Dr. Alexander Wendt and James Corbett Clash Over Inevitable One World State |301|

To this Ohio State University International Relations Professor a one world state is inevitable. To Alt media blogger James Corbett it’s a catastrophe.

photo by: Royce Bair

Today’s show is not about consciousness, spirituality, or any of the topics we normally cover. Today’s show is about geopolitics and whether a “One World State,” or what some call a, “New World Order,” is an inevitable political reality. It’s a provocative topic, and may be of interest to some Skeptiko listeners, but what makes this show special are the participants in this threaded debate. Dr. Alexander Wendt is a professor at Ohio State University and a recognized expert on international relations and political science. He’s a serious academic, but as you’ll see in this interview, he’s willing to take seriously, and straightforwardly address, the concerns of those who believe deep state politics are driving world politics.

After talking to Wendt, I wanted to hear from someone on the front lines of reporting on these deep state geopolitical shenanigans. So, I asked James Corbett, a leading figure in the geopolitical, alternative media and host of the Corbett Report to give me his take on Wendt’s influential One World State paper.

The result was a challenging, and sometimes uncomfortable dialog about questions that don’t seem to get as much attention as they deserve… e.g., if a one world state really is inevitable should “we the people” try and shape it?

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Click here for Dr. Wendt’s website

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Read Excerpts From Interview With Dr. Alexander Wendt:

Dr. Alexander Wendt: In 3000 BC there was something like 600,000 independent political units in the world, most of which were tribes and hardly states at all. But they were separate, sovereign entities and [there were] 600,000 of them. And now we have 190,000. So if you plot that trajectory on a graph what you see is a tremendous consolidation of political authority worldwide over the ensuing millennia. So you project that a bit further and you end up with one. So it seems to me that there has been an increase in the number of states since World War II with the colonization and the break up of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia and so on. But overall I think the trend historically has been fewer and fewer states. And if you add in globalization, the Internet, climate change, that war between states is becoming irrational. There’s just many factors that make the idea of the separate sovereign state increasingly silly.

You can [also] add in the spirit of democracy; the so-called ‘Democratic Peace’–democracies hardly ever go to war with each other; and [there’s] the growth of international institutions. Now all of these things make war lest likely. They don’t necessarily mean that states are going to come together and form a global state. But I guess the point is, if war is off the table, and if exercising national sovereignty in a world economy to resist globalization is off the table, then what is the point at the end of the day of retaining sovereignty? The way I define sovereignty–the way I think about it especially now–is that at the end of the day sovereignty is the right to kill foreigners with no accountability. It’s the right to invade other countries if you think it’s in your national security interest with no accountability. And it seems to me that right is increasingly obsolete and pointless in a sense because who’s going to do that anyway? And, I would say that right has no moral foundation. And that gets to the more normative argument about is this a good thing. I don’t think there’s any justification for one group of people having the right to invade a foreign country if they decide it’s in their national interest and kill foreigners with no accountability.

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Dr. Alexander Wendt: If you are a liberal in the broad sense of believing in human rights, and if you are committed to democracy in the broad sense–that people should have the ability to hold power over them accountable–then it’s very hard it seems to me to justify separate groups retaining the right to kill foreigners [and] violating their human rights with no accountability; violating their democracy with no accountability. It’s just very hard from a western…it’s not just a western, but an increasingly global set of moral values to justify that kind of sovereignty. And the article that I’d like to write that follows up on this World State paper-I want to call “Anarchy as Despotism.” Everyone says that a World State would be despotic and a totalitarian state. Actually, the current state of anarchy in my view is a despotism because states can do whatever they want to to each other with no accountability. So I would like to turn the argument around in effect and put the onus on the defenders of the sovereign state to defend the right to kill foreigners unilaterally.

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Alex Tsakiris: If we accept the idea that governments act in secret at times (and we have plenty of evidence for that). And we have black operations and we now know that people were, whether they are today are today or not, were abducted and taken, and tortured. And other things happened that don’t exactly fit with our values. If you take that by extension, like a lot of people do, and are serious about looking at there is this shadow government that’s in play and then that becomes a huge fear factor in terms of what you’re proposing: a One World State. And they think, gee, that’s exactly what those guys want. We’re playing into their hands. And I don’t need you to go down that whole path. Even you go down that path a little bit, you present some compelling arguments why even if we accept the darkest scenario, we still may be better off with the One World State. Do you want to touch on that?

Dr. Alexander Wendt: Well first I think that we would only get to a One World state voluntarily. If you think about America 10 years ago, [it] was at the height of its power and no state in world history has ever had such a preponderance of power as the United States did 10 years ago. And there’s no way that 10 years ago the US could have conquered the world and subjected it to a World State under American control. So if it couldn’t have happened 10 years ago it’s never going to happen violently it seems to me. If there’s going to be a world state it’s only going to happen through a democratic, incremental process where everybody’s rights gets written into the global constitution.

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Dr. Alexander Wendt: My general feeling, and I should’ve said this on the show, is human beings know a lot less than we think we do. We’re just at the beginning of figuring out the nature of the universe (it seems to me). And I think a lot of scientists and colleagues think we’re really smart and we’ve already got most of it figured out. I just think that’s completely wrong. Who knows even 100 years from now what people will take as common sense that today we can’t even imagine.

Read Excerpts From Interview With James Corbett:

Alex Tsakiris: We also see the advance of the New World Order agenda–it seems to be steamrolling now. It’s rolling into everything: Climate change – we need a New World Order; GMO – we need a New World Order. Everything that comes along is being tied to that. And climate change is one of the most dramatic ones now. They’re saying, this carbon tax will be needed and we’re going to implement this on a worldwide basis. Aha! Here’s a great place where we need the New World Order. So this fear that many have had about the coming pressure towards New World Order is fulfilling itself at every turn… it seems more and more with every major news event that comes about. Wouldn’t you agree?

James Corbett: Unfortunately I have to agree because again, given the logic of the situation, every crisis is a potential opportunity for those who are seeking to consolidate more power in their own hands. This is no a new political phenomenon. It has been noted for a very long time. And just one example of that: H.L. Mencken back in 1918 wrote, “The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed an hence clamorous to be led to safety by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary.” And that sentiment has been repeated a number of times over the years. Winston Churchill is supposed to have said, “Never let a good crisis go to waste.” Whether or not he did say that, Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel, former Chief of Staff for President Obama, really did say that on camera a few years ago. People can look that up on YouTube.

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Alex Tsakiris: That’s what I think is refreshing about Wendt. He’s taking the argument of individualism versus collectivism and saying, hey guys, that isn’t necessarily bound up with One World State. As a matter of fact, he gives some good reasons why it may be better in terms of us maintaining our individualism; maintaining our inherent rights if you will, under a One World State, than through the anarchy that’s created in the situation that we have now. If you remember in the interview, that’s one of his points and I think it’s a good one. In the current situation where you can get together your secret spy seal…whatever you want to call them … and go abduct people and take them to some foreign country. You can just throw money around. How could it be a worse situation than that? There is zero accountability. So we can go in and kill hundreds of thousands of women and children in Iraq and there’s no accountability. How can it really be worse?

James Corbett: It certainly could be worse by handing the people who are behind the system as it exists today even more power and less accountability. Ultimately I think the point is that once you have a world system of governance, then if by some happenstance, wouldn’t you know it, that system of government gets taken over or hijacked, or is ‘put into place’ as I would put it, by the same types of psychopathic ruling clique that are currently in charge of much of the world today. And of course, some of the out-of-control powers in the world. What would be the recourse to that? Especially in a world government that’s presided over by the types of technological control grid technologies that are coming into place with tracking and surveillance. [And] basically the ability of the state to know what you’re doing at all times and to restrict your movements, and things of that nature.

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Alex Tsakiris: You’re not interested in playing police on everything that everyone does. Your key points for you are your individual rights and freedoms and to the extent that those are given to you.

James Corbett: I see what you’re saying. But that is a fundamental misunderstanding of my position because rights are not given by anyone. They are not something that is–

Alex Tsakiris: –protected.

James Corbett: Let’s put it this way–the only rights that exist are negative rights. You cannot do that thing another person, rather than [rights] that somehow you are entitled to something simply because you exist. So I think that there’s a fundamentally different political outlook that arises from the latter than the former.

Alex Tsakiris: But you get my point.

James Corbett: I certainly do. Let’s address this through–I think there is a point of accord here. There is a point of agreement in that ultimately–I, for example, because I’m against the nationalist ideology exactly as much as I’m against the globalist ideology–I agree that it is a global, borderless world. That’s what it is naturally. There are not lines on a map that have any real meaning in reality other than what we make of them. And because of that we are becoming a globally connected society in terms of our technology allowing people to communicate and interact freely around the world. And so we are becoming a global society. And it really is a question of whether you want to do that in a way that is free and open, or a way that is shut and malleable to control. And I of course do advocate for the former rather than the latter for such things as I’ve talked about on my podcast in the past. Like the peer-to-peer economy–I think it’s a wonderful, amazing, incredible thing that people can interact and transact with anyone anywhere on the globe. And you can do it through a crypto-currency or whatever so it’s instantaneous. There’s no bank institution that comes in between. It truly is a global society in that sense. That’s the model I think we have to be working towards rather than putting in a government to control the entire globe.

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Alex Tsakiris: I guess you hit the key phrase for me: “Pipe dream”. It’s a pipe dream that we are going to be able to organically grow an alternative culture that would be attractive to the largest number of people. That’s one thing that does kind of turn me off about the alternative, truth movement, view: ultimately, at the end of the day it does come down to some kind of democratic vote if you will. Even if that movement was to gain momentum and tremendous favor among larger groups of people, it would still ultimately come down to some kind of vote because that is also in keeping with our democratic values.

James Corbett: Why do you keep saying democratic values? I don’t have democratic values and I think that’s the exact point that I’m arguing. No, there would not be a vote on this because that’s the point. There is no majority that can force or compel a peaceful minority to do what they want morally. And that’s the fundamental part of this: the moral principle.

My claim, my answer to that would be that it’s always been more common than we imagined. And I don’t as a rule, even though my interests in mysticism and all the great traditions goes very deep, when I write about consciousness I write about the experience of the transcendent right within the midst of the ordinary–that every ordinary act of consciousness is already saturated with a primordial knowledge of transcendence. So if there is [an increase in awareness]–I think it’s something that would be talked about more–the more oppressively mechanistic the tacit orthodoxy becomes, the more striking and in some sense urgent the expressions of experiences that don’t fit into that picture are likely to be.

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