(Minghui.org) [Editor's Note] This series is a reprint of The Epoch Times' English translation of the book How the Specter of Communism Is Ruling Our World by the editorial team of Nine Commentaries on the Communist Party.
Table of Contents of the Book
Preface: How the Specter of Communism Is Ruling Our World
Introduction: How the Specter of Communism Is Ruling Our World
Chapter One: The Specter’s Strategies for Destroying Humanity
Chapter Two: Communism’s European Beginnings
Chapter Three: Tyranny in the East
Chapter Four: Exporting Revolution
Chapter Five: Infiltrating the West
Chapter Six: The Revolt Against God
Chapter Seven: The Destruction of the Family
Chapter Eight: How Communism Sows Chaos in Politics
Chapter Nine: The Communist Economic Trap
Chapter Ten: Corrupting the Legal System
Chapter Eleven: Desecrating the Arts
Chapter Twelve: Sabotaging Education
Chapter Thirteen: The Media – The Specter’s Mouthpiece
Chapter Fourteen: Popular Culture – A Decadent Indulgence
Chapter Fifteen: The Communist Roots of Terrorism
Chapter Sixteen: The Communism Behind Environmentalism
Chapter Seventeen: Globalization and Communism
Chapter Eighteen: The Chinese Communist Party’s Global Ambitions
Conclusion: How the Specter of Communism Is Ruling Our World
What is Included in This Part?
Chapter Seventeen: Globalization and Communism
Introduction
1. Globalism and Communism
2. Economic Globalization
a. Destabilizing Effects of Globalization
b. How Globalization Facilitates the Spread of Communist Ideology
c. Western Capitalism: Nourishing the Chinese Communist Party
3. Political Globalization
a. Expanding Communist Political Power Through the UN
b. Subverting the UN’s Humanitarian Ideals
c. Promoting Communist Political Ideas Worldwide
d. World Government and Totalitarianism
4. Cultural Globalization: A Means of Corrupting Humanity
a. Destroying the World’s Cultural Traditions
b. The UN’s Role in Spreading Degenerate Values
5. Upholding National Heritage and Universal Values
References
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CHAPTER SEVENTEEN: GLOBALIZATION AND COMMUNISM
Introduction
Today, modern transportation, telecommunications, and digital networks have shrunk geographies and eliminated boundaries that had stood for thousands of years. The world has become smaller and the number of interactions and exchanges between countries is unprecedented. This strengthening of global collaboration is a natural result of technological development, the expansion of production, and migration. This kind of globalization is the result of a natural historical process.
However, there is another kind of globalization, and it is the result of communist ideologies hijacking the natural process in order to undermine humanity. We will address this second form.
Beginning with the Renaissance, human history entered a period of dramatic change. In the late eighteenth century, the Industrial Revolution greatly increased productivity, which spurred social upheaval as well as profound shifts in philosophy and spirituality. As technology advanced, materialist and atheistic ideas became prominent; increasing numbers of people rejected traditional morality and belief in the divine.
Against this historical backdrop, the specter of communism has turned globalization into a powerful tool for its goal of separating people from their traditional cultures and faith. While globalization provides opportunities for international cooperation and understanding, the breakdown of boundaries between nations and economies allows the specter to combine the worst aspects of both the communist and non-communist systems, pursuing broad political and cultural operations to further its agenda around the world. The globalized economic and financial system facilitates this process, making it even harder for individual communities and nations to resist the communist specter’s onslaught.
This book has stressed that communism is not merely a theory, but an evil specter. It is alive, and in pursuing its ultimate goal to destroy humankind, it is capable of nearly any kind of mutation that helps it sustain and expand itself. Since the 1990s, globalization has claimed to be about furthering democracy, the market economy, and free trade, and has therefore met with opposition from a number of left-wing groups and figures. But these individuals don’t realize that the communist specter is operating on another plane. Communism’s aim isn’t to use globalization to create a better world, but to take over the world by imposing an ideology of globalist control on all the world’s nations.
Globalism has made astounding progress on a variety of fronts, particularly in the economic, political, and cultural spheres. As an ideological force, globalism has many faces and manifests in diverse, even superficially contradictory forms — often eliciting nebulous feelings of a world free from war, poverty, discrimination, or exploitation. But in practice, the methods proposed to achieve these things are essentially similar to the utopian lies of communist revolution.
Though each nation has its own culture and history, their diverse traditions contain universal moral values common to all of humankind. National sovereignty and the cultural traditions of each ethnic group play an important role in national heritage and self-determination, and offer collective protection in the face of various threats, from natural disasters to military invasions. Additionally, an ethnic group’s national legends and religious faith help the entire people maintain a sense of identity, and protect them from falling to the specter’s evil designs.
While globalists often claim to stand for the cultures of all ethnicities, in recent years it has become increasingly apparent that this ideology actually serves to strengthen leftist causes. Instead of supporting traditional culture, which is rooted in faith and virtue, globalist talking points tend to mirror the Left’s “political correctness,” “social justice,” “value neutrality,” and “absolute egalitarianism.”
World government, starting with increased supranational bodies and regulation, is the main end goal of globalism. Once a global super-government is formed, communism will easily achieve its goal of eliminating private property rights, nations, races, and the traditional culture of each nation. Revealing how the communist specter manipulates globalization and the relationship between globalism and communism is a pressing matter.
1. Globalism and Communism
Karl Marx did not use the concept of globalism in his writings, but instead used the term “world history,” which has very close connotations. In The Communist Manifesto, Marx and co-author Friedrich Engels claimed that the global expansion of capitalism would inevitably produce a huge proletariat (working) class in the industrialized nations, and then a proletarian revolution would sweep the globe, overthrowing capitalism and achieving the “paradise” of communism.
Marx and Engels also wrote, “The proletariat can thus only exist world-historically, just as communism, its activity, can only have a ‘world-historical’ existence.” [1] That is to say, the realization of communism depends on the proletariat taking joint action around the world — the communist revolution must be a global movement.
Later, Vladimir Lenin modified Marx’s doctrine and proposed that the world revolution could be initiated in Russia, despite the predominantly rural character of its society at the time. In 1919, the Soviet communists established the Communist International in Moscow, with branches spread throughout more than sixty countries. Lenin said that the goal of the Communist International was to establish a World Soviet Republic. [2]
Joseph Stalin, the Soviet leader who succeeded Lenin, was known for the temporary policy of “socialism in one country,” but proposed several goals of the communist global revolution in his book Marxism and the National Question. American thinker G. Edward Griffin summarized Stalin’s points as follows:
1. Confuse, disorganize, and destroy the forces of capitalism around the world.
2. Bring all nations together into a single world system of economy.
3. Force the advanced countries to pour prolonged financial aid into the underdeveloped countries.
4. Divide the world into regional groups as a transitional stage toward total world government. Populations will more readily abandon their national loyalties to a vague regional loyalty than they will for a world authority. Later, the regionals [such as the present NATO, SEATO, and the Organization of American States] can be brought all the way into a single world dictatorship of the proletariat. [3]
William Z. Foster, the former national chairman of the Communist Party USA, wrote: “A Communist world will be a unified, organized world. The economic system will be one great organization, based upon the principle of planning now dawning in the USSR. The American Soviet government will be an important section in this world government.” [4]
From Marx, Lenin, Stalin, and Foster, to the “community of human destiny” proposed by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), we can clearly see that the communist specter is not satisfied with having power in only a few countries. Communist ideology, in all its forms, features the ambition to dominate all of humanity.
The proletarian world revolution failed to take place in the form Marx envisioned. What he thought were desperate and dying capitalist societies were instead prosperous and flourishing with private ownership and rule of law. With the collapse of the Soviet and Eastern European communist camp, and the adoption of market principles by the CCP regime, it appeared that the free world had triumphed over communism. But the communist specter hides behind various doctrines and movements as it corrodes, infiltrates, and expands communist elements into every corner of the world. Socialism — the primary stage of communism — has been gaining currency internationally, piggybacking on the destabilizing aspects brought about by globalization and globalist factors.
After World War II, the left-wing forces in European countries continued to grow. The Socialist International, which advocated democratic socialism, included political parties from more than one hundred countries. These parties were in power in various countries and spread across most of Europe, driving policies of generous welfare, high taxation, and increased state ownership.
Globalization has hollowed out US industry, shrunk the middle class, caused incomes to stagnate, polarized the rich and the poor, and driven rifts through society. This has greatly aided the growth of the Left and socialism in the United States, shifting the global political spectrum sharply left in the last decade or so. Left-wing forces around the world note that globalization has caused income inequality and polarization between the rich and the poor. Alongside these arguments, anti-globalization sentiment has grown rapidly, pinning the blame for the world’s ills on capitalism and advocating socialist policies.
After the Cold War, communist ideas infiltrated economic globalization, with the goal that there would be no pure national economy and that the sovereignty of each country’s economic foundations would be undermined. The result was to fully mobilize and internationalize human greed. In the last few decades, Western financial powers shifted wealth — accumulated by society over several hundred years — to quickly rapidly build up the economy of mainland China following the CCP’s market reforms. The CCP used these investments to prop up its regime, while binding foreign businesses and leaders to its corrupt system.
As the head of the communist forces in the world today, the CCP aims to build up a socialist economic superpower while fortifying left-wing and communist parties around the world. Its totalitarian system upended the rules of normal trade, and it intends to use the enrichment it gained from democratic free markets to co-opt and subvert them from within.
The CCP’s economic strength has also spurred on its political and military ambitions, as it attempts to export its authoritarian communist model throughout the world. Looking at the CCP’s globalized strategy from the perspective of Marx, Lenin, and Stalin, today’s world has many of the conditions necessary for communist revolution.
2. Economic Globalization
Economic globalization refers to the integration of chains of global capital, production, and trade that began in the 1940s and 1950s, matured in the 1970s and 1980s, and became a global norm in the 1990s. International agencies and corporations were the driving forces, as they demanded the loosening of regulation and controls to allow the free flow of capital and goods.
On the surface, economic globalization was promoted by Western countries to spread capitalism around the world. Unfortunately, however, globalization has become a vehicle for the communist specter. In particular, globalization has resulted in Western countries providing financial support to the Chinese regime, resulting in a mutual dependency between the capitalist market economy and the CCP’s socialist totalitarian economy. In exchange for economic benefits, the West sacrifices its conscience and universal values, while the communist regime expands its control by way of economic coercion.
a. Destabilizing Effects of Globalization
Large international organizations, treaties, and regulations have been formed in the process of globalization, particularly the globalization of national economies. On the surface, this appears to be about the expansion of capitalism and the free market. But in fact, the trend works toward a unified system of economic control, one that is able to issue orders to determine the fate of enterprises in many countries. After this international financial order was established, the phenomenon of developed countries giving long-term economic aid to developing countries was also formed — in line with Stalin’s third goal mentioned previously.
In terms of handing out financial aid, international financial organizations, such as the World Bank, usually implement macroeconomic interventionism, which is not only authoritarian but also undermines the free market. It also ignores the social, cultural, and historical conditions of the recipient country. The result is diminished freedom and national sovereignty, as well as greater centralized economic control. American scholar James Bovard wrote that the World Bank “has greatly promoted the nationalization of Third World economies and has increased political and bureaucratic control over the lives of the poorest of the poor.” [5]
Economic globalization has also contributed to the development of a homogeneous global culture, leading to greater similarities in consumer trends and unified mechanisms of production and consumption. Many small businesses and those associated with local ethnic groups have simply been wiped out by the wave of globalization. More and more people have lost the environment or incentives to freely engage in commerce within their own borders.
As the world became more interconnected with the development of communication and transportation technology, it seemed as if globalization would deliver financial prosperity and democratic values to the entire global village. In many cases, the opposite has occurred.
Developing countries become part of a global production chain, which leads to the weakening of their economic sovereignty and to state failure in some cases. Some countries become burdened with debt and the need to meet repayments, fundamentally rupturing the foundation of free capitalist economics in those countries.
Globalization weakens developing countries in other ways as well. In the early 2000s, Jamaica opened its markets and began importing large quantities of cheap milk. This made milk more affordable for more people, but it also led local dairy farmers to go bankrupt, as they couldn’t compete amid the flood of cheap imports. Mexico used to have numerous light industrial manufacturing plants, but after Beijing gained admittance to the World Trade Organization (WTO), most of those jobs moved to the People Republic of China (PRC). Mexico suffered because it could not match China’s high-output manufacturing capability.
Many developing countries are rich in natural resources, but since foreign investment poured in, the minerals have been mined for export abroad with very little economic gain generated for locals. Foreign investment also corrupts government officials. Globalization claims to bring democracy to developing nations, but in reality it has empowered corrupt dictatorships while the general public has been left to starve.
During the 1997 Asian financial crisis, Thailand opened its weak financial system to international investment, which brought temporary prosperity. But when foreign investment left, Thailand’s economy ground to a halt. The neighboring countries were also negatively impacted.
As professor Dani Rodrik of Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government stated, globalization presents a “trilemma”: “We cannot simultaneously pursue democracy, national determination, and economic globalization.” [6] This is the fatal flaw of globalization and something communism has exploited.
The benefits and opportunities brought about by globalization have often been limited to a small number of elites. In many countries, globalization has worsened inequality, with seemingly no long-term solutions available.
b. How Globalization Facilitates the Spread of Communist Ideology
The communist ideology of egalitarianism and the ethos of struggle have ridden around the world on the back of globalization. It eroded national sovereignty, exacerbated regional turmoil, and heightened the archetypal Marxist conflicts between “the oppressor” and “the oppressed” that leftists use as ideological weapons to fight against the free market, private property, and other aspects of the “old society.”
The polarization of wealth created by globalization generates a self-perpetuating cycle. In Western countries, the enormous outflow of jobs and entire industries turned the lower and middle classes into victims of globalization. In the United States, the massive outflow of capital and technology to the PRC, caused millions of manufacturing job losses, leading to the loss of industries and a rise in unemployment. From 2000 to 2011, sixty-five thousand factories were closed, and 5.7 million, or 33 percent, of manufacturing jobs were lost. [7]
The gap between rich and poor has been widening in the United States for decades. Over the past thirty years, the growth of the average wage (adjusted for inflation) has been slowing, bringing about the emergence of the working poor — those who work or seek jobs for twenty-seven weeks of the year, but whose income is below the official poverty level. In 2016, 7.6 million Americans were counted among the working poor. [8]
The polarization of the rich and the poor is a fertile breeding ground for communist ideology to grow. Economic problems impact every aspect of society, but the demand for a solution based on a perceived unfair distribution of income has led to a surge of socialist ideology and of activism for “social justice.” Meanwhile, the expansion of social welfare benefits has in turn created more poor families, generating a vicious cycle of decreased productivity and individual reliance on the state.
Since 2000, leftist ideology has grown increasingly influential in the United States, with youth shifting increasingly to the left on social, economic, and political issues. By the 2016 election, a rising demand for socialism was evident, along with increasing political polarization. To a great extent, the impact of globalization lay behind these shifts. At the same time, the greater the economic and social strife Western democratic societies appeared to be suffering from, the more triumphant the force of communism appeared on the world stage.
Without compunction, the communist specter plays both sides of an issue to achieve its aims. Thus, along with the advance of globalization came anti-globalization campaigns, marked first by the large-scale violent protests in late 1999 in Seattle against the WTO Ministerial Conference. Three large-scale international conferences in 2001 (the Summit of the Americas meeting in Québec, Canada; the European Union summit in Gothenburg, Sweden; and the Group of Eight economic summit in Genoa, Italy) were also beset by such demonstrations.
Worldwide anti-globalization campaigns have drawn participants from a variety of backgrounds. A vast majority of them have been left-wing opponents of capitalism writ large, including labor unions and environmental organizations (also hijacked and infiltrated by communism), as well as victims of globalization and the underprivileged. As a result, the public, whether supporters or opponents of globalization, have ended up inadvertently serving the goals of communism.
c. Western Capitalism: Nourishing the Chinese Communist Party
When assessing the successes or failures of globalization, scholars often cite the PRC, which seemed to greatly benefit from globalization and rapidly came to the fore as the world’s second-largest economy. Many predicted that mainland China would ultimately replace the United States as the world’s largest economy.
Whereas Mexico, for example, established low-end manufacturing as its model, the PRC set out to obtain the most cutting-edge technology from the West and then replace its competitors. To that end, companies from developed countries were required to set up joint ventures with Chinese companies in order to sell into the China market, which the CCP then used to extract key technologies. The Party adopted numerous methods, from forcing technology transfers to outright stealing via hacking. After obtaining this advanced technology, the PRC pressed its advantage to dump low-priced products on the world market. With the help of export rebates and subsidies, mainland China defeated competitors with below-market prices and disrupted the order of free markets.
As undeveloped countries opened their domestic markets, the PRC instead created multiple trade barriers. The CCP profited enormously by taking advantage of the WTO’s rules upon admission in 2001, while simultaneously taking advantage of the global market to dump products abroad. The Party failed to open key industries — including telecommunications, banking, and energy — which in turn enabled mainland China to take advantage of the global economy while reneging on its commitments.
Bought off by economic profits, the Western world turned a blind eye and a deaf ear to the egregious human rights abuses the CCP was committing, and the international community continued to confer generous favor on the regime. In the midst of globalization, a powerful PRC regime, together with a morally corrupt Chinese society, has struck a blow to the market economy and trade regulations in the West.
The PRC has ignored the rules and reaped all the advantages of globalization. In a sense, globalization has been like a blood transfusion for the Communist Party, allowing a fading communist state to spring back into action. Behind the manipulation of globalization is the hidden purpose of propping up the PRC through the reallocation of wealth.
Globalization has been a process of saving the CCP and legitimizing the regime. While the Party strengthened its socialist muscles with capitalist nutrients, the West fell into relative decline, further giving the CCP confidence in its communist totalitarianism and global ambitions. Mainland China’s rise also greatly excited numerous socialists and members of the Left worldwide.
While its economy has grown, the PRC has intensified efforts to infiltrate global economic organizations, including the WTO, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the UN Industrial Development Organization, and others. When assigned to important positions in these organizations, PRC officials persuade them to cooperate with the regime in order to endorse the Party’s schemes and defend its policies.
The CCP regime uses international economic organizations to carry out its own economic agenda and corporatist model. If its ambitions aren’t halted, there’s little doubt that the regime will bring disaster to global politics and economics.
The above are just some examples of how economic globalization has been used to promote and extend communism. With advances in technology and transportation, economic activities are extended beyond a nation’s borders. This is a natural process, but in this case, the process was turned into an opportunity for the CCP to begin the path to global dominance.
3. Political Globalization
Political aspects of globalization include increased cooperation among states, the emergence of international bodies, and the formulation of international agendas and treaties. Following the emergence of such international institutions, as well as rules and regulations that transcend national borders, these organizations have developed into bases of international power, weakening national sovereignty and eroding the cultural, social, and moral foundations of individual nations. In the name of promoting world peace and international understanding, globalist institutions aim to consolidate power for the gradual advancement of the communist program.
The communist specter promotes and uses international organizations to bolster the strength of leftist factors, promoting the Marxist philosophy of struggle and communist regimes’ twisted definitions of human rights and freedom. Globalism promotes socialist ideas on a global scale, including attempts to redistribute wealth and form a world government to eventually bring all of humanity under totalitarian rule.
a. Expanding Communist Political Power Through the UN
The United Nations is the largest international organization and was established after World War II to strengthen cooperation and coordination among countries. As a supranational entity, the UN has been used by communist forces in their goal of weakening and abolishing nation-states. From its establishment, the UN was compromised by the Soviet-led communist bloc, and it has served as a stage for the Communist Party to promote itself and the communist goal of a world government.
When the UN was founded and its charter drafted, the Soviet Union was one of the sponsoring countries and a permanent member of the Security Council, playing a decisive role. The secretary-general of the UN Charter Conference was Alger Hiss, a US State Department official and important adviser to President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Hiss was convicted of perjury in 1950, in connection with the charge of being a Soviet spy. The UN Charter and conventions contain back doors that are beneficial to communist regimes, which likely have a great deal to do with Hiss’s involvement.
The heads of many important UN agencies are communists or fellow travelers. Many UN secretaries-general have been socialists and Marxists. For example, the first, Trygve Lie, was a Norwegian socialist who initially received strong support from the Soviet Union. His most important task was to advocate for bringing the PRC into the United Nations. His successor, Dag Hammarskjöld of Sweden, was a socialist and a sympathizer for a global communist revolution. Hammarskjöld often fawned over high-ranking CCP official Zhou Enlai. The third secretary-general, U Thant of Burma (also known as Myanmar), was a Marxist who believed that Lenin’s ideals were consistent with the UN Charter. The sixth secretary-general, Boutros Boutros-Ghali of Egypt, began his political career in the regime of Gamal Abdel Nasser and was formerly the vice president of the Socialist International. [9]
It is easy to understand why the heads of communist regimes regularly receive the highest courtesy from the United Nations. Many UN conventions have been used to directly or indirectly promote communist ideas and expand communist power.
The highest mission of the UN is to maintain world peace and security and its peacekeeping forces are overseen by the under-secretary-general for political and peacebuilding affairs. Of the fourteen individuals who held this position from 1946 to 1992, thirteen were Soviet citizens. The Soviet communist regime never relinquished its attempt to expand communist power, and it had no interest in contributing to world peace. Though the Soviet Union used “safeguarding world peace” as its slogan, the real aim was to hijack the UN, using it as a pro-socialist organization to advance the communist movement.
Communist influence was so entrenched in the UN that the organization acted as a veritable front group for the Soviet Union. FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover stated in 1963 that communist diplomats assigned to the UN “represent the backbone of Russian intelligence operations in this country.” [10]
Even after the collapse of the Soviet bloc, the communist legacy remained widespread in the UN. The Wall Street Journal reported in 1991: “Many of those working within the Secretariat, or at missions in its vicinity, argue that communism left a legacy within the UN bureaucracy. … ‘It works like a scorpion’s stinger,’ says one UN professional. ‘The scorpion — East Bloc socialism — dies. But the stinger remains poisonous, and strikes new victims.’ … [Over the years,] Westerners who worked at the UN … found themselves surrounded by what many have called a communist mafia.” [11]
The CCP uses the UN as a propaganda platform. For example, top UN officials, including the secretary-general, have promoted the CCP’s One Belt, One Road (OBOR), a global infrastructure and investment initiative, as a way to tackle poverty in the developing world. In reality, the initiative is a means for the CCP to expand its international hegemony. OBOR has left many countries in debt crises; Pakistan, for example, requested a $6 billion bailout from the International Monetary Fund because of the country’s debts problems resulting from OBOR loans. Others have been forced to cede control of critical infrastructure to the PRC. Sri Lanka had to lease an important port to Beijing for ninety-nine years to pay off its debt.
Moreover, the initiative enables the CCP to exert control over the politics and economies of participating countries, while undermining human rights and democracy in those countries. Consequently, many countries are pulling back. However, due to the CCP’s political influence in the UN, the agency’s senior officials have touted the project. [12]
b. Subverting the UN’s Humanitarian Ideals
One of the United Nations’ objectives is to improve human rights and promote freedom; this is a universal principle. But the PRC, together with other corrupt regimes, denies the universality of human rights. The Communist Party claims that human rights are the internal affairs of each country, using this as an excuse for its monstrous repression of religious freedom, ethnic minorities, and dissidents. The CCP even praises itself as a defender of human rights for “lifting” hundreds of millions of PRC citizens out of poverty, taking credit for the hard work and ingenuity of the Chinese people.
The CCP has used the platform of the UN to attack the democratic values of the West, relying on its alliances with developing nations to subvert the efforts of free nations to promote universal values. Due to manipulation by communist factors, the UN has not only done little to improve human rights, but also become a tool used by communist regimes to whitewash their poor human rights records. Dore Gold, former Israeli ambassador to the UN and author of Tower of Babble: How the United Nations Has Fueled Global Chaos, asserted: “The UN is not a benign but ineffective world body. It has actually accelerated and spread global chaos.” Gold outlined numerous examples, including the UN’s “value neutrality” and the immorality of “moral equivalence” and “moral relativism”; the organization’s general corruption; the fact that undemocratic countries are allowed to hold the majority of votes; and the degree of control given to communist regimes. [13] He called the UN an “abject failure,” writing that it was “dominated by anti-Western forces, dictatorships, state sponsors of terrorism, and America’s worst enemies.” [14]
For example, countries with poor human rights records are allowed to become member states of the Human Rights Council, utterly compromising the worth of the council’s human rights reviews. Furthermore, the PRC has bought off many developing countries, ensuring that any criticism of the communist regime’s human rights policies has been shelved. The UN’s tyranny of the majority has made it a tool for communist forces in opposing free nations on many issues. This has prompted the United States to withdraw from the Human Rights Council. The West wants to promote freedom and human rights but has been repeatedly blocked by communist countries. The council has been hijacked by thugs, and the so-called international conventions adopted have done nothing to bind totalitarian countries. These countries simply mouth the slogans without implementing them.
The UN Charter is very similar to the Soviet Constitution and in direct opposition to the US Constitution. The charter’s purpose is not to protect the rights of people, but to serve the interests of political leaders. Likewise, the Soviet Constitution superficially gave the citizens some rights, but in fact, many specific laws were stipulated as “within the scope of the law,” which allowed the Soviet regime to arbitrarily deprive citizens of their rights according to its interpretations of “within the scope of the law.” The UN Charter and its various contracts and conventions define people’s rights in the same equivocal way. For example, in the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, statements like “everyone has the right” are attached to provisions such as “the above-mentioned rights shall not be subject to any restrictions except those which are provided by law.” This is not just an arbitrary or coincidental choice of blueprint, but a “back door” that communism purposefully established.
As Griffin wrote: “In fact, every single right outlined in the United Nations Covenant on Human Rights may be legally denied if in the opinion of the politicians it is ‘necessary to protect national security, or public order, or public safety, or public health, or public morals, or the rights, freedoms or reputations of others.’ Most wars and national crimes are committed in the name of one of these [provisions].” [15] It is difficult for free countries to arbitrarily deprive citizens of their freedom, yet communist regimes can openly take advantage of loopholes in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
c. Promoting Communist Political Ideas Worldwide
The communist specter, through its agents, repeatedly raises global problems and claims that these problems can be solved only through international collaboration and global power structures. Its true goal is to establish a world government. Consequently, various countries are restricted and regulated more and more by a growing number of international treaties, thus weakening their national sovereignty.
Many groups support international power structures of this sort, and although such groups are not necessarily communist, their claims are consistent with communist goals — that is, to eventually abolish individual nations and establish a world government.
In Chapter Sixteen, we detailed how communism uses the claim of protecting the environment to advance its agenda. Environmentalism has gone hand in hand with the drive to weaken national sovereignty and promote supranational political power.
A media personality said on Earth Day 1970: “Humanity needs a world order. The fully sovereign nation is incapable of dealing with the poisoning of the environment. … The management of the planet, therefore, whether we are talking about the need to prevent war or the need to prevent ultimate damage to the conditions of life, requires a world government.” [16]
The Humanist Manifesto II of 1973 also declared: “We have reached a turning point in human history where the best option is to transcend the limits of national sovereignty and to move toward the building of a world community. … Thus we look to the development of a system of world law and a world order based upon transnational federal government.” [17]
In fact, the establishment of the UN Environment Programme came about precisely because a group that advocated for a global confederacy in 1972 considered the environmental issue to be a world issue, and therefore called for the development of global solutions and the establishment of a global environmental protection agency. Its first director was Maurice Strong, a Canadian with strong socialist tendencies.
At the UN Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992 (also known as the UN Conference on Environment and Development), 178 governments voted to adopt Agenda 21. This eight-hundred-page blueprint includes content on the environment, women’s rights, medical care, and so on. An influential environmental researcher who became an official of the UN Environment Programme said: “National sovereignty — the power of a country to control events within its territory — has lost much of its meaning in today’s world, where borders are routinely breached by pollution, international trade, financial flows, and refugees. … Nations are in effect ceding portions of their sovereignty to the international community, and beginning to create a new system of international environmental governance as a means of solving otherwise-unmanageable problems.” [18]
Superficially, many arguments for a world government seem reasonable, but their true purpose is to spread communism and dominate the world. Communist regimes often publicly decry interference in other countries’ affairs while actively participating in the various international organizations promoting the concept of global governance.
Boutros-Ghali initiated rapid advances in the UN’s march toward world government during his term as secretary-general from 1992 to 1996. He called for the formation of a permanent UN army and pressed for the right to collect taxes. [19] The United States opposed allowing him to serve a second term, and one can only imagine how much more powerful the UN would be today if not for that intervention.
In 2002, Secretary-General Kofi Annan said, “In an age of interdependence, global citizenship is a crucial pillar of progress.” Robert Chandler, a former US Air Force colonel and White House strategist, believed that Annan’s so-called progress threatened national sovereignty and opened the way for a global civil society under the governance of a “massive, faceless international bureaucracy, which would … relegate individuals to the status of worker ants in a socialist authoritarian universe.” UN programs like Teaching Toward a Culture of Peace were actually organized and overseen by ultra-leftists, whom Chandler believed were intent on destroying national sovereignty. [20]
The 1958 book The Naked Communist outlined the forty-five goals of communists, one of which states: “Promote the U.N. as the only hope for mankind. If its charter is rewritten, demand that it be set up as one-world government with its own independent armed forces.” [21] A world government cannot be established in the short term, thus, communists and globalists use various issues to establish international institutions in various fields, then promote the unity of these institutions, and continue to advocate for dependence on the UN.
d. World Government and Totalitarianism
There is nothing wrong with envisioning a better world or future. Seeking to establish a world government to solve all of mankind’s problems, however, is no different from the misguided “dictatorship of the proletariat” or central planning promoted by communism.
Advocating for a world government, strengthening the role of the UN, portraying the UN as a panacea for solving all problems in today’s world — all of this is part of an attempt to play God and arrange the future of humankind. Were such a regime established, it would inevitably descend into communist-style totalitarianism.
To attract countries to join it, a world government would invariably offer tantalizing benefits, promises of welfare, and a blueprint of a global utopia for humankind.
However, an unavoidable issue faced by a world government is how to actually implement its policies — be they political, military, economic, or other. To push through its policies on a global scale, such a government couldn’t take the form of a free republic like that of the United States; by necessity, it would be a totalitarian regime, like that of the Soviet Union or the PRC.
This centralization would elevate the power of the government to an unmatched level, and its control over society would be unprecedented. At this stage, such a world government wouldn’t bother with achieving consensus among its member countries or heed any commitments made to them; instead, it would solely focus on the forceful implementation of its policies.
In the world today, there exist great differences among countries. Many countries have neither orthodox faiths nor free societies, not to mention respect for human rights or high moral standards. If countries were to combine to form a world government, that government would have to adopt the lowest standard among them, eliminating any requirements relating to faith and belief, morality, and human rights. In other words, countries would be given a free pass on these issues, as the concept of so-called “neutrality” in religion, morality, and human rights would be used to unite them. A world government would inevitably promote a mainstream culture in order to unify the world, despite the fact that each country has its own cultural traditions and religious beliefs.
Of the experts, scholars, and government officials who actively advocate a world government, the majority are atheists or those who hold progressive views on religious faith. Clearly, a world government would have atheism as its core value — an inevitable consequence, given that communism is the force behind a world government. Furthermore, because cultural and linguistic differences between peoples would impede global authority, proponents of world government often oppose concepts like patriotism or localism, which are essential for the well-being of nation-states.
To maintain its rule, this world government would forcibly and violently implement ideological re-education. To prevent fragmentation or independence movements by member countries, a world government would greatly strengthen its military and police forces and tighten its control over freedom of speech and the media.
The government of a country or region whose people do not have a shared faith and culture could rely only on totalitarian rule to stay in power, and the result would be the loss of individual freedom.
In the end, a world government could only be realized as a totalitarian project, featuring the same enslavement, abuse, and degradation of its subjects seen under communist regimes today and throughout history. But instead of being confined to a single country, this totalitarianism would extend to the entire world, leaving the communist specter practically unopposed in its plan to corrupt human traditional culture, eradicate belief in the divine, and finally destroy humanity itself.
4. Cultural Globalization: A Means of Corrupting Humanity
As cultural exchanges and capital flows expand throughout the world, the various deviant cultural forms that communism has established over the past nearly one hundred years — such as modern art, literature, and thought; deviant entertainment and lifestyles; and consumerism — are transmitted globally. During this process, the traditions of various ethnic groups are interrupted and severed from their original meaning, resulting in hollow, degenerate lifestyles geared toward consumption and profit, breaking down morality and society wherever they are spread.
Willi Münzenberg, the German communist activist and one of the founders of the Frankfurt School, said: “[We must] organise the intellectuals and use them to make Western civilization stink. Only then, after they have corrupted all its values and made life impossible, can we impose the dictatorship of the proletariat.” [22]
Indeed, as described in previous chapters of this book, the heritage of Western civilization has been replaced by deviated modern pop culture. Globalization and globalism bring this degeneracy to all corners of the earth.
Globally, the United States leads in the political, economic, and military arenas. Its unique position in these fields carries over to American popular culture, which is readily accepted and adopted by other countries and regions. After infiltrating and corrupting the family unit, politics, the economy, law, arts, the media, and popular culture across all aspects of daily life in the United States, communism made use of cultural globalization to export this corrupted culture. Seen as the newest, most desirable trends from America, it spread across the entire world. Through Hollywood movies, inhabitants of China’s far-flung conservative inland villages learned that single mothers, extramarital affairs, and sexual liberation are all “normal” aspects of life in the “advanced” West. Rock ‘n’ roll became extremely popular across the world, from Ecuador in South America, to Malaysia in Southeast Asia, to Fiji in the Pacific Islands. In education, the ideology underpinning the Common Core curriculum created by cultural Marxists was almost instantaneously reflected in Taiwan’s secondary-school textbooks. In the blink of an eye, the Occupy Wall Street movement in New York was shown on television screens in the remotest mountain hamlets of India.
Cultural globalization is the hurricane that blows the deviant culture of the West and the Party culture of communist totalitarian regimes throughout the entire world, mercilessly sweeping away the traditional values that have guided humanity for thousands of years.
a. Destroying the World’s Cultural Traditions
Every ethnic culture has unique characteristics and carries the deep influences of its own special history. Despite the differences between ethnic cultures, they all observe the same divinely bestowed universal values in their traditions. After the Industrial Revolution, technological development brought about convenience, and simultaneously, tradition was labeled by progressives as backward. Measuring everything based on its modernness, novelty, and “progress” — or whether it has commercial value — is now standard.
Communism promotes values that seem noble, but, in reality, are aimed at having humankind abandon traditional values, replacing them with homogeneous and deteriorated modern values instead. Today’s so-called common values formed by cultural exchange in the process of globalization aren’t from any particular tradition — they are modern values. The elements and values that are adopted by globalism must, of necessity, deviate from tradition. They include only the crassest elements of existing cultural heritage, as well as the aspects that can be commercialized. Notions about the “common destiny of humankind” and “our common future” are the results of such deviated values.
The lowest standard that is recognized during cultural globalization manifests in consumer culture. Product design and marketing, driven by economic interests, are entirely centered on appealing to consumers’ base instincts. The aim is to control humankind by seducing, indulging, and satisfying people’s superficial desires.
This global consumerist culture is used to corrupt tradition in multiple ways. First, the unique characteristics and meaning behind a product, as originated from its ethnic culture, are removed. In other words, tradition is taken away from products through deculturalization, or standardization. The more alienated a group of people is from their cultural heritage and faith, the more susceptible they become to such a simplified consumerist culture. Over time, through globalization, this population’s customs and identity devolve to only the low level needed to maintain a cheap commercial culture bereft of meaning and morality.
Second, the globalized media industry and its monopolies have enabled communist elements to easily make use of the degenerated ideas behind products. They advertise the superficial cultural aspects of products and introduce Marxist ideology while promoting them. The hybridization of cultures through globalization thus becomes another channel for promoting communist ideology.
Third, a global culture makes consumerism the mainstream culture of society. Commercials, films, television shows, and social media constantly bombard consumers with the idea that they are not living a real life if they don’t consume or own certain products, or seek to be entertained in particular ways. Communism uses different means and entertainment to prompt people to pursue the satisfaction of their base desires. As people indulge these desires, they move away from the spiritual plane, causing them to deviate from their long-held divine beliefs and traditional values within a few short generations.
As communism quickly spreads its deteriorated ideology amid the backdrop of globalization, it utilizes the herd mentality. With frequent exposure to news media, social media, commercials, television shows, and films, people are bombarded with various anti-traditional ideologies. This creates an illusion that such deteriorated ideologies represent a global consensus. People gradually become numb to the damage wrought by these ideologies, as twisted behaviors come to be seen as fashionable and people are urged to take pride in them. Substance abuse, sexual liberation, degenerate music, abstract art, and much more all spread in this fashion.
Modern art is degenerate and violates all traditional definitions of aesthetics. Some people may have realized this at first, but after modern artworks are constantly exhibited in major metropolitan areas and sold at high prices, and when the media frequently reports on dark and strange works, normal people begin to believe that they’re the ones who’ve fallen out of touch with fashion and that it’s their taste in art that needs to be updated. Gaslighted by this aesthetic trend, people begin to negate their own sense of the beautiful and to favor deteriorated art forms.
All manner of deteriorated culture masked as Western culture is currently being spread to every corner of the world. Hollywood, in particular, has become a major carrier of various ideologies that stem from cultural Marxism. The special characteristics of the movie industry allow it to make people subconsciously accept its values. As described in Chapter Thirteen, film has the power to depict compelling atmospheres, narratives, and personalities, immersing audiences in the director’s viewpoint. Hollywood movies play an enormous role in shaping audiences’ values and worldview.
In this book, we have also discussed how cultural Marxism has taken over Western education (see Chapter Twelve), and, in turn, exposed foreign students studying in Western countries to various leftist ideologies. When they return to their countries, they spread these ideologies, which are seen as attractive because Western countries are more technologically advanced and economically developed. Thus, these ideologies encounter little resistance as they spread and destroy the local traditional culture.
These modern globalist values have also become ubiquitous and mainstream via the corporate culture of multinational corporations. The promotion of sexual liberation has developed rapidly through globalization, seriously impacting and corroding the moral values of traditional society.
In 2016, a large global chain retailer announced that their store dressing rooms and restrooms would be “friendly to transgender people,” meaning that men could enter women’s restrooms or locker rooms at will if they self-identified as women. The American Family Association said the policy was harmful to women and children and called on consumers to boycott the company. To date, the association’s pledge to boycott the store chain has received more than 1.5 million signatures. [23] Boycotts have become unrealistic, however, as more and more companies across society have adopted such policies. Communism is able to utilize the herd mentality because many people do not have a strong will. Once humankind deviates from divinely imparted traditions, everything becomes relative and changes over time. The situation becomes ripe for exploitation.
Under the conditions of globalization, mutual respect and tolerance of different national cultures have become mainstream. Communism has used this to distort the concept of tolerance and make value neutrality a “global consensus,” thereby advocating deviant ideas.
b. The UN’s Role in Spreading Degenerate Values
Article 13 of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child states, “The child shall have the right to freedom of expression; this right shall include freedom to seek, receive and impart information and ideas of all kinds, regardless of frontiers, either orally, in writing or in print, in the form of art, or through any other media of the child’s choice.” [24]
Some scholars have asked: If parents do not allow their children to wear T-shirts with Satanic symbolism, does it constitute a violation of children’s rights? Do children have the right to choose how they speak to their parents? Children may lack judgment; if they commit acts of violence or violate ethical norms, can parents discipline them? These worries are not unwarranted. In 2017, Ontario, Canada, passed a law that parents should not deny children’s wishes of gender expression (i.e., children could select their own genders). Parents who don’t accept their child’s chosen gender identity may be considered to be engaging in child abuse, and their children could be taken away by the state. [25]
In 1990, the World Health Organization announced that homosexuality was not a mental illness, which greatly elevated and spurred on the LGBT movement worldwide. Under the conditions of globalization, AIDS spread globally, and the most susceptible group, homosexuals, became a focus of social concern and public discussion. Communism has thus promoted the expansion of the LGBT cause. South Africa was the first country to introduce a new convention at the UN Human Rights Council that requires that the recognition of sexual orientation and gender identity be used as an indicator of upholding human rights. The convention, the first that directly targeted sexual orientation and gender identity, was ultimately adopted. In reality, the convention normalizes what used to be considered deviant ideas by attributing to them the same importance as natural rights.
Communism thus uses globalization to mutate and destroy traditional culture and moral values in an all-encompassing fashion. This includes the use of developed countries, global enterprises, and international institutions. People are immersed in the superficial convenience of a globalized lifestyle, but they are not aware of the rapid transformations occurring at the level of ideology and consciousness. In just a few decades, these completely new ideas have engulfed many parts of the world. Wherever these ideas go, the culture changes — even the oldest and most closed countries can’t escape. If this trend continues, civilization itself will be lost.
Traditional culture is the root of human existence and an important safeguard for human beings to maintain moral standards. It is the key for people to return to the righteous path and be saved by their Creator. In the process of globalization, traditional culture has been twisted and ruined by the arrangements of the communist specter. The long-term moral crisis human civilization faces is unprecedented.
5. Upholding National Heritage and Universal Values
Different nationalities and countries have existed for millennia. Although they exist in different regions, have different social forms and political systems, use different languages, and have different cultural and psychological qualities, all share common universal values. These universal values are the core of traditional culture for all ethnic groups.
By using globalization in conjunction with other historical processes over the last few centuries, the communist specter has greatly expanded its power in the human world and brought tremendous damage to the divinely inspired traditional cultures of mankind.
In the first half of the twentieth century, communists took power in Russia and China, slaughtering the cultural elites and destroying the traditional culture of these two vast nations. After World War II, the communist camp infiltrated and controlled international organizations such as the UN, abused democratic procedures to allow the majority to conquer the minority, and used money to win over small countries in an attempt to use the UN’s supranational power to spread its political system worldwide.
Around the world, especially after the end of the Cold War, communism’s representatives in both the East and the West began using international political, economic, and cultural exchanges and cooperation to expand and control globalization. Globalist institutions promote degenerate values in virtually every country on earth, aiding the communist specter’s systematic destruction of universal values, traditional culture, and faith in the divine.
In the little more than one hundred years since the emergence of communism on the global stage, these transnational political and economic forces have come to wield formidable power, imperiling sovereign nations everywhere with the agenda of world government.
Only with the return of tradition can people restore their national identity and sovereignty and create a harmonious international environment governed by upright universal values. This will allow humankind to banish the communist specter and live under the protection and grace of the divine.
References
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20. Chandler, Shadow World, 401–403.
21. W. Cleon Skousen, The Naked Communist (Salt Lake City: Izzard Ink Publishing, 1958), chap. 12.
22. Willi Münzenberg, as quoted in Bernard Connolly, The Rotten Heart of Europe: Dirty War for Europe’s Money (London: Faber & Faber, 2013).
23. “Sign the Boycott Target Pledge!” American Family Association, April 2016, https://www.afa.net/target.
24. United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, “Convention on the Rights of the Child” (Geneva: United Nations, 1989), https://www.ohchr.org/en/professionalinterest/pages/crc.aspx.
25. Grace Carr, “Ontario Makes Disapproval of Kid’s Gender Choice Potential Child Abuse,” Daily Caller, June 5, 2017, https://dailycaller.com/2017/06/05/ontario-makes-disapproval-of-kids-gender-choice-child-abuse.