Been thinking all day about the word “globalist” and my own use of it.
I am an Australian who has lived and worked all over the world. I believe travel and knowing people from different cultures is a vital part of life. I believe open cultures are stronger than closed ones. 1/
I am an Australian who has lived and worked all over the world. I believe travel and knowing people from different cultures is a vital part of life. I believe open cultures are stronger than closed ones. 1/
I am therefore comfortable calling myself a globalist. In fact I have walked into meetings at the Trump White House to talk trade and introduced myself as such, jokingly and as a recognition of my former employer. (The @FT is unashamedly for open economies.) 2/
I’ve always been conscious that globalist is a slur used by anti-semites. But I’ve always believed that appropriating slurs is also a powerful tool to counter bullies. And we should all do our bit to stand up to bullies. 3/
I also don’t buy into the idea that globalization is a recent phenomenon, or that it only relates to economics. My late father was on one side descended from a Sicilian merchant seaman who met an Irish lass in a port one day, fell in love and found a new home in Australia. 4/
That was globalization at work. So too was the way my Australian father and Austrian mother met, in the American Express office in Salzburg one day a half-century ago. My father was exploring the world. My mother was back from a year as an exchange student in Massachusetts. 5/
So without globalization I don’t exist. But it goes back further than that. Christianity doesn’t exist without globalization. Neither does the United States. Neither do the Italian-Americans or the Irish-Americans. 6/
You get the point... To me embracing the term globalist is about embracing history, some of it personal. I never understood the slur... 7/
But today America is mourning 11 people killed by a man who saw the slur “globalist” as a reason to kill. Who saw in people from one faith who helped people from others to flee their countries and find shelter a reason to hate. 8/
And I am hearing moving calls for people to call out people who use the term “globalist” as a slur, including the president. So I apologize. If I have been flip in my use of the term globalist to describe myself and failed to recognize the embedded anti-semitism I am sorry. 9/
I am so very sorry... 10/
For those expressing doubts about the use of the word “globalist” here is the Anti Defamation League with both an explanation and some examples of its use. adl.org/resources/repo…“globalist”-as-code-word-for-“jew”
A coda: This thread is about my own use of a word and my discomfort with it. This is not - as some seem to have taken it - about attacking those who question globalization or its economic costs. (There are lots fwiw.) This is about words and thinking before you use them.
