ive 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.
