Long Shadow of Globalisation

Book Review

Derrick Jenson, The Culture of Make Believe. (Chelsea Green: US, 2002)

Misha Glenny, McMafia: Crime without Frontiers. (Bodley Head: London, 2008)

The Shadow of Globalisation

In The Culture of Make Believe, we are immediately and constantly told names of ordinary Jack and Jills as victims of various crimes. The range of topics in this book is nothing new but that of interpretation called into question of established common sense. Jenson puts strong emphasis on the role of media, especially TV, as the main instrument of genocide, perpetuating culture, selling fear, destroying sexuality, causing unbelievable alienation and addiction. Most of the time, the role of journalism twists the image of how our culture, perceives certain patterns, unfortunately humans as objectives, strengthening visible appearance as much of our translated hatred.

Unfortunately, such moments purposefully incorporate into our everyday-lives and people tend to neglect how dangerous it might be when accepting shown images without judgement. The author sets McDonaldization as a representative example of globalisation, which can be symbolized as efficiency, predictability, calculability and nonhuman technology. One special feature in Jenson’s manuscript is that Korea is mentioned once. However, it is not the mainstream of the context but just as somewhat on overexploiting sweater producing country.

According to McMafia, Glenny conveys the fall of communism in Eastern Europe by reviewing series of crimes in the Balkans during the 1990s. Though with high-technology development, Bulgaria struggled with issues including drugs, arms and shortage of democratic opposition. Montenegro came up with huge criminal industry, entangling with mobs. Embargo on Croatia, Bosnia led to and boosted smuggling channels, partly by government. Former Yugoslavia’s fragmented economy devastated the country. The problem is that the sanctions and corruptions were negligible in the EU and the US, so the Balkans gave the sad pictures of disposing dirty jobs where none of the other nations would do. Glenny makes a stab at extending his analysis that poor country’s attempt to survive has been blocked by world order most of the time, inserting the example of CAP¹ containing the sale of agricultural production. He insists that loose regulation in the financial sector and the extreme observation in the labor market deepen disparity among countries, leading into immense disruption to international order as the globalisation link deepens.

Crime and Corruption in Globalisation

In presenting the dark side of globalisation, both authors limit themselves to the main scope of crime, however with different points of standards: Jenson traces the root of the crime from hatred and Glenny seeks the reasons and the future of the crime in a global aspect.

In The culture of make believe, wars are presented to explain the relationship between hatred and economics. Based on competition, wars are the very way of boosting both wealth and economy. The author presents the growth of JP Morgan as the significant beneficiary during most of the modern wars, as a tool of radical union breaking, and eliminating socialists within the political force. He sharply points out that even the perception on property rights of Ricardo, one of the three most important economists, prioritizes over the health and safety of children, arguing our standard of valuing high thoughts. He also devoted himself to explaining the start and activity of Ku Klux Klan (KKK) and the history of the slavery system. He reveals the sound origination of KKK and explores the change of their distort activities, indicating how dangerous and reckless they were.

In McMafia, illegal and trafficked labor is described in many ways. Glenny starts with Israel, where the Jewish oligarch expands world wide with permissive globalisation and, success of high-tech industry.² In the case of smuggling, author claims that despite intervention, the consumption of drugs rises constantly as the price falls. He also gives an analysis on cyber crimes, which is with uncertainty totally based on the entire ‘identity’, triumvirate among India, China and Brazil in recent years. In representing organised crime and corruption, which the author argues have been flourishing where public trust in institution is weak, emphasis is placed on how tiny forms of change could affect and deliberate countries across large parts of the globe. He observes the future of organised crime with China and Yakuza factors. He claims that China is soaking up all the slack in labour market, as the world’s cheapest miscellany producer with 60% of the whole market, escaping poverty with somewhat too-rushing in trade. Thus an uncertain futurology of China does exist and Yakuzaas one of the most influential gangs worldwide.

Gender Treatment under Globalisation

Both Jenson and Glenny lay heavy emphasis on violence against women, how this is stereotyped and done worldwide. In McMafia, women trafficking in Israel, where the immigration-rooted have strong Russian identity, and prostitution is dealt as consumer activities, is explained. Women in this context are just a commodity and sometimes mothers recruit their daughters, and re-recruit three new women to get their daughters out. In the (sexual) Drang nach Osten³ period, women were compelled-to-work on the road. To borrow Spivak’s point of view, we confront the question of “Is a woman’s ethics located between her legs and fixated upon a unique male?” (Sanders, 2008, p. 106). She continuously insists on the importance of education, considering rural teacher training as ‘Righting Wrongs’ to get over the gender-biased globalisation.

In The Culture of Make Believe, the culture of training minorities is metonymically elaborated through the chapters. The concept is occasioned by regarding women as potentially victimised minority and is retained by patterning and fixating who takes which role. Jenson drops a hint that rememberless people tend to repeat the past, which strongly reminds me of the portrait of gender treatment in Korea today. One of the integral parts of his writing is the argument of the rape: why rape is not a hate crime, but a crime of power? Bloviate’s illustration is shown to the process of getting the relationship between rape and crime. Quoted from the authorities, rape is a crime of power since it is not to violate civil rights rather to hurt or to have forced sex. In this respect, rape becomes a hate crime only when men sexually assault women (or the other way around) because she is woman.

In a later chapter, the author comments that violence against women would stop only when other men refuse to socially reward those who are violent, which gives another aspect about gender domination. Jenson’s argument implies, on one hand, the consolidation of male-oriented society and on the other hand, the imminence of gender equality improvement. Throughout these observations, he shrewdly comes up with the conclusion of the middle class white (male) domination, by adding the examples of prison, where the rate of black is high and the rape rate within is also high, as the mirror image of social dynamics. Symbolic demension of violence on women may be solved at court, however, little will be improved unless the exposure of (in)visible violence on women is fundamentally eradicated.

Globalisation: Where Does Hatred Go?

Jenson points that hatred is the sentiment of crime, however having blinded ourselves to the enchantment of the world, sometimes not knowing whom to fight, we humans tend to just follow the crowd. Time and again, faced with the goal of whom to fight, “people tend to involve others killing each other, which leads to multiple unintended and often violent consequences” (Body-Gendrot & Spierenburg, 2008, p. 237).

Glenny draws attention to the borderless crime in the Balkans in the 1990s and Yakuzaand crimes in cyber spaces. Both books marshalled considerable examples with a wide range of sources, which slightly detract from all those merits of the volume, the absence of a commonly accepted terminology, using slangs and lowbrowed expressions. Even with these reservations, Jenson and Glenny challenged and provocatively contributed to the existing studies. I hope these two books provide certain impetus for stimulating how we should face this harsh wind of globalisation.

References

• Beck, U., (2002), What is globalisation?, Blackwell, Oxford.
• Benjamin, W., (2002), Medienästhetische schriften, Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main.
• Body-Gendrot, S., Spierenburg, P. (Eds.), (2008), Violence in Europe: Historical and contemporaty perspectives, Springer Science + Business Media, NY.
• European Commission on Agriculture and Rural Development, (2007), The common agricultural policy explained, Retrieved May 19, 2008, from http://ec.europa.eu/agriculture/publi/capexplained/cap_en.pdf.
• Kim, Yoola, (2008, May, 15), Israel geongug 60junyeongwa dogil-Israel uhogwangye ［The 60th National foundation Anniversary of Israel and friendship with Germany］, Prometheus. Retrieved May 19, 2008, from http://www.prometheus.co.kr/articles/103/20080515/20080515130600.html.
• Mearsheimer, J. J., (2001), The tragedy of great power politics, W. W. Norton and Company, NY.
• Sanders, M., (2006), Gaytari chakravorty spivak: Live theory, Cintinuum International Publishing Group, London & New York.
• Young, R. J. C., (2003), Postcolonialism: A very short introduction, Oxford University Press, Oxford.