By Kerry Bolton
Part 3 of 3
The Role of Multiculturalism in the Globalist Agenda
Many nefarious aims have been imposed under the banner of multiculturalism and slogans such as “equality” and “human rights.” As “democracy” has been used to justify the bombing states throughout recent history, these slogans often serve as rhetoric to beguile the well-intentioned while hiding the aims of those motivated by little if anything other than power and greed.
One might think of the manner by which the issue of the Uitlanders was agitated to justify the Anglo-Boer wars for the purpose of procuring the mineral wealth of South Africa for the benefit of Cecil Rhodes, Alfred Beit, et al.
A similar issue was revived in our own time, under the name of “fighting apartheid,” and while the world was jubilant at the assumption to power of the ANC, the reality has been that the Africans have not benefited materially one iota, but the parastatals or state owned enterprises are being privatized so that they can be sold off to global capitalism. When the patriarch of South African capitalism, Harry Oppenheimer, whose family was a traditional foe of the Afrikaners, died in 2000,Nelson Mandela eulogized him thus: “His contribution to building partnership between big business and the new democratic government in that first period of democratic rule can never be appreciated too much.”[1]
The “democracy” Oppenheimer and other plutocrats in tandem with the ANC created in South Africa is the freedom for global capital to exploit the country. Mandela stated the result of this “long march to freedom” in 1996: “Privatization is the fundamental policy of the ANC and will remain so.”[2] In commenting on the privatization of the Johannesburg municipal water supply, which is now under the French corporation Suez Lyonnaise Eaux, the ANC issued a statements declaring that: “Eskom is one of a host of government owned ‘parastatals’ created during the apartheid era which the democratically elected government has set out to privatise in a bid to raise money.”[3] It is the same outcome for South Africa that was achieved by the “liberation” of Kosovan minerals in the name of “democracy” and in the name of the rights of Muslims under Serb rule, while other Muslims under their own rule are bombed into submission by the USA and its allies.
The Aims of Global Capitalism
The nature of the globalist dialectic has been explained particularly cogently by Noam Chomsky:
See, capitalism is not fundamentally racist — it can exploit racism for its purposes, but racism isn’t built into it. Capitalism basically wants people to be interchangeable cogs, and differences among them, such as on the basis of race, usually are not functional. I mean, they may be functional for a period, like if you want a super exploited workforce or something, but those situations are kind of anomalous. Over the long term, you can expect capitalism to be anti-racist — just because it’s anti-human. And race is in fact a human characteristic — there’s no reason why it should be a negative characteristic, but it is a human characteristic. So therefore identifications based on race interfere with the basic ideal that people should be available just as consumers and producers, interchangeable cogs who will purchase all the junk that’s produced — that’s their ultimate function, and any other properties they might have are kind of irrelevant, and usually a nuisance.[4]
The Chomsky statement cogently expresses the situation in its entirety.
France as a Social Laboratory for Globalization
The Rivkin offensive is the latest in a long line of programs for undermining French identity. France is a paradox, combining the cosmopolitan values of the bourgeois Revolution of 1789 with a stubborn traditionalism and nationalism, which the globalists term “xenophobia.” It is manifested even in small ways such as the legal obligation of French public servants and politicians to speak only French to the foreign media, regardless of their knowledge of any other language; or the widespread resistance in France to McDonalds and Disney World.
France, like much of the rest of the world, however, is fighting a losing cultural battle against globalization. Jeff Steiner’s column “Americans in France,” refers to the manner by which the French at one time resisted the opening of the American fast food franchise as “part of an American cultural invasion.” Steiner writes:
. . . That seems to be past as McDonalds has so become a part of French culture that it’s not seen as an American import any longer, but wholly French. In short, McDonalds has grown on the French just like in so many other countries.
I’ve been to a few McDonalds in France and, except for one in Strasbourg that looks from the outside to be built in the traditional Alsatian style, all McDonalds in France that I have seen look no different than their American counterparts.
Yes, there are those that still curse McDo (They are now a very small group and mostly ignored) as the symbol of the Americanization of France and who also see it as France losing its uniqueness in terms of cuisine. The menu in a French McDonalds is almost an exact copy of what you would find in any McDonalds in the United States. It struck me as a bit odd that I could order as I would in the United States, that is in English, with the odd French preposition thrown in.
If truth were told, the French who eat at McDonalds are just as much at home there as any American could be.[5]
This seemingly trivial example is actually of immense importance in showing just how a culture as strong as that of France — until recently an immensely proud nation — can succumb, especially under the impress of marketing towards youngsters. It is a case study par excellence of the standardization that American corporate culture entails. It is what the globalist elite desires on a world scale, right down to what one eats.
It is notable that the vanguard of resistance to McDonalds came from farmers, a traditionalist segment of Europe’s population that is becoming increasingly anomalous and under the globalist regime will become an extinct species as agriculture gives way to agribusiness.
Given France’s status in Europe and its historical tendency to maintain its sovereignty in the face of US interests — even quite recently with its opposition to the war against Iraq — France remains one globalism’s few stumbling blocks in Europe. An added concern is that the French will take their stubborn “xenophobia” to the polls and elect a stridently anti-globalist party, as reflected in the electoral ups and downs of the Front National, which opposes both globalization and privatization.
This is a major reason for Rivkin’s far-reaching subversive and interventionist program to assimilate Muslims into French society, which would fundamentally transform French consciousness to be more thoroughly cosmopolitan. The intention is clear enough in the Rivkin embassy documents where it is stated that the Embassy will monitor the effects of the “outreach” program on the “decrease in popular support for xenophobic political parties and platforms.”
Contra the “xenophobia” of France, R. J. Barnet and R. E. Müller’s study of the global corporation, Global Reach,[6] based on interviews with corporate executives, shows that the French business elite has long been seeking to undermine the foundations of French tradition. Jacques Maisonrouge, president of the IBM World Trade Corporation “likes to point out that ‘Down with borders,’ a revolutionary student slogan of the 1968 Paris university uprising – in which some of his children were involved – is also a welcome slogan at IBM.”[7] Maisonrouge stated that the “World Managers” (as Barnett and Muller call the corporate executives) believe they are making the world “smaller and more homogeneous.”[8] Maisonrouge approvingly described the global corporate executive as “the detribalized, international career men.”[9] It is this “detribalization” that is the basis of a “world consumer culture” required to more efficiently create a world economy.
Paris is already a cosmopolitan center and therefore ideal as a prototype for the “global city” of the future. In the 1970s Howard Perlmutter and Hasan Ozekhan of the Wharton School of Finance Worldwide Institutions Program prepared a plan for a “global city.” Paris was chosen for the purpose. Prof. Perlmutter was a consultant to global corporations. His plan was commissioned by the French Government planning agency. Perlmutter predicted that cities would become “global cities” during the 1980s.
For Paris, this required “becoming less French” and undergoing “denationalization.” This, he said, requires a “psycho-cultural change of image with respect to the traditional impression of ‘xenophobia’ that the French seem to exude.” The parallels with the current Rivkin program are apparent. Perlmutter suggested that the best way of ridding France of its nationalism was to introduce multiculturalism. He advocated “the globalization of cultural events” such as international rock festivals, as an antidote to “overly national and sometimes nationalistic culture.”[10]
Undermining France’s “overly national and sometimes nationalistic culture” is the reason Rivkin sought to foster stronger connections between Hollywood and the French culture industry.[11] Rivkin knows the value of entertainment in transforming attitudes, especially among the young. After working as a corporate finance analyst at Salomon Brothers, Rivkin joined The Jim Henson Company in 1988 as director of strategic planning. Two years later, he was made vice president of the company.
The Jim Henson Company produces Sesame Street, whose cute little muppets push a well-calculated globalist agenda to toddlers. Lawrence Balter, professor of applied psychology at New York University, wrote that Sesame Street“introduced children to a broad range of ideas, information, and experiences about diverse topics such as death, cultural pride, race relations, people with disabilities, marriage, pregnancy, and even space exploration.” The series was the first to employ educational researchers, with the formation of a Research Department.[12] Sesame Street has received funding from the Ford Foundation, the Carnegie Corporation, and the US Office of Education. Of passing interest is that the Carnegie Corporation and the Ford Foundation are also patrons of the Pacific Council on International Policy.
Creating the World Consumer
As Chomsky has pointed out, global capitalism sees humanity in terms of interchangeable cogs in the production and consumption cycle. The summit of corporate human evolution is transformation into “detribalized, international career men.” According to financial journalist G. Pascal Zachary, these rootless cosmopolitans constitute an “informal global aristocracy” recruited all over the world by corporations, depending totally on their companies and “little upon the larger public,” a new class unhindered by national, cultural, or ethnic bonds.[13]
Barnett and Muller quoted Pfizer’s John J. Powers as stating that global corporations are “agents for change, socially, economically and culturally.”[14] They stated that global executives see “irrational nationalism” as inhibiting “the free flow of finance capital, technology, and goods on a global scale.” A crucial aspect of nationalism is “differences in psychological and cultural attitudes, that complicate the task of homogenizing the earth into an integrated unit. . . . Cultural nationalism is also a serious problem because it threatens the concept of the Global Shopping Center.”[15]
This “cultural nationalism” is described by Rivkin and all other partisans of globalism as “xenophobia,” unless that “xenophobia” can be marshaled in the service of a military adventure when bribes, embargoes and threats don’t bring a reticent state into line, as in the cases of Serbia, Iraq, and perhaps soon, Libya. Then the American globalist elite and their allies become “patriots.”
Barnet and Muller cite A. W. Clausen when he headed the Bank of America, as stating that national, cultural, and racial differences create “marketing problems,” lamenting that there is “no such thing as a uniform, global market.”[16] Harry Heltzer, Chief Executive Officer of 3M stated that global corporations are a “powerful voice for world peace because their allegiance is not to any nation, tongue, race, or creed but to one of the finer aspirations of mankind, that the people of the world may be united in common economic purpose.”[17]
These “finer aspirations of mankind,” known in other quarters as greed, avarice, and Mammon-worship, have despoiled the earth, caused global economic imbalance, and operate on usury that was in better times regarded as a sin. These “finer aspirations,” by corporate reckoning, have caused more wars than any “xenophobic” dictator, usually in the name of “world peace,” and “democracy.”
The Rivkin doctrine for France — which according to the leaked document, must be carried out in a subtle manner — is a far-reaching subversive program to transform especially the young into global clones devoid of cultural identity, while proceeding, in the manner of Orwellian “doublethink,” under the name of “multiculturalism.”
Notes
1. “Mandela honours ‘monumental’ Oppenheimer”, The Star, South Africa, August 21, 2000, http://www.iol.co.za/index.php?set_id=1&click_id=13&art_id=ct20000821001004683O150279(accessed September 27, 2009).
2. Lynda Loxton, “Mandela: We are going to privatise,” The Saturday Star, May 25, 1996, p.1.
3. ANC daily news briefing, June 27, 2001. See also “Eskom,” ANC Daily News Briefing, June 20, 2001, 70.84.171.10/~etools/newsbrief/2001/news0621.txt
4. Noam Chomsky, Understanding Power: The Indispensable Chomsky (New York: The New York Press, 2002), pp. 88–89.
5. J. Steiner, “American in France: Culture: McDonalds in France, http://www.americansinfrance.net/culture/mcdonalds_in_france.cfm
6. R. J. Barnet and R. E. Müller, Global Reach: The Power of the Multinational Corporations (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1974).
7. Global Reach, p. 19. For an update on Maisonrouge see: IBM, http://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/exhibits/builders/builders_maisonrouge.html
8. Global Reach, , p. 62.
9. Global Reach, ibid.
10. Global Reach, pp. 113–14.
11. “2010 France Country Dialogue,” PCIP, op. cit.
12. L. Balter, Parenthood in America: An Encyclopaedia, Vol. 1 (ABC-CLIO, 2000), p. 556.
13. G. Pascal Zachary, The Global Me (New South Wales: Allen & Unwin, 2000).
14. Global Reach, p. 31.
15. Global Reach, p. 58.
16. Global Reach, ibid.
17. Global Reach, p. 106.
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