By DEXTER DUGGAN
PHOENIX — Around the Earth, “globalism” has a bad name among conservatives today.
The concept is understood to mean overreaching institutions and tentacles of global government.
But it used to acknowledge that we’re simply in “a small world after all,” and that world was full of opportunity for someone ready to make big strides.
The founder of a program named Project Arizona, which brings other nations’ young citizens to the Grand Canyon State so they can learn to be advocates for small government and constitutionalism, recalled how “globalism” was redefined.
“I am not against old-fashioned globalism, which was understood as free trade for all, easy travels, and more opportunities,” Jacek Spendel told The Wanderer. “But recently the word ‘globalism’ changed its meaning into the position to support global government. That’s in full contradiction to the promises of the original globalism.”
Spendel is a native of Poland whose life has ranged from running a pizza business in Katowice to obtaining a master’s degree in sociology from the University of Silesia, in the same city. He also studied at Jagiellonian University, in Krakow, and Georgetown, in Washington, D.C.
He added, “So I can say that I am old-school liberal and old-school globalist, but these terms were stolen by the left — and the right-wing movement accepted the new terminology. I am not very happy about it.”
Project Arizona began in 2017 with six participants from three nations, Poland, Ukraine, and Georgia. In its third year with the Class of 2019, the program has reached far beyond Europe to include Venezuela, Nepal, and Mexico as well as Ukraine, Poland, and Russia as the homelands of the current six participants.
Their focus is the successful founding ideals of the United States, which they hope to nurture back home, constitutionalism, liberty, capitalism, and entrepreneurship. Spendel chose Phoenix as a location where he sensed dynamism and self-confident individualism.
During the three-month program, they study at Arizona State University, in Tempe, engage in internships with liberty-minded organizations, make field trips and find time for Southwestern sightseeing.
One of their stops is a visit with the Arizona Project Tea Party having one of its weekly meetings in north Phoenix. It’s called “Project Arizona meets the Arizona Project.”
Project Arizona’s Facebook page noted the March 11 visit by saying the people at “Arizona Project are very patriotic, and it makes them happy that we care about American founding principles and the Constitution.”
The Wanderer asked Spendel if Europeans might regard patriotism negatively after its exaggerated version led to two world wars ravaging their lands in the twentieth century.
Spendel replied that patriotism that isn’t chauvinistic can “be a good thing. Especially when it’s patriotic to give a salute to the Constitution that is such freedom-spirited as the American one. In other words — patriots in America, conservatives, they do conserve truly classical liberal ideals, and that’s really great. But also having a sense of community is a positive thing, from the social point of view.”
Driving straight over from an evening class at Arizona State University, Project Arizona’s liberty-seekers dived into a pizza dinner that had been ordered for them at the Arizona Project offices, then Spendel saluted the Tea Party group’s outlook.
“I like what you do a lot . . . strong fighters for Arizona, for freedom,” he said. “. . . Our mission has not changed. . . . Our mission is to empower young leaders” with U.S. ideals. “We believe that Arizona is a special place,” where “most of the people still believe that they are masters” of their freedom.
“Hard work, very low taxes . . . low interference of the government . . . very well embedded here in Arizona,” Spendel said.
He said there were around 100 applicants for this year’s program. “We needed to make choices, tough choices” about who would carry forward the freedom message.
Spendel said he first came here “exactly 10 years ago. . . . I always had a love for Arizona,” which “gave me a lot of belief and confidence that the cause of freedom is not finished. . . . Arizona is on the forefront of this battle of liberty.”
Ron Ludders, chairman of the Tea Party group, spoke up to say that Venezuela once was a prosperous and wonderful country, but socialism took that away. When Ludders added that U.S. students who express admiration for socialism haven’t had to live under it, the Project Arizona participants all nodded in agreement.
Krzysztof Moszynski, of Poland, referring to Soviet Communism’s previous domination of his country, said, “Unfortunately, the bear was holding us very tight.” The result, he said, is that even today, often people “don’t know how to do” liberty.
When Americans are free to do as they want, as long as they don’t harm others, “you have the possibility to grow,” and they aren’t afraid he’ll cheat or steal from them, Moszynski said. But in Poland, people “are afraid of that. . . . When we hear about liberty, when we hear about freedom,” Poles worry, he said.
“Poland is a pretty good country to live in, but it’s a terrible country to do business in,” he said.
Moszynski has experience in language translation and economics and, according to autobiographical information, he “created a project called Lessons of Economics for Catholics, focused on spreading knowledge of economics among the Polish Catholic youth.”
Mariya Kapinos, a young journalist from Ukraine, said that having socialism in the U.S. is “a very scary thought,” but when she tells her own story to some American students, they think she just made it up. At her profile page at the Project Arizona site (projectarizona.us), she said, “It is hard to be a journalist in Ukraine. I’d say it is hard to be Ukrainian in general.”
Venezuela’s Jorge Andres Galicia Rodriguez, who received his law degree from a Catholic university, has up-close knowledge of the struggle against dictatorial socialism in his homeland. He said he belongs to a center-right political party and began following Tea Party activity in the U.S. in 2014.
He said he was involved in massive demonstrations against the Venezuelan government, and “the police actively started looking for me in my neighborhood” for two or three months, so he stayed away from contact with his parents.
The socialist government meant “massive confiscations of property . . . the growth of the welfare state…a lot of price controls to combat the hyperinflation” that chased away investors, he said, adding that he thinks “the future of Venezuela is promising” because of strong opposition arising against the Nicolas Maduro dictatorship.
Kaamala Neupane explained that her native Nepal is a small country between India and China, and she studied other countries like the U.S. that were prosperous. She mentioned obstacles she worked to overcome against girls pursuing education there. “I love to be the freedom fighter of Nepal.”
Her autobiographical information says she worked to improve individual women’s economic status and developed “a strong willpower that women should leave no stones unturned to change the society, and one must dare to work against all the norms that are discriminatory.”
Neupane said she was mentored to understand free-market ideas and cited the “Nepal Prosperity Institute, an economic think tank that promotes financial literacy, entrepreneurship, and economic-policy reform.”
“Absolutely Awesome”
Russia’s Yury Terekhov told the Tea Party meeting, “I’m really happy that Communism fell in my country,” and he would like to see something like the U.S. First Amendment in Russia. The amendment guarantees people’s freedom of religion, speech, the press, and the right to assemble and to petition the government for redress of grievances.
“We have no free and fair elections in Russia,” he added later. “. . . I must say that the minority of Russians actually voted for (Russian President Vladimir) Putin.”
Terekhov’s autobiographical information says he studied at Moscow State University of International Relations.
Also, in 2013, he “became an editor of one of the few independent Russian outlets, RuFabula, promoting peace, civil liberties, market economy and European values, criticizing authoritarian policies abroad and at home. Four years later, the website was blocked by the Russian Internet regulator without a proper explanation.”
The U.S. Southwest, he added, “is absolutely awesome and is my favorite part of the U.S.!”
Project Arizona’s sixth participant this year, Andrea Hernandez, from Mexico, wasn’t able to attend the Tea Party meeting because she had to fly to San Francisco, Spendel told The Wanderer.
However, her autobiographical information expresses her interest in economic improvement and liberty, as well as participation in organizations including “Students for Liberty that promote the liberal ideas that our world needs more than ever. ‘Liberty has never come from the government. Liberty has always come from the subjects of it. The history of liberty is a history of resistance’.”
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