Beware of Global Strategies of TensionTony Cartalucci, Contributor However, the people of the world in general must recognize corruption, monopolies, and imperialism in all of its forms, regardless of what flag is being flown and be ever vigilant against these dangers. While geopolitical analysts today may consider BRICS and the SCO as essential for maintaining a multipolar balance of power against the West, the risk of a strategy of tension creating increasingly centralized supranational blocs facing off against each other may leave whomever prevails with the capacity to carry out global despotism on an even grander scale. Image: A Russian nuclear missile. It was mutually assured destruction the ultimate balance of power that prevented catastrophic war from breaking out between East and West. Balancing power, offering deterrence against aggression and exploitation has been the study of tacticians for thousands of years and is a subject the global elite are well versed in. The masses must also familiarize themselves with such concepts and formulate their own means of balancing power locally and nationally to keep in check powers both foreign and domestic that seek domination through exploiting economic, social, and tactical disparity. (source: Wikipedia) Worldwide, people must begin identifying national and international special interests, and rejecting them all entirely. They must begin devising local alternatives by leveraging technology and collaboration where possible, and realizing that nationalism, localism, and borders in general represent indispensable protective bulkheads with which to stop the spread of abuse of power, exploitation, military aggression, corruption of all kinds, and both social and financial dysfunction. An Informed, Active, Vigilant Citizenry Is Needed The world must perform a careful balancing act to ensure Western financier oligarchy is kept in check, or ideally rolled back, while ensuring in our haste or zeal we do not create its replacement in the process. An international, multipolar balance of power requires that each nation-state acquires, maintains, and continuously expands a certain degree of independence in terms of economics and defense. Within a nation and its provinces, to achieve such balance, a certain degree of independence amongst individuals and their communities is required. To enhance individual and local independence, we can do everything from being responsible firearms owners, growing a garden, patronizing local businesses and industry, learning a trade, and simply learning how to organize and work with our neighbors to solve our own problems. While we are faced with immense, overwhelming global problems stemming from monolithic powers these powers are fed by each and every one of us individually when we pay into multinational corporations and their contrived institutions, laws, and regulations. If our collective actions can create and compound these problems, surely they can solve them. It is disparity that is used to sell globalization; disparity in climate, in the resources present within ones borders, of the quality and education of ones work force, and the disparity between nations in their ability to defend themselves. These are all factors that govern the form globalization takes, including all of its supposed benefits and the serial exploitation it leaves behind. We are told that globalizations interdependent relationships governed by centralized international institutions are the keys to solving these disparities. This is not true. Policy never has and never will solve our problems as a species. Instead, it is through technological research and development, innovation and invention, investment in defense, infrastructure, and education that these disparities can truly be reduced or all together eliminated, creating stronger communities and in-turn a stronger nation-state while deterring aggression and exploitation at our borders. Trade and collaboration with ones neighbors becomes a supplement to a strong independent nation, not a necessity and certainly not a liability in a time of crisis. We must ask our elected representatives why these obvious measures are not being taken to address these disparities. Why are we exploiting poorly educated workforces for cheap labor instead of leveraging technology and education to create the same products domestically, better and cheaper? Why are we importing certain goods instead of devising ways to produce them locally? Why are we struggling for fuel abroad instead of making a serious effort to develop alternatives at home? The questions could go on ad infinitum and illustrate just how globalization has been sold as a ready-made solution to artificially created and/or perpetuated problems. It also illustrates the necessity for regular people to boycott the corporations and institutions perpetuating such flawed policy, and devise solutions themselves. Photo: Neil Gershenfeld of MITs Fab Lab project seeks to provide modern manufacturing technology to people around the world to solve local problems with local, technological solutions. Fab Labs and maker spaces are turning up in communities around the world, literally putting the means of production into the masses hands, and are a good place to start for people interested in organizing locally, sharing knowledge, and collaborating on projects that leverage technology to the benefit of everyone. Balancing power need not involve weapons of mass destruction or violent uprisings an informed, educated, technically competent self-sufficient population starves the forces of parasitic elitism out of existence. It is essential to examine the state of modern technology today, from communication and education, to manufacturing technology, to see what can be leveraged by people on a local level so that communities can not only devise their own programs to address their problems, but so that they can begin implementing solutions on their as well. As communities grow stronger, their ability to influence pragmatic positive change provincially and nationally will increase and a balance of power may be struck. Demanding change from a position of weakness, without even the means of sustaining ones existence without the very corporations, institutions, and governments change is being demanded from, is strategically untenable. Individuals and local communities must build-up their capacity in terms of education, economics, politics, and their ability to provide for themselves adequate order and security (through effective Constitutional sheriffs for instance). Only then will the people possess a sufficient deterrence against exploitation, as well as possess the leverage needed to make demands or simply achieve on their own what they desire. Conclusion There is already the European Union and the African Union. There exists an informal North American Union and a transatlantic partnership. The excuse of a rising China has spurred Southeast Asia into forming the ill-advised ASEAN bloc, complete with European Union-style institutions, ready to fail just as spectacularly both politically and economically. Even the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation comes with it the potential of consolidating the other side of the world into a growing supranational bloc. People must inform themselves of the differences between international cooperation, and recklessly lashing their ships together while gutting the watertight compartments within their own hulls. Generally, such self-defeating exercises are coordinated by piratical elements who find such consolidation and the removal of obstructions convenient for subsequent plundering as the banks in America and Europe are currently doing to Western nation-states. Recent tensions with Russia herald the rise of not individual superpowers this time, but the rise of superpower blocs. We must ensure we do not fall for a strategy of tension that leaves us all at the mercy of a terribly powerful, supranationally-consolidated victor, be it East or West. Alliances that pose as anti-fascism or anti-imperialism must make the appropriate assurances that a multipolar world order will prevail, strengthening the nation-state and the individual, not undermining them. Simultaneously, we as individuals must be resolved to taking our fates into our own hands,taking back the responsibilities demanded of a free citizenry that we have long ago traded in for the convenience offered by monopolies of all kinds. It has been our collective negligence that has led to a world of such disparities it must be our collective resolve that rectifies them. linkwithin_text=Related Articles: 