The U.N. does many things that are wrong.
Its setup and philosophy are fundamentally flawed, but its charter does contain
some items that aim to lift the member states out of a Hobbesian state of
nature, which is a war of all against all. One of these appears in Article 2,
Paragraph 4: “All Members shall refrain in their international relations from
the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political
independence of any state, or in any other manner inconsistent with the
Purposes of the United Nations.”
If this article were followed, it would
help prevent globalism or global government. Local wars are being fought that
violate this commitment. But also, quietly and behind the scenes, the U.N.
itself has a globalist agenda that is even more insidiously tyrannical than any
invasion of one country by another is.
This commitment is being violated in Syria
by several member states. Since there is no world sovereign to keep the peace,
and such a sovereign would almost surely be a tyranny anyway; and since the world’s
human beings have not yet found a way to peace without a global sovereign, this
commitment is honored only when a configuration of forces, factors and
interests happens to align with peace. In other cases, such as we have seen
repeatedly in the last 15 years, the commitment is breached, sometimes brazenly
with nothing but a thin veneer of entirely unsatisfactory justifications and
secrecy to cover over the breaches and maintain the face of adherence to
Article 2 while making war in violation of it.
The Syrian government, which is on one side
of the war, has recruited forces mainly from Russia, Iran, and Hezbollah. These
have been invited into Syria, and this is no violation of the U.N. treaty. On the other
side are many violators (see here):
Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the U.S., Great Britain, France, Turkey, plus other states
and non-state actors.
Russia would like to maintain Syria as an
ally at low cost, but its costs have risen as it has had to use its forces to
fight the rebels that are being supplied and re-supplied
by Saudi Arabia and others. The Saudis obtain arms from the U.S. and pressure the U.S.
to ship in ever more deadly and sophisticated weaponry.
The U.S. and Russia negotiated an
agreement for a cease-fire in early September 2016. This added to a
previous February 2016
agreement.
These agreements have not resulted in peace
because they haven’t been honored. Furthermore, they were not comprehensive.
All of the actual warring parties didn’t participate and some rejected the
whole idea right away. Russia and the U.S. blame each other. Putin has
criticized the U.S. for not staying with the agreement. Recently, Lavrov has also
criticized the U.S. for the same reason. Lavrov said, “We have seen
that after every humanitarian pause, the opportunity is used by the terrorists
to strengthen their manpower and weaponry.” Saudi Arabia does keep resupplying
the rebels and the rebels infiltrate forces into such areas as East Aleppo.
Russia, but not the Syrian air force, has
refrained from bombing in East Aleppo since October 18. Putin has
extended this pause. A renewed attack in this area by the rebels
that cannot be defeated by the Syrian forces alone could result in renewed Russian
participation. Putin left that option open.
The U.S. also materially supports the Saudi
Arabian war on Yemen. This too grossly breaches the U.N. Charter. It just so
happens that the Charter in that provision happened to have articulated a
useful policy. The Charter itself is based upon a deeply flawed philosophy for
the world’s people, basically socialistic materialism. The U.N. was the first
step after World War II toward a globalist outcome, a global government and a
globalism that is wrong for human beings. Fascism and Communism didn’t produce
a global sovereign. It became the turn of Social Democracy to attempt this
tyrannical feat. A partial attempt on a large scale is the European Union, and
we have already seen the dreadful results of that.
The
people of the world need to reject GLOBALISM in all its forms. The U.N.’s
vision of globalism needs to be rejected. This vision involves rule by
technocrats, bureaucrats, and experts. This form of U.N. government is a
technocracy, bureaucracy, and expertocracy. An example is the deeply flawed 2030 Agenda for
Sustainable Development. This document is universalist,
perfectionist and utopian. Any drive to eliminate the problems of human beings
by a centrally-directed body of social scientists and experts in order to
achieve a universal (global) outcome is bound to be tyrannical or arrive at
tyranny sooner or later.
The U.S.
government has embodied globalism in a different form. The U.S. government has
acted as if it wants to be the sole surviving sovereign, the global leader of a
confederation of like-minded states who have law systems like that of the U.S.
This agenda is globalist too, but its vision has the U.S. as the core world
government. This vision also devolves into rule by specific interests that
control the government or deep state control. This vision too is basically
world tyranny.
Universal policies that aim for utopian
protection cannot succeed because they are inconsistent with the realities of
human nature. They imagine that human beings will find happiness through the
satisfaction of material “needs” and through ever more applications of science.
This never happens because human beings are not solely material in nature.
Human beings have qualities, hopes, potentials and talents that go way beyond
the merely material. Human beings have unique qualities, each and every one.
They have imaginations. They have feelings toward one another. They respond to
beauty and ugliness. They can plan. They can reason. They want to die feeling
that their lives have had meaning. They don’t want to be slaves or controlled.
They want to love and be loved. They want to have fun. They want to create. The
open-ended dimensions of a human being far exceed the pitiful dimensions and
bounds imposed by technocrats, bureaucrats, and expertocrats. Making little
boys stop pointing their fingers or pushing one another in play and giving
little girls vaccinations against HPV are no more paths to happiness or
fulfillment than attacking Saddam Hussein or killing Gaddafi.
When
global perfectionist and materialistic policies fail, as they must, and are
followed up by repeated vain efforts to succeed, immense costs are incurred.
The
time is long, long overdue for the U.S. government to call a halt to its the
Middle East, Central Asian and African wars, which embody its latest efforts
within its globalist agenda. The U.S. needs to awake from its mad dream of
benevolent global hegemony under the umbrella of the U.S. government as the
sole superpower. The U.S. needs to awake from the mad agenda of moving the
world to its idea of perfection. If it does not so awake, the bell will toll
for the Empire and Americans through financial stringency and economic hardship.
The costs of following universal policies that aim for utopian perfection will
break the Empire’s back.
The crisis of Western civilization is rooted in too
limited a view of man’s nature and being. Men are not machines, controlled by external forces and causes. Man can
and does cause from within. This is an essential dimension of human beings and
the wellspring of the capacity to create. We can make something new that never
existed before. We are not programmed computers. We search for meaning in our
lives. We believe. We cannot express all of the reality in words, concepts and
ideas. There are things that we sense or know lie beyond the limits of such
tools and reason. We need symbols and myths, poetry, and the ineffable. We are
struck by music and beauty.
Western civilization descended into two
world wars as part of its decline, which was a philosophical and religious
crisis that unmoored human beings from their connections that bring meaning to
their lives. Then those wars disillusioned mankind further. The attempt has
been made to climb out of that disillusionment through political extensions of
a globalist type that are basically violence-based and champion science and
higher standards of living. Ideas of rights have been bastardized beyond
recognition by social democrats. A thrust toward globalism has been part of
this attempt to remake the world and the human being. This attempt to find a
path out of the philosophical and religious desert and wilderness is failing.
There is no such path, no way out of the crisis, through violence and
materialism. The human being is impervious to such superficial methods and
manipulations. We are not rats or pigeons to be fed and conditioned. There is
deep down a core that defies all such methods. That core is free and seeks the
expression of freedom. The pursuit of happiness lies in the hands of each one
of us, not in the hands of anyone else. There is more to the human being than
any globalist contemplates: “There are more things in heaven and earth,
Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”
Michael S. Rozeff [send him mail]
is a retired Professor of Finance living in East Amherst, New York. He is the
author of the free e-book Essays on
American Empire: Liberty vs. Domination and the free e-book The U.S. Constitution and Money: Corruption and
Decline.
