What a piece of utopian twaddle!

Our foreign policy has always been about ‘more’ than preserving our privileged position & keeping people out.

Storey’s shining exemplar, the EU owes much of its ‘progress’ to a commonality of history, religion,
& fecundity. His attempt to diminish this with the quip “a common …heritage of
warfare... conflict!”, is shabby. It’s very telling that the EU almost choked on Turkeys
application.

Democracy & human rights are not the panacea(s) Storey seems to believe –Hitler & Hamas &
a lynch mob are all products of democracy. Democracy needs to be taken in conjunction with
other remedies like a critical media & academia (something-Aust-could-benefit-from-a-dose-of
too) – and “human rights” is increasing being portrayed as a western construct ( cultural imperialism ), at odds with non-western cultural values.

While his diagnosis: “the policy of defending our relative privileges though border protection …
will only be the prelude to more wars and more ‘need’ to protect our borders” is not a ‘fact’ as
some seem to think, but quackery:
i) It has not been a failure of border controls–rather a failure of will to
apply such controls; many non-western countries apply more effective controls, with
far less outlay.
ii) A logical extension of his argument , would see us disbanding the police, removing
window bars & alarms, since we have ‘relative privilege’ within Aust also, and such
control measures will only be the prelude to future break-ins, thefts, rapes?

Further, Storey needs to learn that exploitation is not only found where a multinational
employs someone for low wages. Exploitation is also someone having more kids than they can
afford, and expecting someone else to support them.

It has never been simply an issue of Aust self interest at everyones else’s expenses– as he
mischievously suggests.


Any scheme that seeks to impose restrictions on Aust’s industrial development –while ignoring
similar development in other countries. Any agreement that talks of Aust’s ‘obligations” to
feed, clothe, medicate & educate the others, while not talking of the others ‘responsibilities’ to
family plan –is either unrealistic, or inspired by ulterior motives!

Dear Rob P .... yes I fully understand your point mate...but even in a hundred centuries... the most one could hope for is a kind of "Western" Global unity.. note I say 'hope for'.... there are a number of factors which mitigate against even that theory.

1/ CHINA... is becoming so huge and powerful...and tends to resist efforts to tell it how to act.
2/ ISLAM... 1.2billion.. and by dogma.. the only global unity provided for in their view is a world united under Islamic Sharia.
3/ INDIA..another growing powerhouse.

Taken together.. I think it's
a) a waste of time to write hopeful articles about such an idea of Global Unity. and
b) outright DANGEROUS in that it might lull shallow unthinking, historically ignorant folk into believing it might happen in the next 5 minutes.
The idea is nice... but would only 'work' if people were not *sinful* in disposition.

Eudomaniac.... (no offense.. that was just too tempting :)... you write with deep sensitivity and compassion, suggesting you support such an idea and while your motives appear noble, may I suggest you review some of the thoughts the rest of us have posted on this ?

GLOBAL UNION IS POSSIBLE..but not the kind of union the article speaks of. In the same way that Christian denominations can have a heart unity in diversity, so nation states can be bound by common values, the most obvious being "Do for others as you would have them do for you"

We don't need any supergovernment for this.

The arguments against the article can be encapsulated as i) it's just utopian dreaming and ii) it will never happen.

These are exactly the attitudes that - if everybody were to hold them - will ensure we continue to disappear down the gurgler of our own shortsightedness.

This isn't about today, or this election, or even much to do with this lifetime (for me at least).

But it has a great deal to do with our approach to life on this planet, which is cavalier at best, and intensely self-centred at worst.

The answer is likely to be closer to the view of genuinely religious people than it is to that of those folk whose devil-take-the-hindmost approach is considered to epitomise "Australian Values".

Not of course the self-aggrandizing version of religion that we see displayed on these pages, but the self-effacing kind shown throughout her long life by my grandmother. I can safely say that she never had a bad word to say about anyone, and did everything in her (very little) power to make life better for those around her.

That sort of religion. Where you can confidently point and say "by their deeds shall ye know them".

Which is why I suspect that some people here aren't exactly as Christian as they make out:

>>even in a hundred centuries... the most one could hope for is a kind of "Western" Global unity<<

A hundred centuries ago, Boaz, man lived in what has become known as the "Stone Age".

If you were Stone Age Man, and you limited your ideas to those that you could extrapolate from concepts with which you were familiar, the most you could manage in 10,000 years would be a new way to tie your axe blade to a handle.

"The most one can hope for" is way beyond what you could imagine, just so long as you don't live in fear and superstition.

I know you think the answer to man's innate selfishness lies in the second coming or whatever. But it might just be possible for us to do something about it ourselves.

Those who oppose Storey’s proposal have been accused of lacking vision.

The truth is they have a different, more realistic vision.

Storey calls for a ‘fairer’ world, fairer as measured by similarity of outcome.
If the human race was a plant, Storey’s perfect world would be a well-watered, well-fertilized,
closely-cropped lawn.

A union dominated by have-nots, and the PC policies & procedures that would inevitably follow in the name of redressing imbalances -would not be an advance.

A union of a technological focused entity with more numerous but less technologically focused entitles –would not be an advance.

Ultimately humanity’s future depends less on masses all marching in lockstep, than a few enterprising individuals/countries.
.
Let a thousand weeds bloom!

Trotsky was all for a “global human union” along with perpetual revolution.

Even Stalin realized how dangerous Trotsky was.

This “Global Human Union” I would suggest, could only be achieved by surrendering of individual sovereignty through surrendering of national sovereignty.

Whilst the author criticizes Australia exercising its right to decide who can settle here it fails to predict what would happen if we were to allow unfettered entry to all and sundry.

We have quarantine laws to prevent the import of diseased materials, which would damage our local economy and our ability to feed ourselves and large parts of the rest of the world.

So too we need laws to quarantine out the diseased and undesirable people who would damage our local economy, social fabric and sense of national cohesion.

This “Global Human Union” is just another version of half-baked socialist claptrap dressed up to be appealing.

It is a bitter pill packaged like a candy.

It sounds all too reasonable but works only by the “reward for effort” being dissipated through “socialist leveling”

(Horus more eloquent description “If the human race was a plant, Storey’s perfect world would be a well-watered, well-fertilized, closely-cropped lawn.” Each blade of grass of equal height and “roundup” for the tall poppies)

- so each is provided with what some remote and mindless bureaucrat decides is the bare necessity for existence. It can be applied at the national level but ultimately results in being suffered at the individual level.

It is a hoax, the failed repackaging of previously failed socialist political strategies and deserves to be treated with contempt.

As Horus points out “Ultimately humanity’s future depends less on masses all marching in lockstep, than a few enterprising individuals/countries.”

Those individuals would be lost under a “global human union”

Finally dearest Margaret Thatcher had something pertinent to say about it

“There is no such thing as Society. There are individual men and women, and there are families.”

Governments are subordinate to the aspiration of the individuals who elect it. Those individuals should decide how broad a “union” they should participate in

Most leaders of family homes, financial and government institutions, and media agencies, seem intent on naturalising economic growth of the type experienced by economically developed countries since the late 1970s at the cost of more environmental destruction and consumer credit debt levels that can only inflict anxiety and hurtle us towards another economic bust.

I think the Mr Storey’s paper and the links he provides at the paper’s end offer a practicable and philosophically sound call to hope to advance when one is beginning to fall foul of the deception that these necrophilic trends are inexorable. I commend the paper and links as a rewarding read for anyone interested in informing themselves about how some people are conceptualising how humans can organise themselves, in modes that respect individuals’ and voluntary associations’ self-determination, towards decision-making ethics and structures that respect our shared humanity, including expression of our differences that do not harm others (and, in many cases, harm, if they are repressed).

Some of the criticisms of Mr Storey’s paper seem to derive from a crisis in the belief that humans can work together to respectfully and sustainably enable others, where they could so easily be – and are often pressured to be – inordinately patronising and otherwise exploitative. I understand that it is often difficult to believe this and then easy to forget the forgetting (with apologies to Heidegger) that one has ceased to so believe.

There is immanent, in any individual or group organising themselves to improve any circumstance, a potential for them to act from the dark chambers of their hearts. Indeed, the very process of deciding what is an improvement is an exercise of power. However, to not try – and to not try sometimes on an incrementally global scale - is simply ‘bad faith’. (May I also comment that caricaturing Mr Storey’s work as somehow sharing all the perceived defects of the thought of any previous internationalist, such as Trotsky, is also not genuine engagement with oneself and the paper?)