Posted on 04/29/2003 3:19:44 AM PDT by kattracks
CNSNews.com) - Would the United States be better off under a one-world government controlled by the United Nations, or is now the time for America to withdraw from the U.N. and reassert its sovereign authority? That is the question explored in a new video premiering this week by the Leadership Institute's Campus Leadership Program (CLP).
Independence or World Government, the latest CLP project, was shipped to 253 campus leadership groups in 42 states to help provide conservative students with a balanced view of the U.N. and its global initiatives.
The video notes the anti-Americanism and distrust of the Bush administration that permeated the various peace demonstrations throughout Operation Iraqi Freedom, especially those sponsored by International Act Now to Stop War and End Racism (A.N.S.W.E.R.), an organization tied to the Communist World Workers Party.
"I think for a lot of folks on the globalist left, there's a reflexive anti-Americanism as opposed to a thoughtful critique of this country," said Daniel Flynn, author of Why the Left Hates America. Flynn is one of several foreign policy/sovereignty specialists interviewed for the CLP video.
Numerous speakers at the peace rallies, such as former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark, demanded that the White House respect international law and act militarily only after gaining the consent of the United Nations.
However, after failed attempts by the U.S. to resolve the Iraqi crisis through diplomatic channels at the United Nations, the American government's relationship with the global agency is "untenable," according to Paul Weyrich, president of the Free Congress Foundation.
Weyrich believes the U.N.'s agenda still resonates with college students, making it important, he said, for an alternative view to be offered.
"Young people want idealism. They search for something greater than themselves to identify with, and the left is offering them the extreme environmentalism, they're offering them opposition to war and all of these wonderful Utopian ideas. And there really isn't a movement on the right that has so far been able to counter what is in the public school system," Weyrich said.
Some experts see a one-world government as the only solution to the pressing problems of human rights abuses, poverty and disease. Those views are also presented in the Campus Leadership Program video.
"When you look at the (world) map, yeah, it looks very complex, and there's a lot of problems in the world, but I believe most of them could be solved as our 13 colonies solved a lot of our problems by forming a federal world government - a federal, democratic world government," said Chuck Woolery of the World Federalist Association.
Globalism vs. National Sovereignty
For 30 years, Europeans have been working to establish a multi-national government that controls the economic, fiscal, political and regulatory policies of nations in the region. But this seems to rub against the national sovereignty ingrained in the U.S. Constitution, the video explains.
"The American independent streak and dedication to the rights of the individuals, which makes this country so strong, is completely at odds with the way the Europeans see the state and the world, and see their place in it," Halle Dale of the Heritage Foundation said in the video.
"If you look at Europe, it has a long tradition of bureaucracy to an extent that's unheard of in the United States," Dale added.
Despite Europe's bureaucratic traditions - making it 12 times longer for new businesses to get started and four times more expensive than in the U.S. - the video states that many impoverished Eastern European nations are still clamoring to join the European Union.
According to the video, these nations see E.U. membership as a "boon" due to the taxes from the richer countries being passed down to the poorer ones. It then questions why any U.S. businesses would favor regulation by a U.N.-modeled world government.
"Wouldn't a global government just be an excuse to loot American taxpayers?" the narrator asks.
In 1979, the U.N. enacted the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination treaty to end the mistreatment of women worldwide. Yet the U.S. was the sole western power to abstain from signing the treaty, a decision Woolery considers a mistake.
"In most of the world, women and children do not have sufficient rights," Woolery said. "In Afghanistan when the Taliban were in rule, had the treaty been in place at that time, the Taliban hopefully would have been held accountable for women's rights violations."
However, the video points out that following the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the U.S., the U.N. also has allowed "a repressive dictatorship in Libya to chair a commission on human rights." It also scheduled Iran and Iraq, listed by the U.S. State Dept. as rogue nations and sponsors of terrorism "and both working hard to acquire weapons of mass destruction" to head a U.N. commission on disarmament.
The video also explores the idea of a global tax, in which the U.N. would impose a levy on currency transactions.
"By instituting a global micro-tax on currency transfers - that right now is $1.8 trillion a day - you could actually generate enough resources to prevent problems like infectious diseases, like nation-state collapses, like terrorism," Woolery said.
The bottom line for conservatives, however, expressed by Weyrich is that "our getting involved with a world government would be the single greatest mistake ever perpetrated on the part of the American people."
The Leadership Institute will hold the first public screening of Independence or World Government at its Arlington, Va., headquarters Wednesday at 6:30 p.m.
E-mail a news tip to Steve Brown.
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1. um... God?
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