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“Globalization has caused discrimination?” said First Deputy Managing Director, Stanley Fischer; “I thought it was the opposite” (Pilger, 2001) As in, because of discrimination, globalization is the moneymaker it is today for certain people, and always has been. Fischer’s statement was not an expression of ignorance, or a remark made in crudeness. To my mind, his point is valid, I agree with it, but not because it counters an argument but underlines it.
How capitalist powers have profited from decades, centuries, off of nonindustrial countries, will continue to do so until usurped. This is because globalization “is not natural, it is designed” assesses Dita Sari, a protester to this system (Pilger, 2001). A system can be coordinated, challenged, changed, and reformed. Unfortunately, Globalization is a system that works but for the wrong reasons.
John Pilger’s New Rulers of the World (2001) focuses on Indonesia, one of the many countries ruined by Western hands. The documentary is actually rooted in how Globalization sponsored the Indonesian Holocaust, an overlooked tragedy of the 1960s that continues to steamroll the nation today as debt oppresses the population but the government permits its country to be a institution of beggars. This is a problem resulting from the faceless, foreign powers with “the divine right of multinational corporations and the financial institutions and governments that back them” (Pilger, 2001).
The issue is not in publicizing victims such as Indonesia as much as it is in spotlighting its oppressors. What we tell ourselves, what we project, as both the uninformed and the cognizant is to believe that, politically, Globalization equalizes. That this economic concept will give everyone a chance, or a job, when it’s “exactly the opposite” (Pilger, 2001) directs Environmentalist, George Monboit. And its worse, since what we see and stand aside for is actually Genocide. Guy Taylor illustrates this as “violence on a huge scale” because Globalization is “the literal raping of a country through third world debt” (Pilger, 2001).
The terrifying thing is that the debt cannot be lifted. It was the single moment that legitimize how inexcusable this situation has always been. Not wiping out the debt is rationalized, and considered an unwise, economic suicide for a Western country as well as a languid move for indebted country. Professor Jeffrey Winters forwards the unwavering answer: “We would go bankrupt” (Pilger, 2001), that lenders would be worse of than the exploited. The more political response is declared by Stanley Fischer, that the lenders give the exploited a reason to strive because “what will lift people out of poverty is not cancelling their debt but what policies their countries pursue” (Pilger, 2001), which would include a slew of evaluations on weeding out corruption, promoting rights for domestic export, and a lot of willingness from the industrial countries. If anything, Fischer’s explanation blames the indebted country for what it does with the little money it has and not the businesses that are suckling the country into starvation.
Unfortunately, Stanley Fischer draws out the actuality of how disagreeable and drawn out that case would be to get the industrial power to agree to change. Again, “Globalization has caused discrimination? I thought it was the opposite” (Pilger, 2001), is the stubborn greed that has to be extinguished. It is the initial and inherit discrimination that hoards the earnings for the rich and keeps the colored peoples in need. This equation is “the world we’re living in now” (Pilger, 2001), moralizes Dr Susan George, where it is unquestioned that the same multibillion dollar profit is shared amongst a domestic nation’s population versus an foreign investment bank with a hundred partners. And those partners are not looking to slim down their paychecks.
The designing of Globalization was never in the favor of the country it extorts. From the beginning, it was orchestrated by the many heads of Western Capitalism with a list of demands and policies and one-sided investments that industrial countries continue to benefit from. Yes, we could do something about it—and the beginnings can be extremely simple. We can, as Barry Coates says, “act as informed consumers” (Pilger, 2001). We can question our labels, our companies, our retailers. We can directly inquire on matters that they are unlikely to give fully aware and completely honest answers about the standards and conditions of the sweatshop economy we bathe ourselves with. But what we will do has to be better than that. It must be. The theme of The New Rulers of the World (2001) is to present us enough atrocities to stand-up and change the system. Watching the documentary makes us spectators; we need to be activists.
Citations
Pilger, J. (Producer). A (2001, July 18) The New Rulers of the World [Television Broadcast]. London, UK: ITV1.
