I will merely repeat that we are at present working, discreetly but with all our might, to wrest this mysterious political force called sovereignty out of the clutches of the local national states of our world. And all the time we are denying with our lips what we are doing with our hands….
— Arnold J. Toynbee
Historian, Royal Institute of International Affairs, 1931
‘‘The people of our country are united behind our men and women in uniform, and this government will do all that is necessary to assure the success of their historic mission.” So declared President George W. Bush in his April 13 press conference on Iraq. “One central commitment of that mission,” the president continued, “is the transfer of sovereignty back to the Iraqi people. We have set a deadline of June 30th. It is important that we meet that deadline.”
Sovereignty. The president invoked the term 12 times in his press conference, three times in one sentence: “Once we transfer sovereignty, we’ll enter into a security agreement with the government to which we pass sovereignty, the entity to which we pass sovereignty.” It should be of more than passing interest that sovereignty-talk is once again in vogue, at least where Iraq is concerned. Not only the president, but other politicians, legal experts, academicians, and journalists have weighed in on the urgent necessity of transferring sovereignty from the occupational forces to the Iraqis. But it is nothing more than deceptive lip service.
For most of the past century, national sovereignty has been in retreat, steadily eroded by a profusion of treaties and international organizations. All the while, it has been anathematized and scorned by the intelligentsia and the one-world lobby as a stumbling block to world order and world peace.
So why is it suddenly not just acceptable but apparently obligatory for even dedicated globalists to get worked up over Iraq’s “sovereignty”? The inveterate internationalists at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and the Council on Foreign Relations have been producing task force reports, press conferences, articles, and op-ed columns on the subject for months. French Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin, in a radio interview last August, pressed the United States to speed up the transfer, asserting that “a logic of occupation must be rapidly replaced by a logic of sovereignty.” French President Jacques Chirac delivered the same message last September in a New York Times interview: “There will be no concrete solution unless sovereignty is transferred to Iraq as quickly as possible.”
This double talk is from two of the most militant Eurocrats who have been pushing relentlessly for years to destroy the national sovereignty not only of France but of all the countries of the European Union and to subject all to the growing EU central government based in Brussels. Why the concern over sovereignty for Iraq, but not for France, Italy, Germany, and the other (former) nation states of Europe?
Verbicide and Sovereignty
When internationalists speak positively of national sovereignty, they mean something entirely different from the commonly understood, traditional meaning of the term. In short, they are committing verbicide — that is, deliberately butchering the true definition of the word. In the case of Iraq, for instance, they speak of a “transfer of sovereignty” that entails continued military occupation for years to come and administration of many of the functions of the nation-state by the United Nations. Recall that in his demand for “sovereignty” for Iraq, Chirac also demanded a “key role” for the UN. The supposedly anti-UN Bush administration agrees. “Nobody wants the U.N. in there more than we do,” an unnamed “senior State Department official” told the Washington Post. “We’re going to do everything we can to get them there,” the official was quoted as saying in the Post’s February 18 story.
The April 23 New York Times reported on the Bush administration’s “plans for a new caretaker government in Iraq” that “would place severe limits on its sovereignty, including only partial command over its armed forces and no authority to enact new laws.” And Secretary of State Colin Powell stated on April 8: “They will be sovereign, but I think as a result of agreements, as a result of … [UN] resolutions that are passed, there will be some constraints on the power of this sovereignty.”
UN-imposed constraints on sovereignty? Severe limits? What kind of “sovereignty” is that? Answer: The same kind of “sovereignty” that is being fastened upon every other nation of the world, including the United States, by an ever-expanding and constantly tightening net of UN treaties, conventions, and resolutions that claim the fictional authority of “international law.” This newly defined sovereignty is being fastened upon us knowingly and willfully by U.S. officials who have embraced the subversive ideology of internationalism, in blatant violation of the solemn oath of office to “support and defend the Constitution of the United States.”
Sovereignty is like pregnancy; you’re either sovereign or you’re not. If an external authority dictates certain constraints upon your actions and powers, then you are not sovereign; the external authority doing the dictating is the real sovereign. Hugo Grotius, the eminent Dutch legal theorist of the 17th century, whose writings many of the Founding Fathers greatly admired, put it this way: “That power is called sovereign whose actions are not subject to the legal control of another, so that they cannot be rendered void by the operation of another human will.”
Professor Jeremy Rabkin of Cornell University has addressed this fundamental issue more recently (1998, Why Sovereignty Matters), noting: “Sovereignty denotes independence. A sovereign state is one that acknowledges no superior over its own government — or as the Declaration of Independence put it, with proper piety, no superior ‘among the powers of the Earth.’”
This kind of “unenlightened” fidelity to the traditional meaning of things sends the internationalists at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) into near epileptic convulsions. The CFR journal Foreign Affairs went after Professor Rabkin and other defenders of national sovereignty in its November/December 2000 issue. In a diatribe entitled, “The New Sovereigntists: American Exceptionalism and Its False Prophets,” Peter J. Spiro expressed alarm that “anti-internationalism claims a growing intellectual following” that actually has become a “movement.” And this movement is making ratification of UN treaties and U.S. participation in a “broad array of international regimes” increasingly difficult. In short, laments Spiro, the “new sovereigntists” are botching up the drive for global government:
At the center of their thinking stands the edifice of sovereignty. Sovereignty, in this conception, calls for America to resist the incorporation of international norms and drapes the power to do so in the mantle of constitutional legitimacy. “Because the United States is fully sovereign,” claims Jeremy Rabkin, a professor of political science at Cornell University, “it can determine for itself what its Constitution will require. And the Constitution necessarily requires that sovereignty be safeguarded so that the Constitution itself can be secure.”
If Rabkin’s argument makes sense to you, insists Spiro, a professor of law at Hofstra University, it is only because you have a totally antiquated view of sovereignty and the Constitution. The “new sovereigntists” forget, says Spiro, that the Constitution “has always adapted itself successfully to new exigencies of the international system.”
“Indeed,” he declares, “the Constitution will have to adapt to global requirements sooner or later.” Spiro appears dismayed that “the international community cannot yet force formal participation in international regimes.” “But,” says this CFR propagandist, on a triumphant note, “economic globalization will inevitably bring the United States in line.”
Professor Spiro and his one-world cohorts at the CFR are doing all in their power to “bring the United States in line” with the evolving UN-defined notion of sovereignty. In 1999, UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan approvingly declared: “State sovereignty, in its most basic sense, is being redefined.” Annan went on to describe “traditional notions of sovereignty” as an “obstacle” to the UN’s goals. In this, he was absolutely correct; sovereignty, as understood by America’s Founding Fathers, is indeed an obstacle to the UN’s goals of ever-expanding power, and its ultimate goal of unrestrained world government.
Kofi Annan is not the first to push this subversion through verbicide; he is, in fact, merely echoing what a long train of globalists have been advocating for many decades. Walt Whitman Rostow, in his 1960 book entitled The United States in the World Arena, declared that it was “an American interest to see an end to nationhood as it has been historically defined.” As head of the State Department’s Policy Planning Council under President John F. Kennedy (and later as national security advisor to President Johnson), Rostow helped launch policies aimed at destroying U.S. sovereignty, or U.S. “nationhood as it has been historically defined.” Rostow, a longtime CFR member (and a security risk who failed several security clearance checks), left no doubt as to what this really meant. Returning from a trip to Moscow in 1960, he declared that the ultimate goal of U.S. policy is “the creation of a world order which really can’t stop very short of world law and some form of world government.”
The Gospel of Globalism
Admissions like those by Walt Rostow cited above are not made for broad public consumption; they are usually made in publications and forums for dedicated one-worlders and their fellow travelers. As Michael Hirsh (CFR) explained in a special issue of the international edition of Newsweek (edited by CFR member Fareed Zakaria):
[T]he internationalists were always hard at work in quiet places making plans for a more perfect global community. In the end the internationalists have always dominated national policy. Even so, they haven’t bragged about their globe-building for fear of reawakening the other half of the American psyche, our berserker nativism. And so they have always done it in the most out-of-the-way places and with little ado.
Hirsh’s remarkable admission appeared in a “Special Davos Edition” of the magazine for December 2001-February 2002, which was intended primarily for consumption by the elite attending the annual Insider conclave known as the World Economic Forum, in Davos, Switzerland. Hirsh’s Newsweek revelation continued:
In December 1917 the Inquiry, a group of eager reformers who included a young Walter Lippmann, secretly met in New York to draw up Wilson’s Fourteen Points [which proposed the formation of the League of Nations, among other things]. In 1941, FDR concocted the Atlantic Charter in the mists off Newfoundland. The dense woods of New Hampshire gave birth to the Bretton Woods institutions — the IMF and World Bank — in 1944. And a year later the United Nations came to life at the secluded Georgetown estate of Dumbarton Oaks…. So what emerged took us more or less by surprise. We had built a global order without quite realizing it, bit by bit, era by era….
Mr. Hirsh is not at all appalled by the historical facts showing that a coterie of internationalists has been working furtively for decades to undermine America’s nationhood and constitutional order. Indeed, he insists that “we must now embrace the global community we ourselves built.” We ourselves? The clear implication is that we, the American people, must now accept what the CFR “Wise Men” have created in our name — and for our own good. And although we, the American people, may be taken “more or less by surprise” at the sudden appearance of the multitude of new international constraints on our sovereignty, it is certain that the CFR “we,” to whom Hirsh is also speaking, realize precisely what they have been building “bit by bit.”
Under the conception of “sovereignty” envisioned by the likes of Peter Spiro, Walt Rostow, Kofi Annan and Michael Hirsh, the nation-state gradually will, in the words of Arnold J. Toynbee, “dwindle almost to the vanishing point.”
Toynbee made that comment, along with his words that appear at the beginning of this article, in a speech he delivered in 1931 to the Conference of Institutions for the Scientific Study of International Affairs in Copenhagen — one of the “out-of-the-way” gatherings Hirsh referred to where internationalist Insiders carry out their conspiratorial plans “with little ado.”
Admitting Conspiracy
Although not a household name today, British historian Arnold J. Toynbee is one of the most famous and oft-quoted intellectuals of the last century. His fame owes as much (if not more) to his connections as to his erudition. He was one of the central characters in many of the key behind-the-scenes gatherings referred to in Hirsh’s Newsweek story. Professor Toynbee was one of the early internationalists hired by the Royal Institute of International Affairs (RIIA) to build its global brain trust and propagandize for its one-world gospel. The RIIA is the British sister of the American CFR, both of which were established as fronts for the Rhodes-Milner Group, the super-elite British cabal formed by diamond magnate Cecil Rhodes and Lord Alfred Milner toward the end of the 19th century.
Besides serving the RIIA in the British Foreign Office and British intelligence during World Wars I and II, Toynbee also was director of studies at the RIIA for three decades (1925-1955), editor of its journal, International Affairs, and professor of history at the University of London and the London School of Economics (an academic bastion founded and controlled by the Fabian Socialists). He was an RIIA operative at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919 and was one of their top representatives at secret conferences over the course of five decades.
Toynbee’s speech to the 1931 Copenhagen conference was entitled, “The Trend of International Affairs Since the War.” He did not mince words with his fellow globalists. “If we are frank with ourselves,” he said, “we shall admit that we are engaged on a deliberate and sustained and concentrated effort to impose limitations upon the sovereignty and independence of the fifty or sixty local sovereign independent States which at present partition the habitable surface of the earth and divide the political allegiance of mankind.”
However, Toynbee explained, it would not do to be so frank with the great unwashed; instead, great pains must be taken by internationalists, he said, to conceal their real designs. In fact, Toynbee advocated, and proudly boasted of, outright lying to deceive the common people whom he pretended to be serving:
It is just because we are really attacking the principle of local sovereignty that we keep on protesting our loyalty to it so loudly. The harder we press our attack upon the idol, the more pains we take to keep its priests and devotees in a fool’s paradise — lapped in a false sense of security which will inhibit them from taking up arms in their idol’s defense.
When it comes to idolatry, few of even the most vehement nationalists come close to matching the religious fervor of internationalists like Toynbee, who would virtually turn lying and deceit into sacraments. As he makes stunningly clear in the following statement, it is internationalism’s true believers who are the idolaters, equating their one-world religion with “worship of the divinity.” According to Toynbee:
The local national state, invested with the attributes of sovereignty … is an abomination of desolation standing in the place where it ought not. It has stood in that place now — demanding and receiving human sacrifices from its poor deluded votaries — for four or five centuries. Our political task in our generation is to cast the abomination out, to cleanse the temple and to restore the worship of the divinity to whom the temple rightfully belongs. In plain terms, we have to re-transfer the prestige and the prerogatives of sovereignty from the fifty or sixty fragments of contemporary society to the whole of contemporary society — from the local national States by which sovereignty has been usurped, with disastrous consequences, for half a millennium, to some institution embodying our society as a whole.
He was speaking in 1931, remember, a decade before Pearl Harbor and 14 years prior to the founding of the United Nations. But Toynbee knew that the UN was coming because he was right in the center of the RIIA-CFR cabal that had launched the failed League of Nations and was even then, in 1931, striving mightily, but secretly, to launch a second try at “world order.” What would this new institution look like? Toynbee told the conferees:
In the world as it is today, this institution can hardly be a universal Church. It is more likely to be something like a League of Nations. I will not prophesy. I will merely repeat that we are at present working, discreetly but with all our might, to wrest this mysterious political force called sovereignty out of the clutches of the local national states of our world. And all the time we are denying with our lips what we are doing with our hands, because to impugn the sovereignty of the local national states of the world is still a heresy for which a statesman or a publicist can be — perhaps not quite burnt at the stake, but certainly ostracized and discredited…. [Emphasis added.]
Nevertheless, Toynbee assured his fellow heretics, their Luciferian gospel of deception and the worship of the “divine” collective humanity would triumph. “I believe that the monster of sovereignty is doomed to perish by our sword,” he confidently declared. “The fifty or sixty local states of the world will no doubt survive as administrative conveniences,” he predicted. “But sooner or later sovereignty will depart from them. Sovereignty will cease, in fact if not in name, to be a local affair.”
By Their Fruits
We can thank the Internationalist Power Elite for World War II, Korea, Vietnam, the Gulf War, the War in Iraq and dozens of other conflicts that have left tens of millions of dead in the 20th and 21st centuries. The “new world order” architects have sought to “cleanse the temple” from the “abomination of desolation” they call sovereignty. Toynbee’s heirs continue to take up the sword and are busily fulfilling his prophecy, slaying “the monster of sovereignty.” Across the political terrain of this planet are scattered the remains of dozens of nations that still are called sovereign States, but which are, in fact, no more than “administrative conveniences.”
This is clearly apparent in the case of developing countries, whose policies are dictated by the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, or in those countries and regions dominated by UN “peacekeeping,” “peace-building” and “nation-building” operations. Remember the UNMIK peacekeeping operation launched in Kosovo in 1999? What about UNTSO, the Middle East peacekeeping operation begun in 1948, or UNFICYP in Cypress dating back to 1964? Guess what; they all are still on-going, along with UNAMSIL, UNIFIL, UNMISET, UNSCO, UNOMB, UNAMIL, UNMEE, etc. There are dozens of operations with tens of thousands of troops and civilian administrators, costing billions of dollars, and leading the U.S. toward bankruptcy. Once begun, they have not ended.
However, Third World and Middle Eastern countries are not the only ones losing their sovereignty “in fact if not in name.” The advanced countries of the European Union are rapidly becoming mere administrative units of the EU organs in Brussels and Strasbourg, according to the plan laid out by the RIIA-CFR architects who designed the Common Market decades ago. Meanwhile, our own nation is following Europe’s lead, with NAFTA — and now the proposed Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) — wielding the internationalist sword against our vitals. The late Robert L. Bartley (CFR), longtime editor of the Wall Street Journal and an ardent internationalist, praised the NAFTA/FTAA plan for moving the United States toward completely “open borders” and a sovereignty-destroying, EU-style merger of the nations of the Western Hemisphere. “I think the nation-state is finished,” Bartley said.
In April 2001, President Bush attended the Quebec Summit of the Americas, accompanied by his CFR guides Secretary of State Colin Powell and U.S. Trade Representative Robert Zoellick. New York Times writer David E. Sanger (CFR) may have been the only journalist at the summit to let the cat out of the bag, in an article entitled, “News Analysis: Biggest Obstacle to Selling Trade Pact Is Sovereignty.” Sanger reported that President Bush “said he was focusing on a regional accord so that ‘we can combine in a common market….’” But making the FTAA a reality would be a “complex task,” noted Sanger: “The biggest problem comes down to one word: sovereignty.” Sanger could have elaborated on the significance of the moment with a touch of Toynbee: “And all the time we are denying with our lips what we are doing with our hands.”
