I’ve got a coworker who is driving me nuts with their Satanic panic, so I wanted to find a nice YouTube video about it, and I found Getting Sweaty About Globalism by Thought Slime. It’s pretty good, and it is down the page a bit, but first let me give you some definitions that really explain it a bit.
Real Globalism
Real, actual globalism is a reference to global capitalism. In general, it means that both resources and products are moved all over the world; so your phone might have been designed in California, but it was made from materials that came from Congo, other parts of the US, Canada, Saudi Arabia, and Bolivia, and those were shipped to China, where people built the phones under such horrible conditions that the factory has a suicide prevention net around it. When China steals your job, that was really globalism stealing it; it just took it to China after it stole it. (If a kid steals your car and drives it into a river, do you say that the river stole the car?)
Globalism doesn’t want to destroy your culture unless your culture has a problem with capitalism, and then you’re in big trouble. But let’s say your culture is fine with capitalism — globalism will happily take your culture, turn it into something marketable and sell it all over the world. The same globalized corporation will happily sell you some Christian wall art, a thin blue line flag, a BLM t-shirt, a gay pride button, and a 10-inch Baphomet statue. It will even sell you a leftist book — “There’s nothing you can say about capitalism that it won’t subsume and sell back to you.“
In order to make more money, global capitalism wants to get rid of regulation wherever it finds it, and it does that by existing outside the nation state (it can move any component of its operation to whichever nation favors that particular piece of the business) and buying off government officials or even whole governments. Global capital favors weak governments, and especially weak international government (e.g., the UN) because that allows it to maximize profit and externalize costs to you, the normal person who does not own capital. Globalism wants us all to exist under a kind of normalized international contract law — like (right-wing) libertarianism, it wants the government’s only role to be enforcing property rights and contracts with force or the threat of force.
Fake Globalism
The pretend globalism of right-wing fever dreams is something very different. Fascists like to pretend that capitalism is great, but that globalism is really a conspiracy by Jewish people, who are also Satanists, who are also pedophiles, to enslave white Christians and force them into doing sinful things like gay sex or making a cake for a gay wedding (which is apparently just as sinful as the sex). Did I mention that the righties think that these Jewish pedophile Satanists also control all the banks? So when right wingers say “bankers” they really mean Jewish people. The purpose, then, of this bullshit version of globalism is to take your very real and very valid rage against capitalism and nudge it in the direction of various marginalized groups who are easy targets for your hatred, and Jewish people are typically placed at the apex of this fictional conspiracy.
Fascists are fine with actual globalism as long as it can be built to serve the needs of their preferred hierarchy, which typically puts straight, white, Christian men at the top. They like how capitalism can be used as a tool of domination, but they hate one of the good things about it — the fact that it promotes all kinds of cultures (as a side effect of product design and marketing).
Fascists may claim that they are opposed to wars of choice, but if they manage to conquer their host nation, they inevitably turn their attention outward. They see everything good in the world as their rightful property, so they don’t have any reason not to try to grab Venezuelan oil, Bolivian lithium, or Chinese labor. They may claim that they are opposed to “internationalism” but they will gladly work with fascists from other nations, as they’ve done both in World War II and now, with fascists from different nations inspiring each other and even going to other countries to fight.
The Left’s Option
For the sake of completeness, I should mention that the left’s take on global capitalism (aka, globalism) is that it is bad. And if there were an evil ethnic group trying to take over the world, I’m positive that the left would oppose that — white supremacists are an evil ethnic group and the left opposes them, while still supporting white people because they are people. The left’s position is that all working people should try to have solidarity with each other all over the world, support each other’s differences, live in peace, and live in a way that is sustainable so we can maintain that peace. The left wants us all to have the opportunity to be citizens of the world. It’s the consistent goodness of the left that makes it so dangerous to capital and fascists alike, who will then claim that since goodness is not possible, the left must truly be evil.
But here’s that Thought Slime video I mentioned. It’s entertaining. (28 minutes)
And here is Philosophy Tube’s take on Antisemitism (56 minutes):