The Mel Gibson character in the movie Conspiracy Theory could serve as the model for how the smart people view them: a high-strung cab driver, living alone and friendless in a shabby apartment festooned with news clippings about space aliens and powerful shadow governments that control our lives.
Admittedly, there are people who fit this caricature, who, in fact, make the Mel Gibson character seem a model of rationality. But so what? There are others who make the case against globalism – Pat Buchanan, for example – in a thoughtful and balanced manner. We do not refuse to debate the issue of capital punishment because some of the characters who turn up for the candlelit processions outside prisons on the night of scheduled executions are, well…unusual. And environmental issues continue to be debated in a serious manner even though there are bizarre extremists in organizations such as Green Peace.
One can argue that the world will be a better place once the nation-state system is abolished, but not that a transformation of this magnitude should take place without the America people being given an opportunity to wrestle with its implications. Those who object to the idea of some future Kofi Annan deciding our tax rates and where our troops will be deployed do not deserve to be cast as conspiracy nuts. Our Constitution was enacted to “form a more perfect union.” If that is to no longer be a national goal, the citizens of the country are entitled to know why – and to democratically express their objections if they do not want to go along with this profound change in the way we and our children and grandchildren will live.
There is another reason why the push for world government merits informed public debate. I would argue that it the source of many of the issues that exasperate so many Americans – those issues that lead to the groans of disbelief you hear often in social settings where blue-collar and middle class Americans gather and discuss current events. I am talking about those instances where people spread their arms and stare wide-eyed and exclaim, “Can you believe this! Are the politicians out of their minds? Are they out to destroy us?” You can hear similar expressions of despair from callers to talk shows such as Rush Limbaugh’s.
What issues am I talking about? You could probably rattle them off as easily as I can. I have in mind the instances when our political leaders and others in positions of influence act as if they have no special concern for the interests of the American people. For example:
• When politicians take the floor to protest the treatment of the Taliban prisoners being held in U.S. military prisons at Guantanamo Bay, while at the same time assuming the worst about the military personnel assigned to guard them.
• When school administrators refuse to cooperate with immigration authorities searching for illegal immigrants among the student body.
• When the politicians vote to provide medical benefits and educational benefits to illegal immigrants and seek ways to facilitate their getting drivers’ licenses.
• When authorities rename schools named after George Washington and Thomas Jefferson or take down their portraits from positions of prominence in public buildings.
• When multiculturalists in our schools revise the curriculum to diminish the influence of “dead, white European males,” such as Shakespeare and Mozart.
• When movie stars such as Susan Sarandon and Ed Asner reflexively take the word of accused killers such as Mumia Abu-Jamal over the police who arrested him.
• When reporters in panel discussions openly admit that they would not inform U.S. military authorities about an ambush being planned against our troops in order to preserve their “journalistic objectivity.”
• When corporate leaders explain how the loss of American jobs, as a consequence of their decision to move manufacturing operations overseas, is acceptable because the corporation is an international entity.
• When the same people who protest the “distortion of the facts” about the role of blacks in American history, and who highly praised the Bill Cosby documentary Black History: Lost, Stolen or Strayed, mount a campaign to insert black faces onto the statues of the firemen who raised the flag at the site of the destroyed World Trade Center, even though the three firemen were white.
In each of these instances we find an attitude or behavior that appears to be indifferent, even inimical, to the best interests of the American people or to the role that the United States has played in history. My point is that this hostility may be more than apparent. It may be real, a consequence of the one-world frame of mind.
How so? Go down the list. In each instance, pressure is applied to secure a policy that puts some notion of the world community above the interests of the citizens of the United States, or to cast doubts upon the institutions that represent the mainstream view of the American national experience, the police and the military, for example.
An issue worthy of discussion? I’ll say. It makes a difference if we have people in positions of influence whose primary worldly allegiance is to “humanity” or the “world community” or to a future political arrangement that they hope will one day replace the American nation-state. The discussion of what Yale University is trying to promote by appointing Strobe Talbott, the old Clinton advisor, as director of the university’s newly established Yale Center for the Study of Globalization, should not be limited to academic circles. (Talbott is moving on to head the Brookings Institute.) Every American should be involved in what it will mean if Talbott gets his way and this country is placed under, as he phrases it, a “single global authority.”
You can email Mr. Fitzpatrick at Jkfitz42@cs.com. This article originally appeared in The Wanderer and is reprinted with permission. To subscribe call 651-224-5733.
