The Trap by James Goldsmith
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
“Sir James Michael “Jimmy” Goldsmith was an Anglo-French billionaire financier. Towards the end of his life, he became a magazine publisher and a politician. In 1994, he was elected to represent France as a Member of the European Parliament and he subsequently founded the short-lived eurosceptic Referendum Party in Britain. He was known for his polyamorous romantic relationships and for the various children he fathered with his wives and girlfriends.”
This was the author of this book written in 1993-4. He clearly can’t have been a leftist, marxist or “liberal”; at least that’s how our presumption would go. I for one was confused about Mr. Goldsmith’s political identity after reading his book. He goes over what the potential dangers of globalisation looked like 20 years ago, after the fall of the USSR when Fukuyama’s End Of History seemed like it might have been rather spot-on. Now of course we know that history didn’t end and that globalisation was a real phantom menace, but back it wasn’t yet the concrete everyday reality of 2013. And you most certainly wouldn’t have expected a “billionaire financier” to lean that way.
Basically, this rich guy predicted: the crisis of the European South 8 years before even the introduction of the Euro; the inevitability of unemployment, recession and austerity when the world had to competing with the ocean of cheap labour that is Asia; the dangers of monocultures and GMO mega-corporations like Monsanto; even the dead-end that is nuclear power, among other things. Unexpectedly, for me at least, he doesn’t even touch neoliberalist ideas in the book and uses very lucid and clearly-constructed arguments to demonstrate that the path humanity, or at least its more powerful chunk, has chosen, is basically wrong.
His predictions were logic-driven. They were there in 1993, just like they are there today. If no-one listened back then they might be excused. But there is no excuse today for not listening. Following a strategy doomed to obvious failure is either extremely stupid or criminal -and I’m not buying that anyone making this much money off of the world can be that stupid…
The Trap showed me just how little the discussion has changed, how old false dilemmas have reared their ugly heads again and again, never failing to fool the masses anew and always succeeding to make the world a little bit of a worse place to live in. James Goldsmith wrote this book as a warning. Everything he was warning against has come true. Why should I think that the unseen rest of this huge trap hasn’t already been long prepared or perhaps even sprung?
Time will tell. Fortunately, my pessimistic side doesn’t usually get the best of me.
Kudos go to Dan Carlin for bringing this book to my attention (listen to this episode for a much better review and comparison of The Trap to the present situation than I could ever write) and my father who actually bought it when it first came out. I found it in his bookshelf; it’s apparently rather hard/expensive to find now.
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