Stephen Marshall, co-founder of Guerrilla News Network (GNN), has written an anti-globalization manifesto, Wolves in Sheep’s Clothing, challenging Thomas L. Friedman’s creepy spin in The World is Flat. I’ve met Stephen and find him an intense, sincere investigator and artist. I have never met Thomas but every interview I have seen with him has gotten under my skin in a bad way. A brief scan of this chapter excerpt is chilling. I hope Stephan is actually wrong. My only caveat concerning the politics of dissident news organizations like GNN is how they define themselves in the mold of a negative “us” vs. “them” paradigm. I think there is a danger in the concept of the information-will-set-you-free strategy of the left, but in this case it may be necessary to be a better informed consumer of the feel-good cheerleaders of liberal global markets.
Marshall cites Samir Amin’s The Liberal Virus: Permanent War and the Americanization of the World as Friedman’s foil. I like the concept of the virus, but for real social change I’d like to propose that the most destructive virus is alphabetic literacy. It is one of the most cannibalizing mind fraks ever invented by human beings. It has the capacity to subsume the holistic perception of the right-brain. No doubt, a person trained in the left-brain print literate universe sees everything as flat. Is the alphabet evil? Not necessarily, after all, I’m using it as a tool for education, yet what is wrong is an imbalanced mind, one that only thinks in the materialistic capacity of the left-brain. The point of this small diatribe is that I hope critics will also avoid the materialistic, flat world approach to critical thinking.
AlterNet: Sorry, Thomas Friedman, the World Is Round:
If Thomas Friedman is the prophet of 21st century capitalism, then Samir Amin is his anti-Christ. But to hear Amin tell it, Friedman is the only one leading humankind into the depths of Hell. Writing from Dakar, Senegal, where he runs the Third World Forum, Amin’s thesis is essentially that liberalism, if allowed to continue on its path of creative destruction, will lead to an apocalyptic end. He likens the globalizing force of liberalism to a virus that has destroyed all ideological competitors and that is now making its final assault on its host species. According to Amin, the ethic of liberalism — “Long live competition, may the strong win” — is now ravaging societies of the Third World, causing further “social alienation and pauperization of urban classes.”
It’s nothing new from the far, far left. There are shelves full of books by anti-globalization writers from the developing world. What made me pick up Samir Amin’s essay, though, was the striking specificity of his warning. In Liberal Virus, he argues that liberalism’s most decisive effect will be to divide the world into an apartheid system that sees 3 billion peasant farmers pushed from their land and forced into the cities where they will die. This, he explains, will result from the implementation of a 2001 World Trade Organization (WTO) mandate that all agricultural markets be opened to the expansion of commercial agribusiness producers. Without the ability to make a subsistence living from their own land, half the world’s population will have to migrate to the urban centers where there is no work for them. And thus, he concludes, they will be trapped in an “organized system of apartheid” on a global scale.
