2000 Saw Populism, Nationalism Reinvigorated

The past year presented patriots with an unusual number of welcome developments: new evidence that populism is on the rise around the world, and news items of cheer for this newspapers' readers, even when they spread gloom among Establishment publications.

Thus Prof. Stewart Patrick of New York University, writing in Current History, a leading academic monthly, sorrowfully admitted at year's end that "America has retreated from multilateralism."

Patrick was referring the odious early policy of the Clinton administration to send U.S. troops into action under a UN banner, as part of a mongrelized international soldatesca, under the command of third-world generals who still thought the bolt-action rifle was the latest thing in military weaponry.

During the past year, America has "increasingly withdrawn from collective (overseas) initiatives ... the reluctance of the United States to participate in multilateral operations such as international peacekeeping, the use of military force under UN leadership, arms control and international law enforcement is growing more and more apparent," lamented Patrick.

But if it saddens such globalist intellectuals that American politicians have taken note of the rising populist aversion to gun-grabbing UN military adventures, that turn of events should gladden all patriots who have offered resistance to the first Clinton administration's misbegotten policy of "assertive multilateralism."

There is no doubt that populism is the new wave of politics around the world.

At the dawn of year 2001, nationalist movements opposed to globalism and runaway "free trade" either hold power or dominate the opposition from Austria to Venezuela, even in such long-somnolent countries as Switzerland and Romania.

Explosive corruption scandals have contributed to the fall of U.S.-backed strongman regimes in a number of countries.

Peru, for one, has been ruled with an iron hand by a dictatorial president of Japanese ancestry, Alberto Fujimori, and his sinister intelligence chief, Vladimiro Montesinos, for more than a decade, backed by strong support from the CIA and the State Department.

At year's end, both were in flight from the law, after it was discovered that with full CIA approval they had bought tens of thousands of infantry weapons from the well-known Los Angeles-based arms dealer, Sarkis Sorghananian, and then resold the armaments to Colombia's drug-dealing Communist guerrillas, now considered the main U.S. enemy south of the border.

"Such intolerably corrupt conditions in Venezuela, the region's largest oil producer, have boosted into power President Hugo Chavez, who is now regarded as Latin America's most popular and reform-minded populist leader," said Dr. Arva Borglid, a visiting lecturer in Spanish-American history at American University.

And, of course, "Washington is already putting into practice its well-known tactics to destabilize the democratically elected Chavez government," added reporter Ricardo Vasconcelos, who writes for El Diario, New York's leading Spanish-language newspaper.

But in the view of diplomatic and academic observers, the attempts of U.S. covert-action agents to undermine the populist regime of Dr. Mahathir Mohamad in Malaysia last year "failed miserably -- and so will other clandestine operations designed to stem the rising tide of populism," added Borglid.