A Plague of Power
Article audio sponsored by The John Birch Society

The 50th anniversary of the founding of the United Nations has provided the organized internationalists the opportunity not only for an orgy of celebration, but for a continuous cascading of calls for expanded "global governance." As 1995 wears on, these appeals for a worldwide "rule of law" and the building of new international institutions and cooperation will escalate; treaties, legislation, and program proposals to advance those objectives will proliferate.

A keystone event in this accelerating campaign for "world order" was the UN World Summit for Social Development, where more of the global socialist agenda was unveiled during the week of March 6th-12th in Copenhagen, Denmark. The summit’s purpose was to ratify an already-prepared "historic pact" pitched as "an agreement to launch a coordinated attack on three profound social problems that imperil the peace and security of every nation: poverty, unemployment, and social disintegration."

As with previous UN summits, the Social Summit’s program is designed to vastly expand government on both the national and international levels. One of the priority items on the summit program is the "20/20 Initiative," which calls on developing countries to "increase their national expenditures for basic social services to 20 per cent, from the current average of 13 per cent, while donor countries would earmark 20 per cent of their total aid budgets for the same projects (up from the current average of 10 per cent.)" This, says the UN’s propaganda mill, "could raise up to $40 billion a year in additional spending to help the world’s poor."

More accurately, it could provide $40 billion more per year to help further line the pockets of the ruling kleptocrats, Western bankers, and pampered UN plutocrats who will be the recipients and administrators of these funds — while burdening the struggling poor of those nations with more debt, taxes, and bureaucracy.

Commissars of Global Governance

Organized support — expertly, professionally, expensively organized support — for these glorious objectives is not lacking. Released on the eve of the Social Summit was Our Global Neighborhood (Oxford University Press), the report of the "independent" Commission on Global Governance (CGG). Whether you hear of this group or not, its plans for the world, if implemented, will deeply affect you and all other inhabitants of this planet.

The eminent "world citizens" who comprise this private clique include: Ingvar Carlsson, prime minister of Sweden; Shridath Ramphal, former foreign minister of Guyana and president of the World Conservation Union; Allan Boesak, a member of the Executive Committee of the terrorist African National Congress which now runs South Africa; Jiri Dienstbier, chairman of the Czech Council on Foreign Relations; Barber Conable, former president of the World Bank; Jacques Delors, socialist president of the European Commission; Yuli Vorontsov, adviser to Boris Yeltsin; and Maurice Strong, Secretary-General of the 1992 Earth Summit, chairman of the Earth Council, and co-chairman of the World Economic Forum.

According to the distinguished authors of Our Global Neighborhood, "the interdependence of nations is wider and deeper" today. As a result, "There is a need to weave a tighter fabric of international norms, expanding the rule of law worldwide." Moreover, says the CGG report, "The development of global governance is part of the evolution of human efforts to organize life on the planet…."

Then, to assuage the concerns that statement is certain to elicit in some quarters, the CGG offers this deceptive balm:

"As this report makes clear, global governance is not global government. No misunderstanding should arise from the similarity of terms. We are not proposing movement towards world government …."

And a punch in the eye is not a "poke" in the eye. "Global government" is exactly what they are proposing, as they well know. That the Commission is playing with semantics is obvious from an objective evaluation of their program, the membership of the CGG, and the well-documented world government sympathies of the overwhelming number of individuals and organizations prominently involved in CGG’s work.

While CGG’s proposals for increased legislative, executive, and judicial powers — including new regulatory, taxing, police and military capabilities — may not constitute immediate, full-blown, omnipotent world government, promises that they will not end up there are about as worthy of belief as those between two illicit lovers that their passionate roll in the hay will go no further than a kiss. Once started, the process develops its own drive to full consummation.

Globalist Coterie

In the foreword to Our Global Neighborhood by Ingvar Carlsson and Shridath Ramphal, we read, "It was Willy Brandt who brought the two of us together as co-chairmen of the Commission on Global Governance." The late Mr. Brandt, the former prime minister of Germany, was until his death president of the Socialist International, descendant of the First International founded by Karl Marx. The other principal founders of the Commission along with Brandt were President Gro Harlem Brundtland of Norway (a vice president in the Socialist International) and Julius Nyerere, the Marxist former dictator of Tanzania. Other certified one-worlders listed as endorsers of and participants in the CGG’s initiative are Jimmy Carter, Boutros Boutros-Ghali, Robert Strange McNamara, Michael Manly, Eduard Shevardnadze, Benazir Bhutto, and Vaclav Havel.

Financing for the CGG’s efforts came from (surprise) the same coffers that have funded virtually every socialist, subversive, and internationalist venture during this century: the Ford Foundation, the Carnegie Corporation, and the MacArthur Foundation.

In the CGG report’s annex we learn that "Michael Clough served as rapporteur for three of the four working groups, and drafted early versions of the text." Convenient — and apropos. Clough serves as a "senior fellow" at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), the most influential world-government-promoting organization in this country. Harlan Cleveland (CFR), a notorious security risk from the Kennedy State Department, was also consulted. In addition, "expert papers prepared specially for the Commission" were contributed by Lincoln Bloomfield (CFR) and Peter Haas (CFR). Other CFR members are listed as having provided "help and advice."

The globalist handprints of the CFR are all over the report. The late Admiral Chester Ward, who was himself a member of the CFR for 16 years, was not exaggerating when he charged that the CFR agenda is to promote "disarmament and submergence of U.S. sovereignty and national independence into an all-powerful one-world government." The leadership of the group, he wrote, "is composed of the one-world-global-government ideologists — more respectfully referred to as the organized internationalists." Moreover, he charged, the "lust to surrender the sovereignty and independence of the United States is pervasive throughout most of the membership …. The majority visualize the utopian submergence of the United States as a subsidiary administrative unit of a global government…."

Ward’s statements paralleled closely the findings of the 1953 Special House Committee to Investigate Tax-Exempt Foundations, which concluded that the CFR’s publications, articles, and studies permeating our press, universities, and government institutions "are not objective but are directed overwhelmingly at promoting the globalist concept." Moreover, the committee charged that the CFR had become "in essence an agency of the United States Government … carrying its internationalist bias with it."

In the early 1920s the Carnegie Endowment had begun funding "International Mind Alcoves" to stock school libraries with publications of the CFR, the Foreign Policy Association, and books by communists, socialists, and assorted radicals. Such efforts were proving effective, noted the Carnegie Endowment’s Yearbooks, as a "means of developing the international mind" and promoting a "new world order." As early as 1925, the Carnegie officials expressed the hope that by these means they "may not only guide but compel the action of governments and public officers" toward this end. (Emphasis added.)

Joining the plentiful CFR technocrats in crafting the manifesto of the Commission on Global Governance were sundry new world order adepts from the World Bank and various UN agencies, One World Action, the Worldwatch Institute, the Global Policy Institute, Greenpeace, the Aspen Institute, the Brookings Institute, Friends of the Earth, the World Federalist Association, the World Council of Churches, the Socialist International, and the Trilateral Commission.

Fabian Foundations

Especially significant was the superabundance of academics from the London School of Economics "assisting" the CGG. Since its founding by the Fabian Socialists back in 1895, that nest of globalist vipers has had a vital hand in most of the world government schemes of note. President Woodrow Wilson’s famous "Fourteen Points" for the World War I "peace" settlement and the establishment of the League of Nations were taken point by point from two Fabian Society publications: Labour’s War Aims, written by Fabian founder Sidney Webb, and International Government, by Leonard Woolf. The British Fabian texts were drafted into the Fourteen Points for Wilson by Walter Lippmann and by Wilson’s "alter ego," Colonel Edward Mandell House, who favored "Socialism as dreamed of by Karl Marx." Lippmann himself had joined the Fabian Society years before, in 1909.

House and Lippmann, together with the young Dulles brothers (Allen and John Foster) and Christian Herter, remained in Paris after the Peace Conference in 1919 for a meeting at the Hotel Majestic with (among others) British Fabians John Maynard Keynes, R.H. Tawney, and Arnold Toynbee. From that gathering came the organization of the Royal Institute of International Affairs and the Council on Foreign Relations, the twin pillars of the Anglo-American one-world Establishment.

From its inception, the Fabian Society embraced a strategy of deception and patient gradualism, adopting the wolf in sheep’s clothing and the tortoise as its symbols. Sidney and Beatrice Webb, along with their Fabian friends, were militant atheists with a special burning animus toward Christianity and traditional "bourgeoisie" family values. Committed to socialist world government, the Fabians adopted the practices of "penetration" and "permeation" to spread their malevolent influence through government, academe, the press, the churches, and all other social institutions.

Among the organizations they had no difficulty permeating and controlling were the Socialist International and the British Labour Party. The Congress of the Socialist International in 1962 stated: "The ultimate objective of the parties of the Socialist International is nothing less than world government." So, too, the Labour Party Platform of 1964, written by Fabians, proclaimed: "For us World Government is the final objective…."

The same ideas were ascendant among the American intelligentsia at the time. From 1945 through the early 1950s, a series of proposals and resolutions openly calling for world government gained increasing support in Congress. In 1950 a Preliminary Draft of a World Constitution was introduced in Congress by Senator Glen Taylor (D-ID). The submitted World Constitution declared that "iniquity and war inseparably spring from the competitive anarchy of the national slates; that therefore the age of nations must end."

In 1960, Rhodes Scholar Walt Whitman Rostow (CFR) claimed that urgent imperatives "argue strongly for movement in the direction of federalized world organization under effective international law" and for "effective international control of military power." The real world problem, said Rostow, is "national sovereignty," and "it is therefore an American interest to see an end to nationhood as it has been historically defined." Spouting subversive tripe such as this was sufficient proof of the Oxford don’s qualifications for a top spot in the Kennedy State Department — the same State Department that would put that subversive tripe into an official policy entitled Freedom From War: The United States Program for General and Complete Disarmament in a Peaceful World (see page 11). In promoting this barely disguised policy for U.S. surrender to a world government under an all-powerful UN, President John F. Kennedy (CFR) said, "We must create worldwide law and law enforcement as we outlaw worldwide war and weapons."

Meanwhile, amongst themselves the Kennedy Administration one-worlders were more explicit. In early 1962 a study entitled A World Effectively Controlled by the United Nations was completed for the State Department by Lincoln Bloomfield. Concerning the UN and the verbal subterfuge then being used for public consumption, he wrote that "to avoid endless euphemism and evasive verbiage, the contemplated regime will occasionally be referred to unblushingly as a ‘world government.’" Which is exactly what his secret study proposed.

Fast Forward

In a June 22, 1993 letter on White House stationery to the World Federalist Association (WFA), President Bill Clinton (CFR) praised the late Norman Cousins (CFR), past president of the WFA, and wished the group "success" in its long-stated quest to submerge the U.S. in a world government under an empowered United Nations. The occasion that prompted the presidential epistle was a WFA banquet honoring Mr. Clinton’s fellow Rhodes Scholar and Oxford roommate Strobe Talbott (CFR). The Clinton letter, which was read to the banquet attendees by WFA President John Anderson (CFR), said:

Norman Cousins worked for world peace and world government …. Strobe Talbott’s lifetime achievements as a voice for global harmony have earned him this recognition …. He will be a worthy recipient of the Norman Cousins Global Governance Award.

Talbott, whom President Clinton had appointed to the number two spot in the State Department, was being honored by the World Federalists for his July 20, 1992 Time editorial, "The Birth of the Global Nation," in which he opined that "it has taken the events in our own wondrous and terrible century to clinch the case for world government." In presenting the WFA award, Anderson expressed appreciation to Talbott for his contributions "for the cause of global governance."

The appeals for world government have been multiplying. Following are but a few of the hundreds that could be cited:

• The UN Development Program’s Human Development Report, 1994 contains a short essay by Nobel Prize-winning economist Jan Tinbergen entitled "Global Governance for the 21st Century." Unlike the CGG, Dr. Tinbergen does not cavil with words or conceal his true intent. "Mankind’s problems can no longer be solved by national governments," says Tinbergen. "What is needed is a World Government." And this government, says he, should have a "World Police" and a program for "the redistribution of world income."

• In his famous "Churchill speech" in Fulton, Missouri in 1992, Mikhail Gorbachev called for "global government." In the interests of preventing "conflicts from developing into a worldwide conflagration," he said, it is time to consider putting "certain national armed forces at the disposal of the Security Council, making them subordinate to the United Nations military command." The Los Angeles Times for May 7, 1992 got the headline right: "Gorbachev Backs World Government." With these bonafides Gorby was appointed to head the CFR’s Global Security Project.

• In the 1994 Spiritual Politics: Changing the World From the Inside Out, New Age mystagogues Corinne McLaughlin and Gordon Davidson tell us: "Fundamentalist Christians have great fear of any movement toward a world government, such as the United Nations, or toward ‘oneness,’ such as the New Age movement. They see this as the work of the devil …. A helpful way for fundamentalists to overcome their fear is to remember the ‘unity in diversity’ theme, which forms the basis of the work of both the United Nations and the New Age movement…."

• As host of the 22-week PBS series Future Quest, actor Jeff Goldblum (Jurassic Park) asks, "Can the world really unite behind one government?" The PBS series answers not only that the world can, but that it must.

Why Not World Government?

Professor R.J. Rummel has spent the past eight years of his life in an intensive study of a very grim but important phenomenon of our century: genocide and government mass murder, or what he calls "democide." He has thus far produced four powerful and harrowing books, the latest volume being, Death by Government (1994). "The more power a government has," notes Dr. Rummel, "the more it can act arbitrarily according to the whims and desires of the elite, and the more it will make war on others and murder its foreign and domestic subjects. The more constrained the power of governments, the more power is diffused, checked and balanced, the less it will aggress on others and commit democide."

One graph in his newest book lists the top 15 of "this century’s megamurderers — those states killing in cold blood, aside from warfare, 1 million or more men, women and children." "These fifteen megamurderers have wiped out over 151 million people, almost four times the almost 38,500,000 battle dead from all this century’s international and civil wars up to 1987." The bloodiest of those criminal regimes — the USSR and Red China — were not only invited into the United Nations, but given special status on the UN Security Council.

The UN could (and does) accommodate these megamurderers because "the rule of law," in UN terms, is radically, fundamentally different from the "rule of law" as understood by the American Founding Fathers and as embodied in our Constitution. Whereas the U.S. Constitution is rooted in the traditional Western and Judeo-Christian legal concepts of divine law and natural law which circumscribe the limits of government power and posit individual God-given rights which it is government’s duty to protect, the United Nations Charter is based on the framework of positivist legal theory which virtually guarantees unrestrained, despotic government.

In addition to these fundamental philosophical differences, our constitutional system is structurally different, providing essential checks and balances that the UN system does not possess. This is true not only of the UN itself, but of most of its individual member states. All of its empty platitudes about "peace," "justice," "law," and "human rights" notwithstanding, the UN is a lawless organization made up largely of criminal regimes pursuing a malevolent, tyrannical agenda.

Global government under the UN would be this era’s Black Death

We have, in this article, already touched on some of the troubling developments and proposals for granting the UN more governing powers. Those are appraised in more detail in other articles in this issue. However, considering the increasingly oppressive nature of our own federal government, it shouldn’t take a great deal of imaginative ability to envision the enormous abuses possible under a United Nations empowered with legislative, executive, and judicial powers — including global police, military, regulatory, and taxing functions. A terrifying prospect for any rational mind with a conscience to contemplate.

Yes, a global, regimented police state would mean a grim existence — if you are one of the "lucky" ones allowed to exist. One sure thing Dr. Rummel’s research points out with unmistakable clarity is this: "Power will achieve its murderous potential." Ponder for a moment, then, Dr. Rummel’s mind-numbing summary of already "realized" potential:

In total, during the first eighty-eight years of this century, almost 170 million men, women, and children have been shot, beaten, tortured, knifed, burned, starved, frozen, crushed, or worked to death; buried alive, drowned, hung, bombed, or killed in any other of the myriad ways governments have inflicted death on unarmed, helpless citizens and foreigners. The dead could conceivably be nearly 360 million people. It is as though our species has been devastated by a modern Black Plague. And indeed it has, but a plague of Power, not of germs.

Surely the human mind cannot even begin to conceive the enormity of the global slaughter that would certainly accompany the "Plague of Power" issuing from a world government under any entity other than God Himself.

This article by William F. Jasper originally appeared in The New American magazine for April 3, 1995.