Over the last decade, the United Nations has unabashedly been reinventing itself into a global government, striving to obtain the legal teeth and financial resources to implement its policies.  Government reinvention is frequently an effort to avoid the consequences of failed policies in the past, or to justify a government's continued expansion by posing solutions to the problems it has created. 

Historically, government never downsizes voluntarily; it always increases its power and minimizes accountability to its citizens.  This is one reason bloody and non-bloody revolutions have been fought throughout history.
 
In 1995, the United Nations Commission on Global Governance published a report entitled, Our Global Neighborhood, ¹  which called for a World Conference on Global Governance, to have been originally held in 1998 but which never materialized.  The Commission made a number of eye-opening recommendations for changes to the United Nations, including:²

o A system of global taxation;
o A standing U.N. army;
o A Court of Criminal Justice;
o Expanded authority for the Secretary General;
o An Economic Security Council;
o U.N. authority over the global commons (especially the oceans and all areas of sovereign territories that influence the oceans);
o An end to the veto power of permanent Security Council members;
o  A new parliamentary body of "civil society" representatives (NGOs).³

The report denied it was supporting "global government," preferring the term "global governance," but its contents reveal all elements required for a genuine government.  Besides, a little reflection yields the following question:  How can one have global "governance" without global "government"?

It has been argued that the Commission was not an official body of the U.N. "It was, however, endorsed by the U.N. Secretary General and funded through two trust funds of the United Nations Development Program (UNDP), nine national governments, and several foundations, including the MacArthur Foundation, the Ford Foundation, and the Carnegie Corporation."⁴ 

The foundations involved have been promoting globalism and socialism for years.  Although no conference was ever held, implementation of the Commission's recommendations are well under way.

Global taxation, such as the proposed Tobin tax, will free the U.N. from relying on members' dues for financial income.  A U.N. standing army, once made possible by global taxation, will establish the U.N. as a military power in its own right, not dependant on the armed forces of member countries.

The dream of an international court of criminal justice was accomplished two years ago in July of 1998 (in Rome) when the International Criminal Court was created.  The court claims jurisdiction over all countries of the world, even those which do not ratify the implementation treaty.  The Court believes its verdicts to be binding on all countries.

Expanded authority for the Secretary General will convert him to a global prime minister.  The economic security council will manage international finances. Regulation of global trade is already under way through another nongovernmental organization, the World Trade Organization (WTO) via the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT).

Note that GATT was in reality a treaty, which should have been ratified by the U.S. Senate.  However, public outcry would likely have prevented ratification so calling it an "agreement" executed an end-run on that necessity.

Eliminating the veto power of permanent Security Council members (the U.S., Great Britain, Russia, China, etc.) creates equity; thereafter it's one nation, one vote and no vetoes if you don't like the outcome of world opinion.

The Millennium Assembly: Formation of a World Parliament

The next big item on the U.N. agenda is a new parliamentary body of "civil society" representatives scheduled this September when the U.N. People's Millennium Assembly begins.  The Assembly's purpose is to create a global parliament.

On May 25, 2000, a preliminary workshop on the forum was held, featuring Dr. Andrew Strauss, currently involved in hammering out the structure of the "people's parliament," along with Jim Garrison, President of the Gorbachev Foundation in San Francisco, California.  In an interview with Joan Veon, Dr. Strauss said:

...we could think of this meeting symbolically, where civil society has been officially called in to have this meeting at the U.N. as the end of the "old paradigm." And what is the old paradigm of sovereignty?  It says "citizens, if they are going to be represented at the international level, are going to be represented through their states"...I think perhaps if the very meaning is about anything, it is about the end of that order;  that citizens want to be directly represented at the international order;  that the old idea of sovereignty of politics for citizens within or between states is over.  That leaves us with a very big question which we are far from resolving, and that is how citizens should be represented.⁵

According to Dr. Strauss, the old idea of national sovereignty is out.  Local lawmaking bodies will be bypassed.  The new parliament will begin as an advisory body, but the ultimate goal is to convert it into a global lawmaking body. Currently it is uncertain how members of the world body will be elected.  Several proposals have been placed on the table:

o Establishing some kind of consultative assembly of parliamentarians to which parliaments all over the world would appoint representatives.

o Creating a consultative assembly consisting of nonelected NGO organizations, which already provide input to the U.N. major conferences.

o An assembly directly elected by all the people of the world.

o Direct democracy by way of the Internet, so that any "world citizen" could vote on any items they could so choose at any time.⁶ This would probably be an electronic form of the ancient Greek "mobocracy."

Global Government Rising

The issues driving the "need" for the global government are often genuine or over-hyped issues such as environment, war, children's issues, weapons of mass destruction, genocide, justice and equity, et al. However genuine the problems, 20th century history teaches that evil frequently rides on the back of a white horse: the solution to a real problem that becomes far worse and abusive than the original problem ever was.

Global government has been a long time in coming, supported by a wide panoply of luminaries over the years.  Our Global Neighborhood said the surrender of sovereignty is "a principle that will yield only slowly and reluctantly to the imperatives of global environmental cooperation." ⁷

Sixty years ago, famed globalist H.G. Wells in his book, The New World Order, put it another way: "Countless people...will hate the New World Order [his words]...and will die protesting against it...we have to bear in mind the distress of a generation or so of malcontents..." ⁸ Bottom line: globalists recognize that the new order will have to be shoved down a lot of people's throats whether they like it or not.

According to Henry Lamb of EcoLogic, "the foundation of global governance is a set of core values, a belief system, which contains ideas that are foreign to the American experience and ignores other values and ideas that are precious to the American experience.  The values and ideas articulated in the Commission's report are not new.  They have been tried, under different names, in other societies.  Often, the consequences have been devastating."⁹

These values, which we would label socialist at best and Marxist at worst, have consistently appeared in U.N. documents since the late 1980s.  Appearing with repackaged names, they have dominated all international conferences, agreements, and treaties.  Marxist transfer-of-wealth schemes, the demonization of capitalism, enforced equity among peoples, etc. are all part and parcel of the new globalist rhetoric.
 
As global government is locked into place, people should understand that the legal safeguards against government abuse do not exist at the international level nor are there plans to create them.  The political bent of the U.N. has always been toward socialist ideology and the concept that government is all good, all knowing.  The rights enshrined in the U.S. Bill of Rights - property and financial rights, freedom of speech and religion, the right to bear arms against invaders and abusive government, protection against double jeopardy, trial by a jury of one's peers, right to petition for redress of grievances, et al. - do not exist in the same form at the U.N. level.
 
Where the U.N. appears to guarantee rights, there are often "weasel words," which allow the so-called rights to be set aside at the will of government.  As always, the devil is in the details - literally.

Article 19, Paragraph 1 and 2 of the U.N.'s International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights states:

1.  Everyone shall have the right to hold opinions without interference.

2.  Everyone shall have the right to freedom of expression; this right shall include freedom to seek, receive and impart information and ideas of all kinds, regardless of frontiers, either orally, in writing or in print, in the form of art, or through any other media of his choice."¹⁰

So far, everything sounds good.  But read Paragraph 3:

3.  The exercise of the rights provided for in Paragraph 2 of this article carries with it special duties and responsibilities. It may therefore be subject to certain restrictions, but these shall only be such as are provided by law and are necessary (a) For respect of the rights or reputations of others; (b) For the protection of national security or of public order (ordre public), or of public health or morals."¹¹

So the right to freedom of speech can be limited any time a state believes it to be in its own best interests or to protect its own corrupt politicians.  The "weasel words" of Paragraph 3 destroy the guarantees of Paragraphs 1 and 2.

Another example: The U.N.'s Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) lays out what seems to be a wonderful series of rights, similar to the U.S. Bill of Rights.  Article 18 of the UDHR upholds "the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion...." Article 19 affirms "the right to freedom of opinion and expression...and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers."

Sounds great!  But then Article 29 states that "these rights and freedoms may in no case be exercised contrary to the purposes and principles of the United Nations." In other words, these "rights" or "freedoms" don't apply to politically incorrect people who refuse to conform to U.N. policies. What is the purpose of freedom of speech if not to openly discuss and critique government?  According to U.N. ideology, that won't be tolerated.  The U.N. has a track record of showing zero tolerance toward those who oppose its goals.

Americans, Canadians, Australians, and New Zealanders are unaware of how radical the internationalist agendas really are, and how they are filtering through each of their governments with the full cooperation of many in them.  Implementation is slow but inexorable everywhere. Some are becoming aware that something is going amiss, but few have a clue as to the origin of the changes that will shortly affect their lives and religious belief systems.

The entire push to globalism has tremendous significance for Christians for several reasons.  First, we are witnessing the formation of what the Bible predicted 2,000 years ago: a (somewhat) unified universal political, financial and religious system.  Christians note that the new global paradigm has a moral and religious component that will not tolerate opposition or dissent by religious factions that do not agree with it!  

Let's say it again:  the new globalism will not leave the Christian church alone.  It will use legal and other pressures to co-opt, coerce, or eliminate religious groups to force them into conformity to the new ideals or go out of business.  Unlike secular humanism, the new global pantheistic socialism will not leave the church alone!   No clearer warning can be sounded as to the dangers to faith on the road ahead.

Thus our closing caveat: no matter how slow the implementation-given the current course-when the changes are all done, they will be binding on all by artifice of law, international treaty and internal regulation conforming to the dictates of the United Nations, against which citizens of the world will have little established methods of recourse or redress.

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For more information on United Nations policies and how they will affect us, we recommend the following sites: http://www.crossroad.to/, http://www.freedom.org/, and http://www.un.org/.