The Death of Nations
We won’t see it reported in the corporate media, but we all know that nations as sovereign states with the right to chart their own course no longer exist. An autopsy would reveal the cause of death to be the inexorable, incremental and insidious cancerous metastasis of the small global power elite that was decades, if not centuries in the making. The continued posturing of independence within nations is now reduced to more and more obvious stagecraft. Patriotism is a form of necromancy. But while globalization’s vulture capitalists pick over the unburied remains of formerly sovereign nations at State liquidation sales and continue to go about the business of cannibalizing the planet, we are left to wonder... what’s next?
Actually, the death of nations is good and bad news. There doesn’t have to be a conceptual vacuum once we give up the illusion that viable nations still exists in any meaningful sense of the term. Consider the implications of their demise. First, if we can no longer say we’re ‘in’ France, or the U.S., or Nigeria or Japan... just where are we? Any re-constructed sense of where we are can’t ignore the geo-political/ economic grid we’ve super-imposed over our Earth. We can’t shift our allegiance and footing to landmasses and ignore this mess under our feet, so giving primacy to the tectonic plates we live on won’t work. Narrowing it down to bio-regions or watersheds and a felt connection to the river valleys, mountain ranges, prairies, rainforests, etc., that we live within is a good idea, but that won’t work either. It would if we lived in a pristine, natural world, or one with only appropriate, small scale human technology in harmony with the natural world around us - but we don’t. We need a more holistic perspective, one capable of containing within itself a conceptual sense of place for us, while still acknowledging these big rotting corpses and the vultures feasting upon them. Only the planetary perspective will work. It alone is all-encompassing enough to incorporate the carcasses of these behemoths we have to contend with, yet still able to contain within itself the fact that we are all here together in this mess. It alone provides us with the psychic solidarity we now urgently need to fend off the vultures.
Placing ourselves on Earth, rather than ‘in’ nations is an act of collective growing up, just as children eventually have to give up believing in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny. Fairy tales can be comforting, but we eventually outgrow them because their enchanted magical landscapes don‘t really exist. We can’t pretend we live in them. So too, it’s time for us to give up the fantasy that nations are still independent sovereign entities that we live within. For one thing, doing so will end the increasingly dangerous sense of insularity we now have. This perceived insularity is born out of the false notion that we’re separated from others of our kind who are ensconced in their respective nations. Grounding ourselves together on Mother Earth is an evolutionary ‘growing up’ that will empower us as a species by making possible within the mass of humanity a newly emerging supra-organization seven billion strong.
We can have that - or we can have it’s bizarro world opposite - the globalization nightmare of der Bilderbergers... The choice is ours.
With the death of nations, if we’re no longer Australians, or Chinese or Egyptians, then just who are we? We need a new ‘Us’ to confront the new ‘them‘. To still self-identify with moribund nations only renders us vulnerable to continued manipulation and engineered squabbling among ourselves. It distracts us from realizing that ‘We’ now all face the same enemy. This new ‘We’ is all of us. Our species. Only this larger ’We’ is powerful enough to confront the new ‘Them’. In spite of all the fear mongering, our worst enemy isn’t the Taliban or al Qaeda. The Taliban isn’t recklessly tampering with the global food supply through GMO foods and a market-based agricultural policy rather than one based on human need. It isn’t endangering all ocean life with frankenfish. al Qaeda isn’t driving subsistence farmers around the world off their land, or to suicide through multi-national agri-business land grabs. No terrorist group is buying up all the seed banks in the world and forcing farmers to cultivate ever more expensive GMO seeds and the increasing amounts of herbicides and pesticides needed to make them grow. No crime syndicate is responsible for the grand scale usury loan sharking that is driving once sovereign nations into impossible debt and subsequent IMF technocrat takeover. No insurgent group - foreign or domestic -has taken responsibility for the worst attacks of eco-terrorism in our lifetimes: the BP Gulf oil spill, Fukushima, and global warming.
The only fanatical religion our enemy embraces is greed. The only ideology they strive to advance is one of total control. Attila the Hun, the Vandals and every thug horde throughout history put together, didn’t commit the extent of pillaging and plunder they‘ve already gotten away with. They’re destroying natural resources at an alarming rate. Through bogus, deceptively boring sounding trade agreements that benefit the power elite and the multi-national corporations they own, they’re dismantling our environmental, health, and worker protections. They’re siphoning off the national wealth of once independent countries through WTO and IMF strong-arm tactics. (First they came for Greece, and no one said anything, etc., etc..). Through structural adjustment policies they’re privatizing our infrastructures, water and other necessities of life and extracting the last drop of life energy they can from us by raising retirement ages higher and higher, lowering wages and gutting retirement funds and collective bargaining rights. They are the enemy we must all be wary of and resist... Do the math.
Seven billion of us vs. a few hundred of them.
An emerging species-wide “Us’ is the best leverage we have to overcome the enemy’s global over-reach. For the first time in history, our social networking tools make this new ‘Us’ possible. A new planetary discourse and sharing of information for ’Us’, and by ’Us’, has already begun. Many of today’s news and political commentary internet sites are more relevant and newsworthy than the daily inundation of info-tainment and electronic slop and swill we’re subjected to from the corporate media. No matter what language they broadcast in, the corporate medias everywhere now all exist for the same purpose - not to create an informed citizenry, but to distract us, and misdirect our attention from the creeping neo-feudalism on our doorsteps.
Self-identified as a species, one among many; we can also once again feel our kinship to the rest of creation. Our alienation from our Earth and all other living beings is what led to the de-sacrilized commodification of life we see today. Future generations may well view us not as the Age of Space Exploration, but as the Age of Exploitation. That the very same mindset of exploitation is now extending to us was inevitable from the outset. What we reap, we sow. We must re-weave ourselves meaningfully once again into the web of life. We can do this once we transfer our primary sense of belonging from dead nations to our living, vibrant Earth and all of creation. We must everywhere begin to openly and passionately pledge our allegiance to Earth, and life; if we want to survive.
As ‘We’ grow in solidarity, we can keep each other informed about what ‘they‘ are doing, and co-ordinate a collective resistance to ‘them’. This new planet-wide solidarity among Us will be established not by outer political overthrow, but by dialogue, allegiance and conceptualization. We were born into a conceptual framework of nations and programmed to feel an emotional bond and belonging to them. But just because we were born into something, doesn’t mean we have to keep buying into it when our own best interests, our very survival, lie elsewhere. Now that autonomous nations are dead by any meaningful measure of sovereignty - we must stop buying into the fallacy that our fates are still tied to them, or that the agenda of the globalization advance men who pose as national leaders share our values and priorities. To continue to assume that they are on our side rather than the side of the enemy, is just wishful thinking and willful naiveté.
As children in whatever nation we were born into, we were all taught The Glorious Story of our nation’s birth. We were taught to believe that it was our story too, and learned to reckon all meaningful time from its beginning. Historical events prior to this heroic narrative were just footnotes to the main text. Throughout our childhoods, we were tested over and over again on our knowledge of our respective Glorious Story’s details, dates and main characters. Murders in the hundreds of thousands, even millions were glossed over in its telling and re-telling. If lands of indigenous peoples were stolen to establish our nation, that was only prologue to The Glorious Story. Their genocidal killing was only given passing reference, explained away under the rubric of ‘Manifest Destiny”, or some such term equally dismissive and exculpatory.
With the death of nations, we must start to tell a new story. Maybe we’ll start it from the time our forebears roamed the African savannah. Then at some point, some of us wandered out of Africa in little bands to every landmass on Earth. Over time, we evolved differently colored eyes and skin to more successfully adapt to whatever local eco-system we settled in. Noses narrowed in places of frigid air. Chests expanded in thin mountain atmospheres.
At some point in this new narrative mention must be made of how we eventually found each other again after many, many generations had passed. Our coming together was not always non-violent, but through it; we learned of the rest of our kind who was with us here on Earth. Mention must also be made of our human propensity for tinkering and tool-making. It is this trait that eventually enabled us to harness electricity, and through it; we began to talk to each other at the planetary level. Our dialog deepened. Our unity grew. In social networking sites, without the mediation of any elites to control the parameters of our discourse, we soon began to realize that we were all in the same situation, we all faced the same enemy. We began to enmass not physically - but in consciousness, a unity born of shared peril and shared allegiance to Earth and life.
The true story of nations began not with the Glorious Stories we were told, but with the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648, which brought into being the first nation states. Nations had a 350 odd year run. Hardly a blip on the radar screen of human history. The Medeival world of royal courts and kingdoms lasted longer than that.
The chapter on nations is ending. It’s time for us to evolve and start a new chapter in human history.