote. We briefly controlled the Philipines but we were not the original colonizers. We control a few tiny islands in the South Pacific and the Carribean and that is about it.
We do trade with the world but nobody is forced to trade with us. If peoples in third world countries are being exploited it is their own governments that are doing the exploiting. Not us.
Mostly the third world is poor because they are terribly governed. Argentina in about 1910 was one of the world's richest countries. Then they embraced socialism. Rhodesia used to be a wealthy country and the bread basket of Africa and is now an economic basket case and is facing famine. South Africa is headed down the same path. But some countries like India, China, Chile and Brazil are going to other direction mainly because they are reasonably well governed.
Rather than being a village, the world is like a planet that is filled with a bunch of different countries that have very different interests, different resource bases, different languanges and cultures, historical hatreds and most of which covet that which belongs to their neighboring country (s). Some of these countries are well governed and do a good job of promoting the interests of their people and most of them do not. Some of these countries are occuppied by fairly homogenous people who share a race, ethnicity and culture. Some countries are much more diverse. Some countries handle the diversity fairly well with a decent degree of tolerance and others are in a continual state of internal strife or have one or more of these groups that are badly oppressed and abused. Sometimes, in certain mutually beneficial situations these countries join together and cooperate. Most often they selfishly promote their own interests. Sometimes well governed countries cease to be well governed and their people suffer and rarely the opposite also occurs and a poorly governed country claws itself upwards.
The village metaphor does not fit and anybody who allows their thinking to be guided by such a mistaken notion is going to make bad and probably dangerous decisions.
I must respectively disagree. The United States is the richest country in the world, yes indeed, but you can never seperate the country from the rest of the world. I am not saying trade with the U.S should stop, but what do things like subsidies do to other countries? They cannot compete, whether this is right or wrong it is a fact. Yes I understand that the country has not been explicitly involved with colonialsim but the country has been involved in some activities that aid its own well being to the detriment of others. Lets start with United States territory, the Indians were displaced and the country had new owners. Now what can we say about this, on what basis was the country established. In Africa the U.S has been involved with different African countries, maybe not as colonial master but in a different capacity. Notably we have the case of Mobutu Sese Seko who is the former president of the country formerly known as Zaire (now known as the Democratic Republic of Congo). He was a great friend of the United States and he received assistance. The man did not share the wealth with the common people, rather he made himself rich and by the time he was overthrown after 30 years of rule the country was on its knees. Yes he was a bad leader, but he was largely supported by the United States. Remember the United States backed Saddam Hussein in the 80s too. These are a couple of examples but there are also incidents of supporting corrupt leaders in South America who won power through coups. The case of Iran involves the United States helping the Shah get into power in Iran. Yes there are bad leaders out there but sometimes they need support, an the United States has been involved with some of these leaders. I am not completly blaming the country for everything that happens in every country as I do not possess that much knowledge.
The third world countries you speak off are very complex places where inequality and exploitation were entrenched in the countries. Although the United States may not have been involved directly, it is clear that the lines drawn by colonialists have been causing havoc. Think of the make up of Sudanese people in North and South, Arabs accused of killing blacl Africans. In Rwanda the Hutus and the Tutsis are virtually the same people but the preferential treatment shown by the Belgians created a resentment that boiled over into genocide. It is wrong to simply dismiss these third world countries as places where people are crazy, have bad governance and cannot sustain themselves like it is all their fault. There is more than one reason to every crisis, I was simply trying to use a simple metaphor. I understand that it was dumbed down, and does not capture all the complexities of our world but that is the way I see it from what I have been learning about the world and its structure.
As far as the countries that are the richest being the best governed I also disagree. How could you confirm governance in China and the United States. Is it the best governed or the most opportunistic that won?
http://www.progressiveu.org/blog/tinacho
Yeah we displaced the native Americans. They fought, they lost. History marches forward. It has happened time and again through history and we'll see plenty of it in the future as a result of population pressure and scarcity. It is essentially happening now with the migration from South or our Border. One culture is being overrun by another. Time will tell if the United States as we know it will survives. Things don't look good for California and it is rapidly descending into third world status. I personally hope we put up at least as good a fight as the native Americans did. I bet in your lifetime you will see China overrun a large part of what has historically been Russia. Nothing lasts.
Most of the examples you cited were backlash from the Cold War. It had some unfortunate consequences that are biting us in the butt now. Some criticism is certainly in order but you should remember as you dish out this criticism that children in my generation did regular nuclear war drills where we were taught to hide under our desks or proceed to bomb shelters. It is easy to be critical when you did not grow up without this threat of total annihilation as a daily fear. Realists without rose colored glasses confronted a very dangerous world and did what they needed to do to protect our people. Some of those things had bad consequences for the people in the countries where they occurred and some of those things are haunting us now.
I can't think of a single one of those countries that was not a complete mess BEFORE we got involved. It was not like we went out and destabilized Iceland. Yes we did support Saddam. Iraq was a former Soviet Client and we tried to flip them. It did not work. Without the threat of the Cold War, a more proper foreign policy response would have been isolationism. The natives of these countries need to solve these things for themselves. It is when we start picking winners and losers that we inevitably get bit in the butt. Thank goodness we are mostly staying out of Dar-fur. Now if only we would take a more fair and balanced approach towards Israel and Palestine and let that conflict come to some resolution. My guess is that with or without the USA picking winners, most of these people in the third world are destined to have horrible governments that will enrich themselves at the expense of their people. That is their culture and culture is a hard thing to change.
I agree with you about our Agricultural Subsidies. This New Deal era stuff has long since lived past its usefulness and needs to stop. It just amounts to corporate socialism and in my mind is largely corrupt. I certainly hate seeing my tax dollars being transferred to corporate farms (or anybody else) and would like to see it stop. I don't think that anybody has the intent of harming other countries in the world with these policies but the fact that these subsidies do have this effect are undeniable.
Yeah we displaced the native Americans. They fought, they lost. History marches forward.
That's always the answer people give. Sad really.
It is a human thing. It has been repeated over and over through time and it will repeat again and again in the future.
I read a great book in African History a couple of decades ago when I took that class. It was called "Chaka the Zulu". I highly recommend it. Before I read that book I had naively never really considered Africa to have a history prior to colonialism. Talk about people being displaced! Chaka ran roughshad over 1/3 of Africa and the displacements he caused caused other tribes to displace other tribes in a huge ugly chain reaction complete with lots of killing and slavery..
The world is a dangerous place. People who don't fight hard enough get runover. You are welcome to be as idealistic as you want but it won't change the reality. The world is not a village, it is a war zone and it won't be changing anytime soon.
I know it's a war zone jack, I know. Thank you for sharing your infinite wisdom