The United States has too much government because the American people have allowed a conspiracy to destroy the substance of the American constitutional system, the whole purpose of which was to limit the power of government. And now, the destroyers who have already done such great damage are seeking first to popularize the concept, and then actually to bring about the condition, of “interdependence” with dictatorships, tyrannies and world government.
— John F. McManus
The John Birch Society Bulletin, July 1975
For decades, the John Birch Society has spread word of the Conspiracy: The international bankers who pull all the strings. The ones who really control both the Communist conspiracy and the United States government. The Trilateral Commission. The Federal Reserve, which is ruining our money. The Council on Foreign Relations — psst, they’re out to destroy the Constitution, take away our guns, and enslave us in a United Nations One-World Communist government. Their code words: “New World Order.”
— Ira Straus
Christian Science Monitor, May 13, 1996
‘‘When I joined the John Birch Society in 1964, the American people, except for the ‘better Red than dead’ minority, were almost universally opposed to world government and would not have tolerated any sudden or overt surrender of U.S. sovereignty,” recalls John McManus in an interview for this article. “The architects for global control have had to proceed slowly, so as not to tip their hand. They have had to put in place rather rudimentary structures for global control in the hope that these structures would later be given more power and become more highly developed.”
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McManus is now the president of the John Birch Society as well as the publisher of The New American, an affiliate of the JBS. “Even today, in spite of decades of propaganda in support of more internationalism, most Americans are still opposed to world government,” he says. “Yet the globalists’ stealth strategy has now proceeded to a point that their long-sought-after world government — which is now coalescing around the WTO/NAFTA/IMF/NATO/UN axis — is becoming much more visible, not just to the politically astute but to the man on the street. But this great awakening has not kept the major media from continuing to take pot shots at the John Birch Society and from deriding what they call ‘conspiracy theories.’”
Often the media characterize such “conspiracy theories” not merely as paranoid but as dangerous. “Conspiracy theory is doing America real harm,” Ira Straus wrote in his Christian Science Monitor op-ed column quoted above. “Long incubating underground, it has grown into the greatest enslaver of human minds since communism. It irrationalizes thinking on every issue. It kills. It turns millions of Americans against their own country. It undermines foreign policy by vilifying our government’s every effort.”
Straus’ theme is echoed ad nauseam by other media organs, which often dismiss those who oppose world government — or, for that matter, the exercise of extra-constitutional powers by the federal government — as “anti-government” extremists. At times, responsible opponents of the new world order are unfairly juxtaposed with hate groups or are accused of fostering hatreds that culminate in criminal and terrorist acts. “What is the milieu in which criminal groups of ‘freemen’ and Oklahoma City bombers grow?” Straus asked. “It is the underworld of conspiracy theory, a subculture in which people share fantasies of fighting heroically against a huge Conspiracy that is taking over the world.”
Open Admissions
But the accumulation of power in the hands of a world authority is no fantasy — and neither is the patient planning behind it. Strangely, admissions to this effect are no longer buried in insider publications but are appearing with greater frequency in the mainstream media, the same media that warns against “conspiracy theories” and “anti-government” extremists.
Consider, as Exhibit A, the cover story in the January 17 issue of The New Republic. The provocative headline on the cover states: “America is surrendering its sovereignty to a world government. Hooray.” Inside, teaser copy above a less descriptive title (“Continental Drift”) proclaims: “World government is coming. Deal with it.” The author of the piece, Robert Wright, notes that “in recent years, more and more people have raised the specter of world government” and have sensed “an alarming concentration of planetary power in one or more acronyms: WTO, U.N., IMF, and so forth.” “Of course,” he continues, “these people … are widely considered fringe characters — flaky, if not loony. And their eccentric visions have been punctured by legions of sober observers.”
However, says Wright, “this may be one of those cases when the flaky are closer to the truth than the sober. Much power now vested in the nation-state is indeed starting to migrate to international institutions, and one of these is the WTO [World Trade Organization]. This doesn’t mean that two or three decades from now we’ll see world government in the classic sense of the term — a single, central planetary authority. But world government of a meaningful if more diffuse sort is probably in the cards…. And, what’s more, it’s a good idea.” To the contrary, it’s not a “good idea”; it would become less diffuse over time; and it would be used as an instrument of authoritarian control by the would-be rulers of the world. But if Wright were to adopt those conclusions, he would instantly be regarded as an exponent of “extremism” rather than of “respectable opinion.”
For Exhibit B, consider globalist Henry Grunwald’s candid admissions in his January 1 Wall Street Journal op-ed article entitled “A World Without a Country?” and subtitled “Not right away. But the idea of the nation-state is in for some profound changes.” Grunwald, former editor in chief of Time Inc. and former U.S. ambassador to Austria, is a member of the nongovernmental Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), a pillar of the American establishment and a promoter of global governance. In his Journal article, Grunwald predicts that the “nation-state will undergo sharp limitations of its sovereignty” and that, “just as the old, petty principalities had to dissolve into the wider nation-state, the nation-state will have to dissolve into wider structures.” Moreover: “It will be increasingly difficult for the future nation-state to argue that its treatments of its own citizens is a purely internal matter. Less dramatic forms of international law will also increasingly restrain the nation-state, touching on environment, drugs, communications, air and ocean traffic.”
Grunwald imagines that the “nation-state” will continue to exist in this emerging new world order, if only to provide an appearance of flags and nationhood. “People need more from a state than practical services,” he reasons. “They need inspiration and some sort of spiritual uplift. That is why the forms and trappings of the nation-state will be with us for a long time, although perhaps only as a kind of ceremonial show business.”
For Exhibit C, consider veteran newsman Walter Cronkite’s call for “an international rule of law” in his January 28 interview on the BBC. Cronkite, who anchored the CBS evening news program for almost 20 years, has been referred to by the BBC and others as “America’s most trusted man.” In his interview, he stated that “we need not only an executive to make international law, but we need the military forces to enforce that law and the judicial system to bring the criminals to justice.” The “American people are going to begin to realize that perhaps they are going to have to yield some sovereignty to an international body to enforce world law,” he predicted, “and I think that’s going to come to other people as well.”
Clinton Connection
In his clarion calls for world government, Cronkite is not waxing philosophical about what he hopes will evolve over the next millennium. Last October 19, when he accepted the World Federalist Association’s (WFA’s) “Norman Cousins Global Governance Award,” he implored his fellow one-worlders: “We cannot defer this responsibility to posterity. Time will not wait. Democracy, civilization itself, is at stake. Within the next few years we must change the basic structure of our global community from the present anarchic system of war and ever more destructive weaponry to a new system governed by a democratic UN federation.” He also stated that “the first priority of humankind in this era is to establish an effective system of world law” and that “we must strengthen the United Nations as a first step toward a world government patterned after our own government with a legislature, executive and judiciary, and police.”
On the occasion of the WFA’s tribute to Cronkite, First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton congratulated him for having received the Global Governance Award. “Thank you Walter, thank you for inspiring all of us to build a more peaceful and just world,” she gushed. “We are still listening to your every word. And with your continuing leadership, we can sail across these unnavigated seas into the 21st century. And there’s no better captain I can imagine, than you.”
“For more than a generation in America, it wasn’t the news, until Walter Cronkite, told us it was the news,” Hillary recalled. “For decades you told us, ‘the way it is.’ But tonight we honor you for fighting for ‘the way it could be.’” Never mind that the cause for which Cronkite was being honored was the cause of world government, and world government would mean the loss of the U.S. Constitution — the document to which her husband had sworn allegiance.
But President Clinton himself had already praised an earlier recipient of the Norman Cousins Global Governance Award, then-U.S. Ambassador at Large Strobe Talbott, for having earned this “distinguished” honor. That praise came in the form of a written statement dated June 22, 1993, which was read at the award ceremony two days later. Therein Clinton approvingly noted that WFA founder Norman Cousins had “worked for world peace and world government” and that Talbott’s “lifetime achievements as a voice for global harmony have earned him this recognition.”
The previous year Talbott had written an article for Time magazine entitled “The Birth of the Global Nation” (July 20, 1992 issue), wherein he argued the case for world government. He also gave his forecast of the future: “nationhood as we know it will be obsolete; all states will recognize a single, global authority.” “It has taken the events in our own wondrous and terrible century to clinch the case for world government,” he said.
Talbott’s advocacy for world government did not prevent President Clinton from inviting him into his administration, where he now serves as Deputy Secretary of State. How could it? Both Talbott and Clinton are members of the world-government-promoting Council on Foreign Relations, as are almost 500 other U.S. government officials. In addition, both are also “members in public service” of the Trilateral Commission, an even more exclusive establishmentarian club greasing the skids for global governance.
The WTO and Beyond
President Clinton explicitly referred to “world government” in his written statement to the WFA. In more public settings he has not been so explicit, preferring instead to use more innocuous-sounding terminology such as “globalization.” His meaning is clear enough, however, for those observers who know how to read between the lines.
In his January 29 address to the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Clinton stated that “greater economic integration and political cooperation are positive forces.” And in case any of the assembled political, business, and economic leaders were in doubt as to his meaning of “integration” and “cooperation” (Clinton, as we know, sometimes assigns novel meanings to ordinary words), he called for “rules-based trade” under a strengthened WTO. “We all have to play by the rules and abide by the WTO decisions,” he added, “whether we win or whether we lose.” That is, nations must not be allowed to set their own trade policies but must instead abide by the dictates of the WTO.
Clinton’s vision for global regulation extends far beyond trade. “Those who believe globalization is only about market economics … are wrong,” he said. “We have a well-developed WTO for dealing with the trade issues. We don’t have very well-developed institutions for dealing with the social issues, the environmental issues, the labor issues, and no forum within which they can all be integrated.” And that, Clinton complained, is why people were “in the streets” protesting the WTO.
Last October 8, Clinton made an appearance at the first Forum of Federation Conference in Mont-Tremblant, Canada, to talk about “the ways we in the United States are working to renew and redefine federalism” and how he sees “the whole concept of federalism emerging internationally.” Clinton told the assembly, “It is fitting that the first global conference would be held here in North America, because federalism began here — a founding principle forged in the crucible of revolution, enshrined in the Constitution of the United States.” Yet the new species of federalism he envisions for the 21st century is not confined to the division of powers within the borders of nations but entails global federation. Predicting that there will be “more [of this species of] federalism rather than less in the years ahead,” he cited “as Exhibit A the European Union [EU].”
As Clinton put it, the EU is “a new form of federalism, where the states — in this case, the nations of Europe — are far more important and powerful than the federal government [of Europe], but they are giving enough functions over to the federal government to sort of reinforce their mutual interest in an integrated economy, and in some integrated political circumstances.” What he did not mention is that the EU is gradually becoming more powerful than the individual nations of Europe, in much the same way that the U.S. government has gradually usurped powers that, in our federal system, are reserved to the states.
The United States of Europe
The EU did not acquire its present powers instantly, but in a series of steps that began decades ago. It was once known as the Common Market but was renamed the European Economic Community, then the European Community, then the European Union as its powers accumulated. In the beginning it was presented to Western Europeans as a “free trade” arrangement designed to facilitate the flow of goods and people — much as the more recent WTO and NAFTA arrangements are being presented. But instead of genuine free trade, the incipient European government put in place a system of regulated trade and established a single European currency known as the euro. This economic unification is now leading to political unification.
This expanded role for the EU was not accidental. The New American accurately projected the lines when it warned in its April 10, 1989 issue, “The much-touted ‘free-market reforms’ are really only bait laid out to entice Europeans into the trap of an (eventually) all-powerful supranational government.” That same year a European Community document admitted, “Economic integration is not meant to be an end in itself but merely an intermediate stage on the road to political integration.” Now, says Henry Grunwald in his Journal op-ed article, “Brussels [the seat of the EU] prescribes everything from working conditions to the contents of cheese. More astonishingly, the euro is replacing once-sacrosanct national currencies. The process will repeat itself elsewhere in the world.” (Emphasis added.)
That’s the idea, of course. Robert Wright predicts in The New Republic that “WTO rulings will probably become more binding, whether through sheer custom or through tougher sanctions.” But in so doing, “The WTO isn’t breaking new ground…. It’s following in the footsteps of a body that’s much further down the road of supranational governance: the European Union.” It is not surprising, therefore, that the globalist president in the White House sees the EU as a model for other regional and global trade arrangements such as NAFTA and the WTO. Nor is it surprising that Clinton supports these stepping stones to regional and global governance — or that he is now calling for an expansion of WTO powers to include international labor standards, a significant step made more politically palatable by the demands of the labor union demonstrators in Seattle. Wright is on target when he observes: “For an American president to say that global laws on the treatment of workers should be enforced with real sanctions authorized by a worldwide body was a milestone in the evolution of global governance.”
A Government of the World
The WTO is just one of the planks in the house of world order that is now being erected. Writing in the April 1974 issue of the CFR journal Foreign Affairs, Richard N. Gardner explained that this house “will have to be built from the bottom up rather than from the top down. It will look like a great ‘booming, buzzing confusion,’ … but an end run around national sovereignty, eroding it piece by piece, will accomplish much more than the old-fashioned frontal assault.”
Gardner specifically mentioned seeking new rules “for the conduct of international trade,” and a strengthening of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), as intermediate steps on the road to world order. (Years later a new GATT agreement gave birth to the WTO.) But he listed a number of other steps as well, including “a continued strengthening of the new global and regional agencies charged with protecting the world’s environment” and a revitalization of the International Monetary Fund. “In short,” he wrote, “the case-by-case approach can produce some remarkable concessions of ‘sovereignty’ that could not be achieved on an across-the-board basis.”
Gardner’s article, entitled “The Hard Road to World Order,” was not written to the uninitiated but to his fellow CFR coterie. His desire for world government, and his piece-by-piece approach for achieving it, no doubt “qualified” him for the several foreign policy posts he has held over the years, including U.S. ambassador to Spain in the Clinton administration.
If all goes according to plan, the United Nations will become the nucleus of the incipient world government, around which the other globalist bodies would revolve. Of course, the UN was not originally established as a government, any more than the European Common Market was. But the UN was originally established as the framework for a world government. In 1950, globalist insider John Foster Dulles, who later became U.S. Secretary of State in the Eisenhower administration, revealed as much when he wrote in his book War or Peace: “The United Nations represents not a final stage in the development of world order, but only a primitive stage. Therefore its primary task is to create the conditions which will make possible a more highly developed organization.” UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan expressed a similar view in a speech at UN headquarters on January 14 of this year, when he stated that “a framework of international law has [already] been built” during the UN’s first half-century.
According to Annan, “Local communities have their fire departments and town councils. Nations have their courts and legislatures. In today’s interdependent world, the peoples of the world must have the rules and institutions they need to manage their lives.” By this he meant world government, as he had made even clearer a month earlier, in a December 14, 1999 press conference: “Every community needs rules. The international community needs them as much as a local community or a district…. The challenge on the global level — what I will call global governance — is something that is going to confront us all very, very starkly.”
In his January 14 speech, Annan called for “a new, more broadly defined, more widely conceived definition of national interest” — a definition based on the premise that, “in a growing number of challenges facing humanity, the collective interest is often the national interest.” (Emphasis added.) One area in which the UN has been increasingly active in redefining the national interest as the collective is the area of human rights. “Where once these humanitarian crises might have been considered internal matters,” said Annan in his January 14 speech, “today the balance seems to be shifting — shifting towards an international community willing to uphold human rights for all.” Based on this doctrine, the UN has intervened many times over the years in the internal affairs of nations, from the tragedy of Katanga in the 1960s to that of Somalia in this decade. The UN, though, also seeks to intervene based on criteria other than so-called human rights. Those criteria include the environment, disarmament, discrimination, drug trafficking, and terrorism — all of which, according to Annan, are “problems without borders.” If Kofi Annan is allowed to make his grandiose vision for the UN a reality, it would be hard to imagine any human endeavor falling outside the UN’s jurisdiction.
Step-by-step Usurpation
Kofi Annan’s rantings notwithstanding, the only way the UN could ever gain control over the United States would be for U.S. leaders to surrender power to the UN. For this reason, the unchecked globalist policies of President Clinton are far more troubling than those of Annan.
But the U.S. government’s globalist agenda existed long before Clinton’s rise to power. In 1961, President John F. Kennedy submitted to the UN a three-stage disarmament proposal entitled Freedom From War (a.k.a. State Department Publication 7277). It stipulated: “In Stage III progressive controlled disarmament and continuously developing principles and procedures of international law would proceed to a point where no state [nation] would have the military power to challenge the progressively strengthened U.N. Peace Force.” The following year this same subversive scheme was incorporated into another State Department document entitled Blueprint for the Peace Race, and in that form has remained the official policy of the U.S. government ever since.
In 1978, the UN General Assembly adopted by consensus a UN document on disarmament known as the Final Document. Not surprisingly, it stipulated a policy similar to that of the United States. In the words of the Final Document: “General and complete disarmament under strict and effective international control shall permit States to have at their disposal only those non-nuclear forces, armaments, facilities and establishments as are agreed to be necessary to maintain internal order and protect the personal security of citizens and in order that States shall support and provide agreed manpower for a United Nations peace force.”
Were the UN to acquire the military clout stipulated by both U.S. and UN documents, it would be more powerful than any national government. Although that has not yet occurred, a dangerous step in that direction is the use of American forces as a surrogate army for the UN or NATO (the latter a regional arrangement authorized by the UN Charter). Such was the case when President Bush sent U.S. forces to Iraq, and such was the case when President Clinton sent U.S. forces to Kosovo. Other dangerous UN usurpations to watch out for include:
• An International Criminal Court (ICC): The U.S. has not ratified the ICC treaty, which would go into effect when ratified by 60 nations. Nonetheless, according to the treaty the ICC would possess the authority to arrest and try citizens of any country — regardless of whether or not the country agreed to the treaty. This would include American soldiers accused of war crimes.
• Global environmental controls: The UN’s 1992 “Earth Summit” in Rio de Janeiro approved a mammoth proposal known as Agenda 21, which would regulate myriad activities to achieve “sustainable development” and cost hundreds of billions of dollars to implement. The UN’s proposed Kyoto (global warming) treaty, not ratified by the United States, would mandate a radical reduction in so-called greenhouse gases in the developed nations, thereby restricting industrial production.
• Global gun control: The UN’s “Report of the Group of Governmental Experts on Small Arms,” submitted by Annan to the UN General Assembly on August 19 of last year, recommends that nations “exercise effective control over the legal possession of small arms [including revolvers],” and “consider the prohibition of unrestricted trade and private ownership of small arms and light weapons specifically designed for military purposes.”
• International taxation: The United Nations Development Program’s (UNDP’s) Human Development Report 1999 suggests a number of taxing schemes, including “polluter-pays charges on global pollution”; “rents or royalties on the use of such ‘global commons’ as under-seabed mineral resources or radio waves”; “taxes on such items as international air tickets”; “a charge on short-term financial movements” — and even a “‘bit tax’ … on the amount of data sent through the Internet.”
The Human Development Report also proposes a global central bank, a world environment agency, an expanded mandate for the WTO, and “a two-chamber General Assembly to allow for civil society representation.” The latter proposal would create the appearance of a “democratic” UN, exercising its authority in the name of all of humanity.
Get US out!
Appearances aside, a world government under the UN would be a nightmare, not a blessing, for mankind. A single planetary authority powerful enough to enforce world peace would also be powerful enough to enforce world tyranny. The latter would be the inevitable consequence, not only because such an extraordinary concentration of power would have an extraordinary corrupting influence, but also because of the despotic regimes that infect the UN and the flawed nature of the UN system itself.
In the American constitutional system, powers are divided between the states and the federal government — with the latter possessing few powers, all of which are enumerated. Those enumerated powers are further divided among three branches of government, and those branches possess constitutional means to check each other. The UN does not possess these kinds of constitutional safeguards to prevent the abuse of power. Moreover, UN human rights declarations are in actuality socialist manifestos calling for a vast expansion of government power. What corrupt politicians have thus far been able to accomplish in subverting the American constitutional system would be minuscule compared to what they could accomplish in a socialistic world government.
In fact, the absorption of America into such a world government would mean the elimination of the U.S. Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and the very existence of the American republic. Moreover, it would mean the unbridled exercise of raw power resulting in untold death and misery.
Fortunately, the means to save the American republic from the increasingly open UN conspiracy were wisely bequeathed to posterity by the Founding Fathers in the form of the Constitution and the U.S. Congress. It is now more important than ever for the American people to use these tools to preserve a legacy of independence and freedom by urging their senators and representatives to Get US out! of the United Nations.
This article originally appeared in the February 28, 2000 issue of The New American
