That Other Anti-Globalization Movement

Given the performance consistency and punctuality of anti-globalization protesters, McDonald's really ought to think about hiring some of them because the last time I ordered a Big Mac it took for-ev-er. 

Anyway, lest you think opposing international commerce and industrialization was only a bugbear of the hormonally anarchic left, here's a fun little factoid, courtesy of World Politics Review, that has received scarce notice in the European and American media:

For the NPD, the anti-globalization movement is to be understood as part of a "völkisch" uprising of the world's "peoples" [Völker] against the "rootless" capitalism system. [The German word völkisch is derived from the word Volk: which can be rendered as either "people" or "nation," but unlike the corresponding English words, typically carries a strong connotation of ethnicity. The ethnic idea of the "Volk" or nation was the core idea of the National Socialism of the 1930s and 40s, which was in many ways an outgrowth of a "völkisch" or "ethnic national" movement in German history that long preceded it. — Translator's Note] "The world should know," NPD chairmen Udo Voigts said in May in anticipation of the anti-G-8 protests, "that the struggle against globalization is a struggle of peoples [Völker]. And this struggle — all of Europe is waiting for this — must start from Germany."\

I'll give you one guess at to whom the NPD is great chums with.

Accordingly, the editors of Die Deutsche Stimme evidently have no fear of associating with a man who hardly gives the impression of being "Aryan" and who is, moreover, likewise a hero of the left-wing anti-globalization forces: namely, Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez. Chávez's nationalization of mineral resources and his system of redistribution of oil revenues to the poor wins praise in Die Deutsche Stimme as a shining example of "national Socialism" just as the NPD conceives it. For people all over the world, the paper affirms, Chávez stands for the "revolutionary force of nationalism."

Viva la revolucion.