Theos-Talk Archives (October 2001 Message tt00440)

Katinka Hesselink wrote:
> Well, seems to me that boycotting the UN-decisionmaking
> process is a way of showing that you (the US, not you
> personally) don't take the idea seriously that there is
> going to be a world-wide government with power over
> everybody, even the US. 

Well, that's pretty much correct. We don't take the idea seriously.
Perhaps when human nature changes, such a thing might be desirable, but
right now, world government would most likely be a disaster. Do you
really think that a group that manages to control the world is going to
be interested in the welfare of individuals, or about its own power, and
forcing its values on the rest of the world? 

Karl Marx had a similar idea. He saw a great war coming, and firmly
believed that the workers of the world would see that they had more in
common with each other than they did with their fellow countrymen, and
band together in revolution against their governments. W.W.I came, and
this did not happen. The followers of Marx could only explain this
through a theory that humanity was incapable of seeing reality because
they have been blinded by the wrong political thought (this is the
origin of the treatment of dissidents as insane). But Marx's system,
like most utopian systems, simply assumed that when the "paradise" was
formed, human nature would automatically change, and greed, hunger for
power, and evil would all simply disappear. 

In practice, this has proven to be bullshit. At least to those of us
who, by Communist standards, are insane. 

> Or, in fact, that the US is afraid
> to hand over power to the UN, because it would like to
> remain supreme as a superpower, instead of realizing that
> we have to become some sort of global democracy. 

Why? And how would it be enforced? Who is going to make China buy in?
Who is going to make all the little tin-pot dictators buy in?

In the United States Constitution, there is a concept built-in. That is
that human beings have certain rights, which the government is forbidden
from transgressing except under the most extreme of circumstances. In
the words of Alexander Hamilton, this was to "protect the minority from
the tyranny of the majority". Consider that phrase.

> Well, to be honest, boycotting the decisions of the UN, or
> the decisionmaking process of the UN looks imperialist, and
> arogant.

In American courts, there is a rule that if you show disrespect for the
court, then you can be jailed for "contempt of court". There is,
however, an exception to this: you cannot be held in contempt of a court
which is, in and of itself, contemptible. 

The United States recently refused to send representatives to attend a
conference that was supposed to be against racism. Yet, racist and
proven false literature such as THE PROTOCOLS OF THE ELDERS OF ZION were
distributed as examples of TRUTH. There was a central discussion on how
much better off the world would have been had Hitler WON the second
world war. 

When nations are condemned for crimes which the condemning nations are
far more guilty of, when nations who were largely responsible for
slavery and continue to practice it demand that the United States pay
reparations to slaves out of one corner of their mouth, yet yell
"Imperialist Interference" out of the other corner because the United
States is pressuring them to end slavery in their own countries, then we
are talking about a group that is, in and of itself, contemptible.

Bart Lidofsky