"As matters stood, imperialism spirited away all troubles and produced that deceptive feeling of security, so universal in pre-war Europe, which deceived all but the most sensitive minds. Peguy in France and Chesterton in England knew instinctively that they lived in a world of hollow pretense and that its stablity was the greatest pretense of all. Until everything began to crumble, the stablity of obviously outdated political structures was a fact, and their stubborn unconcerned longevity seemed to give the lie to those who felt the ground tremble under their feet. The solution of the riddle was imperialism. The answer to the fateful question: why did the European comity of nations allow this evil to spread until everything was destroyed, the good as well as the bad, is that all governments knew very well that their countries were secretly disintegrating, that the body politic was being destroyed from within, and that they lived on borrowed time." (The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt, 1994; page 147).
Replace 'globalization' or 'finacialization' for 'imperialism' and Arendt could easily have been talking about today.
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