Like many children of the Fifties, it has taken me a long time to overcome my residual feelings of good will for the United Nations. Initiated by my own country to be a force for good in the world, the UN was going to ensure that nations would resolve their disputes peacefully, and even bring the obstreperous Soviet Union into line.
In this its principal mission of peacemaking and peacekeeping the UN has proven hopelessly inept. Wars and border conflicts abound. And the Big One — World War III — was averted not through the action of UN peacekeepers (the very thought is ludicrous) but rather by the resolve of the US (read Ronald Reagan), helped ably along by a Fifth Column led by the former Cardinal Woltyla.
United Nations bureaucrats, painfully aware how utterly dependent they are on the largess of first world governments, have been scrambling to convince their patrons of their continued usefulness. Of necessity they had to come up with a grand scheme, if only to divert attention from their failure to deliver on their promise of “world peace.” This was the real purpose of the extraordinary frenzy of UN conferences of the Nineties. At Cairo, Copenhagen, Beijing, and Istanbul they revealed selected aspects of their scheme. At Rome they unveiled it in its entirety, and began to move towards its implementation.
The UN made it clear during the course of the “Food Summit” that, supported by the World Bank and other international financial institutions, it intended to “build a new civil society” worldwide. This means, in plain English, that its global mission will henceforth be to remake the world’s cultures into the image of the materialistic, humanistic, anti-natal West.
There is more at play here than the machinations of the population controllers, of course. But it is at least curious that, at the same time that efforts to legalize abortion and promote population control are being buried ever deeper within verbiage about reproductive health, and ever broader within programs which cover everything from birth to death, the UN should decide to remake society. Who is there to speak on behalf of the family in this new “civil society?” Who is there to speak on behalf of tradition, or faith? The answer is, of course, no one. For the model citizen of the UN’s making will be the radically autonomous individual of the post-modern West, alienated from family, tradition, and religion.
The details of how this scheme is to be implemented are to be found elsewhere in this issue, principally in the lead article by David Morrison, who covered the Rome confab for the Review. The principal idea is this: Governments on the receiving end of international assistance will no longer be able to opt out of a particular program in, say, reproductive health (read: population control). Indeed, the World Bank will insist on having “new civil society” programs in place as a condition of financial assistance and loans, and will even fund non-governmental organizations in various countries to bring pressure on recalcitrant governments.
This agenda is as frightening in prospect as it is likely to be dictatorial, in a velvet gloved fashion, in implementation. One foretaste of the future came at the Food Summit itself. Veteran journalist Joe Woodard, frustrated by the way the delegates were sequestered from the press, and surprised that the “Rome declaration” had been decided well before anyone’s arrival in Rome, describes it elsewhere in these pages as a “propaganda exercise.”
The list of UN abuses is lengthy. Noncoopted NGOs were arbitrarily denied accreditation on the grounds that they were a security threat (an allegation later denied by the Italian foreign minister.) The number of NGOs permitted to speak was arbitrarily cut. The deadline for submitting formal reservations was arbitrarily moved up, presumably to help achieve a false “consensus.” In short, freedom did not fare well in Rome. One shudders to think how the UN’s unelected autocrats would behave if they had real power, such as their own armed forces or the power to tax.
For the moment, however, the UN is still vulnerable to financial pressure. House Republican Rep. Chris Smith, for one, is making good use of that vulnerability. Smith, chairman of the House International Relations subcommittee, said on December 17 that his party would oppose paying the US $1 billion in back dues to the UN unless the organization stopped its population control agenda. If enough elected representatives in the US and other donor states follow Smith’s lead, objecting to the UN’s anti-natal and ethnocentric agenda for the Third World, and blocking funding until it is stopped, perhaps the UN will reconsider its misguided effort at global social engineering.
