Internationalism versus Nationalism: The Overview of Fictitious Border Disputes

[William Prest]

We live in a world divided by countries, states, provinces, counties, protectorates, colonies and other man-made and artificial divisions. The divisions by region recapitulates the idea of dividing labor from labor value to create abstracted labor value, which attempts to separate use value from the producer. This land and oceanic division has grown as a result of competition and disputes throughout history, whether derived from conquest, royal decree, bourgeois takeover, legal definition or expropriation using force by financial and economic concerns over resources of all types. The world is now divided among competing capitalist interests that define boundaries of influence. An incursion of one by another is often the pretext to war. It is all about what is of use in each region in a combined and unequal availability. Every region has different resources that are equally needful by all. When trade breaks down, then war is often in the offing. But who is it that goes to war; the leaders of various competing regions, or their designated fighters drawn from the laborers? No they direct war by patriotism triggered by some pretext like an assassination or a false flag operation. It is the people who go to these conflicts to decide who gets the territory and resources and they get maimed and killed as their reward while the winner takes all.

Countries, states, provinces, counties, protectorates and colonies are all artificially defined, acknowledging no other border than what is temporarily agreed upon by competing interests that are next door to one another. Each one has a differing set of guidelines and laws that can conflict with the others. Each larger region is often comprised of many smaller local jurisdictions where the same kind of differences can wreck havoc in people’s lives where one set of laws clash with another, often at the expense of the individual involved. Many laws are in agreement, but lots of them are not. All of this is based solely on the existence of fictitious lines "drawn in the sand" where one idea predominates in contradiction to another on opposite sides of the line. Fictitious divisions are not based on natural barriers like oceans or mountains, but are purely defined by war, threat, law and finance. It is enforced by armed might and terror. Today this is enforced by CBN (Chemical Biological Nuclear) threats.

There has been a long history of shifting borders and conquests where whole peoples have been displaced and many put to genocidal pogroms. It still goes on today in various regions of Africa, the Middle East and Asia. When one region takes over another, the laws change and what was formerly legal, suddenly becomes an indictable offence that can be subject to lethal correction. Even in the context of a single country, regional laws can be so different as to cause people innocent in one region to be persecuted, tormented, jailed and have their lives ruined just across the state or provincial line. As there is no consistency, except for the monetarists who function internationally, everyone suffers. One major set of law forms that stands out in the international theater is the prohibition or permission of the use of marijuana and alcohol. The west and Asia permits alcohol, but dictate that marijuana is illegal to the point of executing people in some Asian countries. In the Muslim world, the exact opposite occurs; i.e., alcohol is prohibited whereas marijuana and hash hish is openly permitted. In short you can smoke a joint in Istanbul or Tehran, but you will be punished for possession or consumption of alcohol. In California you can drink booze like a fish drinks water, but get caught with marijuana in your possession just three times and you'll spend the balance of your life in jail under the "Three Strikes and You're Out" law. This may seem excessive to most, but to some, this is a method to exact absolute control by the division of the "line drawn in the sand" by way of country and state jurisdiction controlled by autocrats, warlords or oligarchs. The threat of potential deadly force to obtain compliant behavior is enough to make most people knuckle under.

But the injunctions against certain behavior do not end there. Historically we can see this manifest in the lives of Roman Polanski and Jerry Lee Lewis who legally had heterosexual relationships including marriage to a woman who was thirteen years old. Both were persecuted when they crossed state or country lines into regions where this type of consensual relationship was condemned as child molestation or statuary rape; i.e., rape as defined by a legal codex without reference to the considerations of anyone directly involved in a mutually consenting relationship. Oscar Wilde was persecuted in the 19th century in the context of the laws of Britain without crossing any lines except legal boundaries. Gay people are treated differently in different countries, states and provinces. Recently 2008-09, there was a fiasco in California that wavered back and forth between legalizing and making illegal, gay marriages. The result was a mass state annulment of marriages, a historical first based on decisions made by policy influenced by Christian fundamentalist mystics rather than the wishes of consenting people involved.

But the idea of fictitious borders does not end there. More importantly, they determine things like economic issues that affect health, safety, income of working people and environmental protection. This type of manipulation allows the internationally acting bourgeois interests to lower costs and increase profits all at once and ignore the environment. They can cause the workers in each country to rise up in xenophobic hysteria that often serves as the trigger to an extremely profitable war or an "ethnic cleansing". The economic crash that affected the entire world in 2008-2009 was well planned, from the days of deregulation in the Reagan era of voodoo economics. It ended with the collapse of the sub-prime mortgage mass foreclosures and accumulation with toxic assets that went on to swallow millions of jobs. The jobs were subsequently "shipped" offshore where cheaper labor abounds in China and the like. As the Western economy collapsed, China's rocketed upward. The two operated in lockstep but opposite phase. As the Chinese economy is mixed socialist and capitalist, the capitalist sector is expanding with tremendous upheaval on all fronts.

If we are to universalize the law that makes sense based on what is observed in nature, we will have to internationalize society and move to a planned economy. This will require the removal of all warlords, oligarchs, dictators and anyone else that lords it over humanity and nature. The change will have to emerge from the laborers and peasants of the entire world. With this, fictitious borders can be wiped off the map entirely and the world can move to true unity, without war and plenty shared by all.

[William Prest]

Here is another way that borders impact people. Say you are collecting child care benefits nationally and are unemployed provncially. The province can declare that the chaild care benefits as income and deduct them from your provincial support. Net result: zero income but a lot of paperwork. On the outside, the PR looks good making it looik like children are getting support, when in reality, they are getting none due to deductions on the more local level. Children end up going hungry and in Canada that figure is now one in two. The fund transfer is really about the federal transfer of funds to provinces with good PR for the media and no benefit to the children it is supposedly designed for. There are other economic legislative packages that inpact seniors, the unemployed and anyone else who is getting "support" across borders. This is an excellent example of how ficititious divisions negatively impact many people.