THE MILLENIUM CONFLICT:
AMERICA FIRST - or -
WORLD GOVERMENT
By: Patrick J. Buchanan
Speech to: Boston World Affairs Council - January 6, 2000
Five years ago, historian Christopher Lasch published "The Revolt of the Elites". It was a book about how our national elite was literally seceding from America. Pointing up the huge and growing gap in incomes between the elite and the middle class, Lasch argued that a more ominous gap existed in how each perceived America.
The old elite, Lasch wrote, had a sense of obligation to country and community. But the new ruling class, more merit based, brainy, and mobile, congregates on the coasts and puts patriotism far down the list in its hierarchy of values. Indeed, said Lasch, "it is a question of whether they think of themselves as Americans at all."
Lasch did not name names, but the new elite is not difficult to identify. A few years ago, Ralph Nader wrote to the executives of 100 giant U.S. corporations, suggesting how they might show their loyalty to "the country that bred them, built them, subsidized them and defended them." At the annual stockholders meeting, Ralph said, why not begin with a pledge of allegiance to the flag?
Only one company responded favorably. Half did not respond at all. Many sent back angry letters declaring that they were not American companies at all. Motorola denounced the request as "political and nationalistic." Other companies likened the idea of a pledge of allegiance to loyalty oaths of the McCarthy era. Why were the heads of these corporations outraged? Because for years they have been trying to sever their bonds to the country of their birth.
In 1997 the head of Boeing told one interviewer he would be delighted if, twenty years hence, no one thought of Boeing as an American company. My goal, said Phil Condit, is to "rid [Boeing] of its image as an American group."
Back in the 1970s, Carl Gerstacker of Dow envisioned a day when Dow would be free of America. "I have long dreamed," he said, "of buying an island owned by no nation and of establishing the World Headquarters of the Dow Company on the truly neutral ground of such an island, beholden to no nation or society." A spokesman for Union Carbide agreed: "It is not proper for an international corporation to put the welfare of any country in which it does business above that of any other." In any test of loyalties, for such as these, the company comes before the country.
Early in the 1970s, Zbigniew Brzezinski, later Jimmy Carter's national security adviser, wrote, "A global consciousness is for the first time beginning to manifest itself...we are witnessing the emergence of transnational elites...composed of international businessmen, scholars, professional men and public officials. The ties of these new elites cut across national boundaries, their perspectives are not confined by national traditions...and their interests are more functional than national." The one force that can derail the rise of this new elite, warned Zbig, is the "politically activated masses," whose "nativism could work against the cosmopolitan elites."
Brzezinski knew that the creation of any New World Order would have to proceed by stealth. As Richard Gardner, Carter's ambassador to Italy, wrote in 1974: "The 'house of world order' will have to be built from the bottom up. An end run around national sovereignty, eroding it piece by piece, will accomplish much more than an old fashioned frontal assault."
Advancing on little cat's feet, they have done their work. By 1992 Mr. Clinton could appoint as Deputy Secretary of State his roommate from Oxford days who openly welcomed the death of nations and the coming of world government. Wrote Strobe Talbott:
All countries are basically social arrangements. Within the next hundred years, nationhood as we know it will be obsolete. All states will recognize a single global authority. A phrase briefly fashionable in the mid 20th century, citizen of the world, will have assumed real meaning at the end of the 21st.
Last year in Istanbul, Bill Clinton declared himself "a citizen of the world."
This, then, is the millennial struggle that succeeds the Cold War: It is the struggle of patriots of every nation against a world government where all nations yield up their sovereignty and fade away. It is the struggle of nationalism against globalism, and it will be fought out not only among nations, but within nations. And the old question Dean Rusk asked in the Vietnam era is relevant anew: Whose side are you on?
Last fall, accepting the highest award of the World Federalist Association, the Most Trusted Man in America declared his loyalty.
...[I]f we are to avoid the eventual catastrophic world conflict, we must strengthen the United Nations as a first step toward a world government... we Americans will have to yield up some of our sovereignty. That would be a bitter pill. It would take a lot of courage, a lot of faith in the new order. Indeed it would, Mr. Cronkite.
Walter went on to urge U.S. ratification of the UN Law of the Sea Treaty rejected by Ronald Reagan, of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty rejected by the Senate, and of the Rome treaty for a permanent international war crimes tribunal. He urged America to surrender its veto power in the Security Council, and called for a standing UN army to enforce the peace of the world. We now no longer see as through a glass darkly, but face to face, the internationalists' vision of world government.
But the American ship of state has long been shifting course to that destination. In October 1991, President Bush told the UN that a New World Order was America's goal. In 1993, the Clinton White House, in a secret national security directive, declared its intent to put U.S. troops under UN command. When young Americans were killed in an accident over Iraq, Al Gore offered his condolences "to the families of those who died in the service of the United Nations."
In a lame-duck session of Congress in 1994, both parties voted to ensnare the United States in a World Trade Organization where America gets one vote out of 135, and gives up its right to negotiate reciprocal trade treaties that serve America's national interest.
Under the treaty on global warming Al Gore brought home from Kyoto, the United States must radically slash its use of fossil fuels like oil and coal, while no commensurate cut is demanded in the fossil fuel use of 132 "underdeveloped countries," including China.
The house of world order is indeed being built from the bottom up; but resistance is also beginning to build. In December globalists were astounded there was so much anger in Seattle at the WTO. But our trade-uber-alles elites do not understand America, or American history. It was the will of this people to be masters in their own house that steeled our first patriots to stand up to the troops of the British Empire, just outside this city in 1775. A spirit of liberty is bred in our bones. Let me tell you about an American who put trade in its proper perspective.
Thomas Nelson, a merchant, was Governor of Virginia and head of its militia at Yorktown. As his artillery was firing on the British, Nelson walked up to the gunners to demand to know why they were avoiding one sector of Yorktown where his own home was located. "Out of respect to you, sir," came the reply. Nelson had the cannons turned and ordered them to fire at his own house. It was shelled to pieces.
But when that spirit of patriotism dies within a nation's elite, the aspirants of global power smell opportunity. Two years ago, a Mr. Bacre Waly Ndiaye of the UN Human Rights Commission came to the U.S. His mission: Tour U.S. prisons to determine if they are up to UN standards. Mr. Ndiaye interviewed condemned killers on death rows to see if their human rights were being violated.
There is, of course, something comical in a UN official from a continent where the criminal justice system is still, shall we say, pre-Miranda, ripping the U.S. for its prison system. But the issue behind the Ndiaye tour is deadly serious. For he insists he has the right to investigate our prisons because his UN commission speaks for "the world"—an authority higher than the United States, and he claims the 1992 International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, signed by President Bush, justifies UN inspections of U.S. prisons.
Last month, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Mary Robinson toured northern Mexico. Her concern: the U.S. Border Patrol. By heavily patrolling the accessible crossing points, said Ms. Robinson, our Border Patrol is "forcing" illegal aliens to take more perilous routes into the United States. It is, presumably, a violation of the human rights of people breaking into our country to "force" them to seek out less safe passages across our borders.
It is easy to see where Mary Robinson and her colleagues are heading. They seek a regime where UN bureaucrats from Third World despotisms demand that America open her borders and grant sanctuary to all who wish to settle here. Americans who wish to control their borders will be told that sovereignty is outdated, and that our great fertile plains and cities are, compared to Bombay and Lagos, under-populated.
>From UN declarations of "world heritage sites" in the U.S, to putting U.S. troops under UN command, to creation of a UN war crimes tribunal with the power to seize and prosecute U.S. soldiers, we are on the road paved by Bill Clinton when he said that he hopes to leave America tied down in a web of global institutions.
Last month, we learned that the UN tribunal to prosecute war crimes in the Balkans has opened a file on U.S. Air Force pilots. The chickens of globalism are coming home to roost.
Another milestone was crossed last year when UN Secretary General Kofi Annan asserted that only the Security Council can authorize the international use of force; and a nation's sovereignty no longer protects it from intervention, if the UN determines that human rights are being violated. The Brezhnev Doctrine of Limited Sovereignty has been replaced by the Annan Doctrine.
Upon what meat has this our Caesar fed? The United Nations was not established as a world government, but a forum for settling disputes. Kofi Annan is not the conscience of mankind; he is a civil servant, an employee of the UN; and he should begin behaving as such.
But it was not Mr. Ndiaye, Mrs. Robinson or Mr. Annan who announced the death of the nation-state. That was Strobe Talbott, Richard Gardner, and those Republicans who have made the Global Economy a Golden Calf to fall down before and worship. And the political globalists have their own Fifth Column of fellow travelers inside the conservative elite.
Wall Street Journal editor Robert Bartley has been quoted as declaring "the nation-state is finished." He calls for an amendment to the Constitution to throw open America's borders to immigration from all over the world. Bartley's vision of America as Global Mall, is embraced by the global corporations that advertise in the Journal and seek access to an inexhaustible supply of low-wage foreign labor. As British author John Gray writes, America's neo-conservatives have become little more than "ranting evangelists of global capitalism."
Let it be said: Loyalty to the New World Order is disloyalty to the Republic. In nation after nation, the struggle between patriotism and globalism is underway. In England, the Tory Party draws a line in the sand at giving up Britain's pound. In France, farmers riot to preserve a way of life. In Canada, the fight to preserve the national culture is gaining recruits. In Germany, Gerhardt Schroeder makes a political comeback by embracing economic nationalism.
And Mr. Cronkite's talk of world government ushering in world peace notwithstanding, the end of sovereignty means endless war. Trampling on the sovereignty of Yugoslavia, President Clinton demanded that the Serbs surrender Kosovo and cede domination of their country to NATO. When Belgrade rejected his ultimatum, Mr. Clinton began 78 days of bombing, using as his casus belli allegations of Serbian genocide against Kosovar Albanians. We now know there was no genocide. We now know it was Clinton's bombing that spurred the killing. We now know Clinton's War did not create a "multi-ethnic democracy," but a vengeful little statelet where Serbs are burned out of their homes for sport.
If ever sovereignty becomes obsolete, we may expect America's involvement in endless wars until, one day, we pay the horrific price in some act of cataclysmic terror on our own soil. For interventionism is the spawning pool of international terror.
Admonishing Russia for her war on Chechnya, Madeline Albright declared, "Killing the innocent does not defeat terror. It feeds terror." Exactly, Ms. Albright. But that is as true of Serbia, as it is of Chechnya.
If we wish to see the future our globalists have in mind, we need only look at the superstate rising in Europe. The nations of the European Union have ceased to be sovereign. They have given up control of their currencies, their budgets, their borders, and are giving up control of their defense. Britain has been forced to comply with a ruling by the European Court of Human Rights requiring the British army to accept homosexuals. Earlier, the court demanded that Britain end corporal punishment in its schools. "What doth it profit a man if he gain the whole world, and suffer the loss of his own country?"
In 1939, in his work, The New World Order, H. G. Wells wrote: "Countless people...will hate the New World Order...and will die protesting against it...we have to bear in mind the distress of a generation or so of malcontents..."
Well, Mr. Wells, we are your malcontents. But we're not going to die protesting your New World Order; we're going to live fighting it. And Seattle may just prove to be the Boston Tea Party of that New World Order. "I believe globalization is inevitable," Bill Clinton told Larry King at year's end. Well, I don't.
My vision of America is of a republic that has recaptured every trace of her lost sovereignty, independence, and liberty, a nation that is once again self-reliant in agriculture, industry, and technology, a country that can, if need be, stand alone in the world.
My vision is of a republic not an empire, a nation that does not go to war unless she is attacked, or her vital interests are imperiled, or her honor is impugned. And when she does goes to war, it is only after following a constitutional declaration by the Congress of the United States. We are not imperialists; we are not interventionists; we are not hegemonists; and we are not isolationists. We simply believe in America first, last, and always.
And we don't want to be citizens of the world, because we have been granted a higher honor-we are citizens of the United States. Asked on his deathbed to make a toast, John Adams, the great Bostonian, declared: "Independence, forever!" That is my vision for America; that is our cause; and it shall prevail.
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