(c) Copyright 1998: Graham Strachan
Immanuel Velikovsky once wrote a book called ‘Mankind in Amnesia’ (1982), the thesis of which was that global catastrophes of a natural kind (crustal upheavals and tidal waves) had occurred at various times in history, and which the collective human mind had tried to forget: to expunge from memory because they had been so terrifying [see also Immanuel Velikovsky, ‘Earth in Upheaval’ (1955)]. Is it possible that, in view of the atrocities committed by governments during the present century, a similar phenomenon is occurring now? Could it be that the lessons of recent history are being deliberately disregarded in the hope that the events on which they are based won’t repeat themselves?
The novelist/philosopher Ayn Rand wrote: "Governments throughout history are the proven agents of bloodshed, wars, persecutions, confiscations, famines, enslavements and wholesale destructions. Potentially a government is the most dangerous threat to human life and liberty. It holds a legal monopoly on the use of physical force against legally disarmed victims. When unlimited and unrestricted by individual rights, a government is men's deadliest enemy". (12)
The historian Lord Acton said ‘power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely’, and this century alone testifies as to the accuracy of the statement: 64 million Russians were murdered by their own government (7); Hitler killed 6 million Jews and many others; an estimated 60 million people were murdered in Mao Tse-tung’s China; the world watched the Tienanmen Square massacre on TV; one third of the population of Cambodia (estimated 2-3 million) was exterminated by Pol Pot (8); Nicolae Ceauscescu of Romania ordered the deaths of 60,000 of his fellow-countrymen during his 23 year dictatorship (9); and Indonesia has practiced genocide on the people of East Timor (10); and that list is by no means exhaustive.
If history teaches any lesson at all it is that nobody, absolutely nobody, can be trusted with political power. All political power will be abused sooner or later unless there are constitutional limits imposed on it and the populace is ‘eternally viligant’. It was for this reason that concepts of individual rights, Bills of Rights, Constitutions, the Separation of Powers, the necessity for a Free Press and Independent Judiciary, and Popular Democracy (government of the people by the people) were developed. These concepts were advanced not by ‘conspiracy theorists’, but intelligent men who realised that while government was necessary, so was the limitation of its power if life for the masses was to remain at all tolerable.
The now much-maligned ‘baby boomer’ generation knew of these things, of the importance of individual freedom and of the things necessary for its preservation. Born in the immediate aftermath of World War II they knew, even before the Cold War, of the Soviet tyranny, the deliberate starving to death of a third of the population of the Ukraine, the Cheka/KGB (their ASIO), the dobbing in of family members for politically incorrect utterances, the knock on the door in the middle of the night, Operation Keelhaul, the slave labour camps, the use of psychiatric institutions for ‘re-education’ of people critical of the government, the purges, the control of information using the media, and the political control of science (as witness the Lysenko Affair (11)).
The present generation it appears is taught no history, so it has no idea of the past, other than as something the older generation ‘got wrong’. The collective wisdom to be gained from history is being expunged from the collective consciousness of our society. As the Spanish-American philosopher Georges Santayana once said, those who do not learn from history are destined to repeat it, and are they ever! The present generation of young Australians is in for the shock of its life.
The politically correct attitude is that the government is like ‘mummy’: all loving, all caring, all benevolent, all forgiving, the source of all that is good and true, and like mummy, would never hurt you, especially because it recognises that every human being is a ‘unique individual’ deserving of ‘self-esteem’ and so on. Where this comes from needs tracking down some Sunday afternoon. Perhaps it stems from the German philosopher Georg Hegel who claimed the State was the instrument by which god’s plan for the world was advanced. Hegel, as we know, found his way into Marxism (admittedly standing on his head) but who cares.
The present generation of young Australians is about to repeat one of history’s grimmest lessons: encouraging and submitting to tyranny, and they are being led to the slaughter by people in the media, particularly on programmes like ‘60 Minutes’. During the ‘60 Minutes’ disinformation piece on Pauline Hanson (8 June 1998), reporter Jeff McMullen repeated the now-familiar piece of propaganda: “The patriots here believe that their own government is selling them out. Like Pauline Hanson they believe that international treaties are undermining the power of national governments to make individual decisions. It’s a much derided global conspiracy theory.”
In the immediate sense the implication is that because one Jeff McMullen of ‘60 Minutes’ in Australia says something has been ‘much derided’, it could not possibly be true. That, of course, is a logical fallacy known as ‘ad populam’: something is false if somebody says lots of people believe it’s false. According to McMullen’s reasoning, the world was once flat because lots of people disbelieved that it was spherical.
Much derided by whom? Again McMullen didn’t say. If he means by other high profile journalists like himself, then forget it. Their credibility is history. Nor does he say what sort of things governments will be left to ‘make individual decisions’ about after all the treaties have been signed. They could for instance decide which street to sweep next, or which train to make run on time. By some stretch of the journalistic imagination this might still be construed as ‘national autonomy’. But the significant thing that McMullen implies is that the government would never sign treaties handing over the people’s sovereignty to international bodies.... mummy government could never be bad, in other words. This of course is nonsense. The lesson of history is that governments have rarely been good.
The big problem for paid propagandists like McMullen now is that there are too many statements in the public arena which have come out of the mouths of internationalists themselves, people who in no way could be construed as ‘conspiracy theorists’. In Buenos Aires on October 17, 1997, President Clinton declared that, “isolationist voices must be ignored as efforts proceed to fully integrate the political and economic future of the Americas....Globalization is irreversible....Protectionism will only make things worse.”(6) Globalisation means ‘political and economic integration’. ‘Isolationism’ is the new term for a country wanting to mind its own business, go its own way and not be ‘globalised’. ‘Protectionism’ is the word for a country protecting its industries, economic assets, and the well-being of its people from exploitation by outsiders. These things, essential for national sovereignty and independence, now ‘will only make things worse’, and have to be abolished.
Strobe Talbot, Clinton's Deputy Secretary of State, was quoted in Time Magazine, July 20th, l992, as saying, "In the next century, nations as we know it will be obsolete; all states will recognize a single, global authority." In 1993 the World Federalist Association, a body promoting world government, presented Talbot with the Norman Cousins Global Governance Award. President Clinton wrote to the Association congratulating it on its choice of Talbot, saying, “Norman Cousins worked for world peace and world government....Best wishes....for future success.”
US Council on Foreign Relations member James Warburg (of the international banking family) said to the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee on February 17th, l950, “We shall have world government whether or not you like it by conquest or consent.” He was right. We’re getting it.
Former High Court Judge and Governor General (now sitting on the International Court of Justice) Sir Ninian Stephen made it clear that in the coming global order there will be a loss of national sovereignty. In its place there will be a thing called ‘subsidiarity’, which he describes as “leaving to local, regional and national institutions those matters which are best dealt with at those levels”.(1) Who will decide what is ‘best dealt with at those levels’? Well not the countries concerned. As globalist Henry Kissinger said while being questioned about America’s role in overthrowing the democratic government of Chile: “The issues are much too important for the Chilean voters to be left to decide for themselves”.
What about these naughty patriots? The Oxford Dictionary defines ‘patriot’ as “One who defends or is zealous for his country’s freedom or rights”. Why would such a person be regarded as a threat to social order and stability? Only yesterday the Australian government was exhorting them, or conscripting them, to go of and be blown to pieces ‘keeping the world safe for democracy’. To borrow an argument favoured by internationalists themselves, if the Australian government was abiding by the Constitution and not up to anything on the sly it should have nothing to fear from patriots, and there would be no need for anti-patriot propaganda pieces such as the one aired by ‘60 Minutes’.
So why is the government so paranoid about patriots? Because it IS handing over national sovereignty on the sly, and it is impossible that Jeff McMullen and the producers of ‘60 Minutes’ don’t know it. It is just plain ludicrous to suggest, for example, that no national sovereignty or autonomy was lost by signing the Financial Services Industry Agreement (FSIA) which signed away the right to prevent foreign takeovers of Australian banks, or that further autonomy will be lost by signing the proposed Multilateral Agreement on Investment (MAI) which signs away the right to limit and control the activities of Multinational Corporations and foreign investors in their exploitation of this country and its people.
As for the so-called ‘conspiracy’ about world government, there are literally hundreds of books written on the subject, so that if McMullen has missed them it says heaps about his lack of ability as an ‘investigative journalist’. Some readily to hand are ‘Goals for Mankind’ (1977), ‘Reshaping the International Order’ (1976), ‘Mankind at the Turning Point’ (1974), and ‘Our Global Neighbourhood: the Report of the Commission on Global Governance’ (1995). None of those books was written by ‘conspiracy theorists’. They were all commissioned by the United Nations or groups associated with it, like the Club of Rome....Non-Government Organisations (NGOs) which are now regarded as legitimate ‘institutions of global governance’ even though their power has no democratic basis whatsoever. All of those books concern the establishment of a new world order in which the sovereign nation state is replaced with a global order of ‘interdependent member-states’ under a new form of ‘global governance’.
There is even to be a UN-sponsored conference this year on global governance. The Concise Oxford Dictionary defines ‘governance’ as the ‘act of governing’. What is the difference between ‘governance’ and ‘government’? None. The same dictionary defines ‘government’ as the more modern word for ‘governance’. ‘Global’ is defined as ‘world-wide, embracing all countries’, so global governance literally means ‘world government’.
Perhaps McMullen believed the Commission on Global Governance when it stated that ‘global governance’ does not mean ‘world government’, though ‘the similarity of the terms could lead to misunderstanding’. The commission feared that such a world government might lead to a world which was “less democratic than the world we have, one more accommodating to power, more hospitable to hegemonic ambition, and more reinforcing of the roles of states and governments rather than the rights of people.” The challenge was “to strike the balance in such a way that the management of global affairs is responsive to the interests of all people in a sustainable future, that it is guided by basic human values, and that it makes global organisation conform to the reality of global diversity.”(3)
And how do you ‘make global organisation conform to the reality of global diversity’? Well says the Commission, “Countries are having to accept that in certain fields sovereignty has to be exercised collectively”.(4) And how can sovereignty be exercised collectively without some coordinating body? It can’t. How can nations ‘exercise sovereignty collectively’ and still be independent? They can’t. They ‘exercised sovereignty collectively’ in the former Soviet Union. Global governance means world government, regardless of what the Commission on Global Governance claims. It would not be the first time idealists have played right into the hands of tyrants. But starry-eyed dealists have an excuse. Smug journalists don’t.
(1) In his 1994 Earl Page Memorial Trust lecture, reproduced in
‘Quadrant’ magazine, Jan/Feb 1995, at pp.20-4.
(2) The Australian Online, 5 May, 1998.
(3) ‘Our Global Neighbourhood’ (1995), p. xvii.
(4) Global Neighbourhood, p.67.
(5) Quoted in “Global Tyranny: Step by Step”, (1992) William F.
Jasper, at p.5.
(6) Reuters.
(7) Alexander Solzhenitsyn, ‘The West’s Betrayal of
Civilisation’(1976); Duncan and Wilson Eds.’Marx Refuted’(1987)
p. 197 quoting Professor Kurganov’s calculations.
(8) Funk and Wagnalls Encyclopaedia.
(9) Ronald H. Nash, “The Closing of the American Heart” 1990,
p.153.
(10)Noam Chomsky, “Manufacturing Consent”.
(11) John Langdon-Davies, ‘Russia Puts Back the Clock’ (1949)
(12) Ayn Rand in "Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal" (1966), pp.97-99.