As participants in the opening session of the May 2000 UN “Millennium Forum” gathered in the General Assembly Hall at UN Headquarters, many of them were drawn to the speaker’s dais at the front of the room. Secretary-General Kofi Annan, who was scheduled to address the session, was delayed by other business. And, as Annan tarried, the vacant lectern — a pulpit radiating power and privilege — proved to be irresistible to many of the non-governmental organization (NGO) representatives who had gathered for the event. With an almost adolescent giddiness, NGO officials formed a line near the lectern to be photographed in a pose of addressing the General Assembly. Interestingly, most of the poseurs affected a classic “Mussolini on the Balcony” posture, as if they were global dictators issuing decrees that mankind would be compelled to obey.
As the song says, “Everybody Wants to Rule the World” — and the UN exists to accomplish that design. For decades, those who have warned that the UN was a world socialist government in embryo have been ridiculed by self-styled sophisticates, who would dismiss such warnings as delusive “conspiracy theories.” But there is nothing theoretical about the ominous empowerment of the UN, and the brazenness with which the UN’s masters are now conducting that campaign makes it difficult to continue to describe this process as a “conspiracy.”
“The world needs new ways of governance,” announces Altered States: Globalization, Sovereignty, and Governance, a report prepared for the UN’s Millennium Summit by former Canadian ambassador to NATO Gordon Smith and Moises Naim, editor of the Carnegie Endowment’s publication Foreign Policy. In what has become a familiar rhetorical dodge, the authors take care to avoid the loaded term “world government” even as they unambiguously extol the concept. “A strong and effective United Nations is a precondition of good governance on Earth…. If we are to govern ourselves better … we must improve the UN.”
As its contribution to the “UN reform agenda” for the Millennium Summit, the Commission on Global Governance (CGG), which was established in 1992 with the support of then-UN Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali, produced a report entitled The Millennium Year and the Reform Process, which updates the group’s 1995 report Our Global Neighborhood. The CGG’s purpose is to expand the UN’s powers in order “to improve the world’s governance” — another oblique acknowledgement of the UN’s emerging role as the seat of a world government. “The development of global governance is part of the evolution of human effort to organize life on the planet,” pontificated the CGG in Our Global Neighborhood. According to the Commission, “the United Nations must continue to play a central role in global governance…. Every effort must be made to give it the credibility and resources it requires to fulfill its responsibilities.”
Not surprisingly, Kofi Annan’s UN “reform” agenda is pitched in the same key. We the Peoples: The Role of the United Nations in the 21st Century, the report prepared by Annan for this September’s Millennium Summit, refers to “new forms of global governance,” “a new ethic of global stewardship,” “global norms,” and “global rules,” all of which assume that the UN will act as a global lawgiver. In the section of his report entitled “Freedom from Fear,” Annan asserted that national sovereignty has, in principle, been abolished: “Surely no legal principle — not even sovereignty — should be used to shield crimes against humanity.”
“The New Superpower”
In his keynote address to the Millennium Forum, Secretary-General Annan pointed out that since the birth of the UN in 1945, the world body has generated more than 500 treaties, conventions, covenants, and other instruments of “international law,” which he described as “a comprehensive legal framework for a better world” — that is, a world ruled by the UN. Annan described the role of NGOs — UN-accredited leftist groups which are neither elected nor accountable — as that of acting in “partnership” with the UN to pressure governments into ratifying and adopting the UN blueprint. Many of the groups represented at the Millennium Forum, Annan observed, “would be protesting outside the [UN] Building, just as they did in Seattle and Washington, D.C.,” had they not been invited to the Forum.
“I’m happy to hear that you were not out demonstrating, but are here working in partnership,” Annan declared to delighted applause. UN-affiliated NGOs constitute “the new superpower,” Annan continued, provoking an audible buzz of excitement from his audience. Admonishing them not to “protest against globalization itself,” Annan instructed them to act as “implementing partners” in carrying out the UN’s designs. In strategic terms, the role of UN-controlled “international civil society” is to provide pressure “from below” on behalf of empowering the UN. Pressure “from above” will be brought to bear by national leaders and policy makers, who will gather at UN Headquarters this September for the Millennium Summit.
The agenda of the NGO “superpower” is breathtakingly audacious. On behalf of “civil society organizations from more than 100 countries,” the Millennium Forum Declaration outlines “a common vision” of “globalization for and by the people.” “In our vision we are one human family, in all our diversity, living on one common homeland,” continues the document. This global “homeland” is ruled by a “strengthened and democratized United Nations,” which enforces “a fair distribution of the earth’s resources” and imposes “peace and human security, as envisioned in the United Nations Charter.” The Declaration updates and globalizes the Communist Manifesto by demanding that the UN undertake “purposeful action to redistribute wealth and land, to construct a safety net and to provide free access to education” in the name of “poverty eradication.”
The document also calls for the UN to “restructure the global financial architecture” and to “impose new forms of taxation, such as the Tobin tax” — a proposed UN surcharge on international financial transactions. To achieve “Justice for the 21st Century,” the Declaration urges adoption of the Earth Charter in fulfillment of Secretary-General Annan’s call for “a new global ethic,” and creation of a permanent UN International Criminal Court (ICC).
If the plans outlined in the Millennium Declaration are carried out, business will be very brisk at the ICC. The Declaration refers to “the universality, indivisibility, and interdependence of all rights, civil, political, social, economic, and cultural,” and calls for a global crusade against “racism, fascism, xenophobia, homophobia, hate crimes, ethnocide and genocide” — thereby designating moral opposition to perversion a human rights violation. Further, the Declaration demands an end to the “insulation from human rights accountability of non-state actors, ranging from transnational corporations and international financial institutions to fundamentalist civil society organizations and criminal syndicates….” (Emphasis added.) This is to say that under the vision described in the Declaration, religious “fundamentalists” would find themselves in the dock before the ICC to be held “accountable” for offenses against UN “law.” Not surprisingly, the Declaration rounds out this sketch of a global despotism by calling for the UN “to establish ready policy and peacekeeping forces.”
Taken together, these proposals would invest the UN with every critical element of sovereignty: A territory (the entire world); the power to collect taxes; the power to make and enforce global laws; a mechanism for trying and sentencing those who disobey global laws; and a standing army to impose the world body’s will on those who resist.
Elements of Global Socialism
In other “civil society” documents referred to during the Millennium Forum, the nature of the world government being pursued by the UN becomes much more vivid. It would be a globe-spanning socialist regime of virtually unlimited powers. And it would enforce a Soviet-style “culture of peace” through the mandatory disarmament of all except those who are enforcing the UN’s will — the UN’s “Peace Force” and various national security establishments subservient to it. That “culture” would also entail ubiquitous globalist/socialist indoctrination through UN-controlled religious, cultural, educational, and media institutions. Values, practices, and institutions rooted in biblical teachings would be eradicated and supplanted with the eco-pagan principles contained in the UN’s Earth Charter. A UN “International Civilian Peacekeeping Force” would be recruited to act as political police, scrutinizing communities for “warning signs” of impending conflicts and calling in elements of the UN “Peace Force” where necessary.
Among the documents that set forth the details of this dystopian UN world dictatorship is The Hague Agenda for Peace and Justice for the 21st Century, which is endorsed by Secretary-General Annan as a sound blueprint for “a new and global partnership” between “international civil society” and the UN. “There are only three documents that you need … to be an informed, effective member of organized civil society,” stated Cora Weiss, head of the Hague Appeal for Peace and Justice, during the UN’s Millennium Forum. “The Charter of the United Nations, the International [sic] Declaration of Human Rights, and The Hague Agenda for Peace and Justice for the 21st Century.” Neither the Declaration of Independence nor the U.S. Constitution was among Weiss’ indispensable texts, and once her background is understood it will become clear why neither of our founding documents made the cut.
A member of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) — the nerve center of America’s globalist elite — Weiss is the daughter of Samuel Rubin, a longtime member of the Communist Party, U.S.A., and the head of a tax-exempt foundation that bears her father’s name. The Samuel Rubin Foundation is the chief financial angel behind the Institute for Policy Studies, a Washington, D.C. “think-tank” connected to the Soviet KGB; Cora Weiss’ husband Peter is IPS chairman. She was among the pro-North Vietnam fifth columnists who undertook a pilgrimage to Hanoi during the Vietnam War. These radical, subversive bona-fides gave Weiss and her organization tremendous stature at the Millennium Forum.
According to the Hague Agenda, “it is time to redefine security in terms of human and ecological needs instead of national sovereignty and national borders.” This will require the creation of “a standing [UN] intervention force” and the implementation of “demobilization programs” around the world to “reclaim and destroy weaponry” not under UN control — not merely nuclear arms and other weapons of mass destruction, but also “light weapons, small arms and guns.”
“Violent conflicts are fueled … by the presence of weapons, weapons, weapons of all kinds all over the world,” declared Weiss at the Millennium Forum. Weiss was a co-organizer of the April 1995 “International Citizens Assembly to Stop the Spread of Weapons” at UN Headquarters, which represented an escalation in the world body’s decades-long campaign for universal civilian disarmament — known euphemistically as “gun control.” Confiscation of private firearms, predictably, is a priority on the Hague Agenda. The document calls for a “global campaign” against “the proliferation and unlawful use of small arms,” including the use of “gun exchanges” (more commonly known in the U.S. as “gun buy-backs”) and the imposition of other measures intended to create “norms of non-possession” of firearms.
This is not to say, of course, that the “weapons, weapons, weapons” that Weiss and her comrades find so distasteful would be abolished, but rather that the UN would enjoy a monopoly on the use of force. “I propose the activation of Chapter VII, article 47 of the UN Charter, which provides for a Military Staff Committee to assist the Security Council for the maintenance of international peace,” declared Weiss at the Millennium Forum. The activation of Chapter VII would require a standing UN military with the power to “take such action by air, sea or land forces as may be necessary to maintain or restore international peace and security.”
Soviet Influence
The UN’s Earth Charter, a “people’s treaty” scheduled to be submitted to the General Assembly in 2002, was created under the direction of former Soviet dictator Mikhail Gorbachev and Canadian industrialist Maurice Strong, who was secretary-general of the 1992 UN “Earth Summit” in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The Earth Summit produced Agenda 21, a mammoth, detailed blueprint for “sustainable development” — meaning a global eco-socialist regime controlled by the UN. At the Millennium Forum, Stephen C. Rockefeller, a member of the Earth Charter Commission and chairman of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund (the tax-exempt foundation that funds much of the radical environmental movement), described the Earth Charter as “an attempt to formulate an integrated legal framework for all sustainable development and environmental law.” The Earth Charter is “a declaration of interdependence and responsibility, [and] a universal code of conduct,” according to Rockefeller.
The Charter is a “soft law” document, continued Rockefeller, a “statement of values” that will undergird the global eco-regime. As such it is a companion to a “hard law” treaty, a proposed “New Covenant” for management of the global biosphere — which encompasses everything on earth — which was created by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources (IUCN) in 1995 and awaits approval by the UN.
The text of the Earth Charter asserts that “we are one human family and one Earth community with a common destiny,” and must therefore create “a global partnership to care for Earth,” which will be defined by “an international legally binding instrument on environment and development” — that is, the IUCN’s “New Covenant.” Significantly, the Charter refers to the human population as merely part of “the greater community of life” and enjoins “humility regarding the human place in nature.” In his remarks at the Millennium Forum, Rockefeller pointed out that the Charter is “the first international document to affirm that individual living creatures — animals, plants, and micro-organisms — are worthy of moral consideration … quite apart from their value to human beings,” and he predicted that “there are going to be very difficult decisions that have to be made when the rights of human beings clash with the obligations human beings have to other living beings — species, but also individual living creatures.”
In 1994, Mikhail Gorbachev predicted that the Earth Charter would be “a kind of Ten Commandments for the environment, something that no one would be allowed to violate.” Gorbachev and the other drafters of that vile document seek to overturn the created order as described in Genesis, in which humanity was a separate, special creation of God, entrusted with stewardship over the lesser orders of life. In place of this biblical worldview, the Earth Charter would install a variety of pagan pantheism in which humanity is part of a democratic biosphere administered by the UN’s priesthood of Gaia.
Rockefeller explicitly acknowledged that the Earth Charter is the distillate of a pantheist worldview. He confided to his audience at the Millennium Forum that he was inspired to participate in drafting the charter by a July 4, 1994 address by former Czech President Václav Havel describing the need for humanity to understand that “our destiny is not dependent merely on what we do for ourselves, but also for what we do for Gaia.” According to Havel, “we are not here alone for ourselves alone, but we are an integral part of higher, mysterious entities against whom it is not advisable to blaspheme.” Havel’s gauzy pantheism, recalled Rockefeller, was enthusiastically “seconded by President Gorbachev,” and it was decided to encapsulate that “spiritual vision in an Earth Charter.” “Unless human beings take seriously their responsibility to the community of life — and not just for it — we [will] not make the major changes in our life that must be made in order to protect the planet,” explained Rockefeller.
The Earth Charter thus offers old Marxist proposals in a new pantheist setting. The document demands the promotion of “social and economic justice,” including “the equitable distribution of wealth within nations and among nations.” It commands human beings everywhere to “affirm that with increased freedom, knowledge, and power comes increased responsibility to promote the common good” — the time-dishonored totalitarian formula through which “freedom” is defined as enslavement to the collective. Most ominously, it commands that subjects of the UN’s would-be global regime “adopt patterns of production, consumption, and reproduction that safeguard Earth’s regenerative capacities, human rights, and community well-being.” This provision, which Rockefeller called “the big principle on sustainable development,” is nothing less than a mandate for state intervention in, and regulation of, all human activities, including childbearing and family life. Once again, the purpose of the “soft law” Earth Charter is to prepare the way for a binding “New Covenant,” which the UN would enforce as global law.
Obvious Plans
In his address to the Millennium Forum, Kofi Annan declared that by equipping the United Nations with sovereign powers and bringing the world under its rule, humanity will achieve the “long dreamed-of age of peace and security.” Significantly, the word freedom was missing from Annan’s utopian pronouncement, and with good reason: Individual liberty, like national independence, must be sacrificed on the altar of “interdependence” in order for the designs of the UN’s masters to be consummated. This is the chilling reality concealed beneath layers of warm and fuzzy UN rhetoric about “peace” and “diversity,” and it is in this deception that the conspiratorial nature of the UN’s agenda is made manifest. This is not to say that the United Nations is a conspiracy. Like the government of the Soviet Union and other totalitarian states, the UN is a vast and ponderous bureaucracy that serves a partially-submerged, conspiratorial elite determined to achieve total power over the world.
Writing in the January 17 issue of The New Republic, Robert Wright observed, “in recent years, more and more people have raised the specter of world government” and have taken note of “an alarming concentration of planetary power” in the United Nations and its affiliated bodies. Such people “are widely considered fringe characters — flaky, if not loony. And their eccentric visions have been punctured by legions of sober observers.” Nonetheless, Wright acknowledges, “this may be one of those cases when the flaky are closer to the truth than the sober.”
One need not be paranoid in order to conclude that a long-term design for world government is unfolding before us; one need only be observant. The observant among us couldn’t help but notice the October 19, 1999 address by former CBS anchorman Walter Cronkite before the World Federalist Association (WFA) in which he accepted the “Norman Cousins Global Governance Award.” In that address Cronkite declared that “the first priority of humankind” must be to “strengthen the United Nations as a first step toward a world government.” In his audience was Hillary Rodham Clinton, who commended Cronkite “for fighting for ‘the way it could be’” — a brazen endorsement of the abolition of the United States of America as a sovereign nation.
In a notorious Time magazine essay (“The Birth of the Global Nation,” July 20, 1992), Strobe Talbott, who is now Deputy Secretary of State in the Clinton administration, predicted that in the near future “nationhood as we know it will be obsolete; all states will recognize a single, global authority.” Talbott stated that “it has taken the events in our own wondrous and terrible century to clinch the case for world government.” As a reward for Talbott’s essay, the WFA presented him with the Norman Cousins Award in 1993. In a letter praising both Talbott and the WFA, Bill Clinton approvingly recalled that Cousins had “worked for world peace and world government” — thereby offering his own oblique endorsement of the repeal of the Declaration of Independence and the end of the United States as a constitutional republic.
Talbott’s globalist prattle notwithstanding, the experience of the 20th century has clinched the case for limited government and national independence. The experience of 20th century “democide” — mass murder of populations by governments, which extinguished almost 170 million lives — illustrates decisively the dangers of consolidating political power. Rather than inaugurating “a long dreamed-of age of peace and security,” a UN world government would create the conditions for democide on an unprecedented scale. This is why sober, intelligent Americans must examine the evidence of the malign intentions behind the drive to create a world government — a small portion of which is contained in this issue — and join in the organized effort to extricate our nation from the UN before our window of opportunity is slammed shut forever.
