Amerika

One cannot separate Leftism from globalism because the nature of egalitarianism is to include every living human in a collective reward scheme that protects their individualism against consequences in reality and nature. Naturally this expands to include all humans worldwide.

Outside the ideological level, Leftism needs globalism because it keeps open international trade so that the middle class can continue its rule despite having raised marginal costs with ideological objectives like anti-poverty and anti-racism programs.

Globalism came about for two reasons: first, the West raised the cost of its labor with marginal costs like unions, taxes, and regulations; second, to continue to the profitable colonialist system where resources are taken from the third world to the first for value-added production.

With globalism, the newest resource was labor for the first reason above. After unions wrecked the American auto industry, it became clear that production had to go abroad with the successes of Lee Iacocca in making parts abroad for final assembly by a smaller workforce in America.

Yoweri Kaguta Museveni Tibuhaburwa, the president of Uganda, attributed colonialism to Islamic intervention in a stirring speech in favor of pan-African nationalism:

Yet, this Africa of many firsts in the history of the human race, has faced calamity after calamity in the last 500 years. These calamities have included: the slave trade, colonialism, genocide in some cases, neo-colonialism and marginalization. Why has this been so?

Africa, which had achieved many firsts for the human race, had some internal weaknesses which made it difficult for its people to respond to the threats that emerged after 1453 AD. This was the year the Ottoman Turks, people coming out of Central Asia, captured Constantinople, the capital of the Eastern Roman Empire. By so doing, they blocked the over-land silk route which had been pioneered by Marco Polo in the years 1271 to 1368. Since Marco Polo, silk and spices were coming through this route. Now, that route was closed and Western Europe was cut off from the products of the East, that they had come to treasure.

A frantic search for a sea route to the East by the Europeans started, led by Portugal. Better ships were, eventually, built and the Portuguese got to Sierra Leone in the year 1460. By 1498, Vasco Da Gama went around the Southern tip of Africa and, on Christmas day, landed at Natal, hence the name of that place up to now, coming from the Latin word, natalis (Natal).

We might add to this the Barbary Pirates, Muslim invasions of Southern Spain, Huns, and Mongols as forces that caused Europeans to look beyond their corner of the world and seek to suppress threats before they arrived unexpectedly.

Europe had become isolated by the difficult goal of making permanent civilization which required an intense inward focus, and after the failure of the empires in Athens and Rome, entered into a period of Balkanization as a means of avoiding the diversity that destroyed those great civilizations.

This lack of unity meant that attacks on the periphery were not countered with unified force, but became essentially local concerns. That meant that villages, towns, and regions fell one by one. If you want to know why anarchy and libertarianism exist only in laboratories, this is why.

Without an overall sense of itself as a matrix of related cultures, both to nations and to the idea of European-ness (now called “White Supremacy”), Europe could not come together to squash relatively manageable invasions like the ones mentioned above, and therefore was subverted by slow assaults.

For this reason, it needed some way to unite itself, and also needed to put out feelers and produce buffer zones at its periphery. Since most human exploration occurs from a profit motive, this began with individuals and groups seeking resources from the third world, an order that persists today.

Museveni identifies the problem of disunity and approaches it as a question to be resolved with nationalism and a broader continent-wide racial unity:

What, however, is amazing is that many of the African political elite, the intellectuals, the other social leaders etc., have not bothered to investigate the cause of our near extinction in the last 500 years and to look for ways of how we can immunize ourselves against any and all threats against our survival, our sovereignty, our security and our prosperity in our land. That is how we come to the two issues that we regard as crucial for our future. These are: political and economic integration of Africa. Our view is that African integration means three things: prosperity, security and fraternity. We cannot guarantee our prosperity if we do not solve the issue of market. When companies or families produce products (goods) or services, how many consumers will buy those products? If a product does not have enough buyers, the business will fail. In Uganda, recently we had a big crop of maize. We produced 5 million tonnes; but Uganda consumes only 1 million tonnes. The prices collapsed. Many farmers will move away from maize in the coming seasons. This is just one example. Many others can be quoted across Africa. We, therefore, need economic integration to provide market for our producing families and companies to be assured of a market on principles of competitiveness. The integrated African market will not only stimulate production in Africa, it will also enable us to negotiate credibly with the other big markets such as the USA, China, India, Russia, European Union, etc. It is good that, recently, we agreed on the Continental Free Trade Area (CFTA). Let us implement its provisions. It is the way to prosperity and part of the answer for under-development, poverty and joblessness.

Ironically, Africa is going down the same path that Europe took, but being informed by a broader range of history — much of European history was lost through the failure of the two great empires and the ensuing religious conversion that destroyed most of the old lore — can take premptive steps.

Instead of a “multipolar order,” what Museveni suggests is a nationalist order: each race takes care of itself, allied with similar groups. He points out that internal diversity in Africa consists of very similar groups who speak similar languages, therefore can unite toward a mutual goal.

Why couldn’t Africa defeat these invasions? Indeed by 1900, the whole of Africa had been defeated except for Ethiopia which defeated the Italian invaders in the battle of Adua in 1896. According to our analysis, it was not because of lack of courage or the will to resist. It was, mainly, on account of political balkanization. The African population is only divided into four linguistic groups. These are: Niger-Congo (Bantu and Kwa); the Nilo-Saharan (Hamitic, Nilotic and Nilo-Hamitic); the Afro-Asiatic (Arabic, Tigrinya and Amharic); and Khoisan (so called bushmen in Southern Africa). Therefore, the entirety of the African peoples are either similar or linked.

In this way, he is suggesting not so much a new world order as correcting the illusions of the old such as multiculturalism/diversity which are essentially being used to perpetuate the colonial order but with band-aids applied to buy off third world peoples who are working against their own interests.

His statements indicate not so much a failure of the past order, but that its definitions have changed through the assumption of equality, which has resulted in a disconnect between the organizations that we recognize in public and the informal familial-style relationships that actually drive politics.

This would replace our formalized definitions with realistic ones that recognize the racial voting bloc as the fundamental unit of politics, instead of denying it and therefore producing fragmented, unstable nation-states:

South Africans also continue to vote in racial blocs, and the existence of a dominant party and a weak opposition has resulted in emerging voter apathy and withdrawal amongst some sections of the electorate.

People vote in cultural blocs associated with linked religion, race, culture, and ethnicity. For this reason, the most natural social order for humans involves the familial order of kinship and race. As the unipolar system based on diverse liberal democracy fades, nationalism rises.

Tags: africa, colonialism, museveni, nationalism