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© 2007 Daniel J. McLaughlin
Shifting Out Of Reverse
The Soviet Union has been dead for a decade and a half, but not its ideal. The goal of a world socialist government is alive and well. The monster is breathing down our necks and we are feeding it, encouraging it, caressing it.
The collectivist monster has spawned many different heads and many different colors and appears in a variety of shapes. The monster has adopted seductive words and seductive titles, and uses powerful people and images, with slow, methodical change rather than violent revolution. Ironically, it is neither left nor right, but uses both liberal and conservative political machines equally well.
The United Nations, European Union, the prospective North American Union, IPCC, Friends of the Earth, World Bank. Who could oppose unity, friendship, cooperation and concern for nature?
Radical environmental groups, like Sierra Club, World Watch, Environmental Defense Fund, and Greenpeace actually are less interested in nature or human beings than they are in the destruction of capitalist society. They do whatever they can to thwart all progress. It doesn’t matter that lives of people all over the world are vastly improved by that progress. Maurice Strong, the founder of the United Nations Earth Summit and a leading voice of the environmental movement had this to say: “Isn’t the only hope for the planet that the industrialized civilization collapses? Isn’t it our responsibility to bring that about?”
Maurice Strong has some pretty influential connections. He has been a senior advisor to the UN Secretary General, Senior advisor to the World Bank president, chairman of the World Resources Institute, co-chairman of the Council of the World Economic Forum and a member of Toyota’s International Advisory Board.
Mr. Strong was apparently a candidate considered for United Nations Secretary General. In talking about the Earth Summit, he said in 1997 that it will play an important role in “reforming and strengthening the United Nations as the centerpiece of the emerging system of democratic global governance." Doesn’t that give you a warm, cozy feeling, that one of the most powerful leaders in the United Nations movement, and many like him, see their mission as the collapse of industrialized civilization under a system of global governance?
Rose Wilder Lane was the daughter of American novelist Laura Engles Wilder, the writer of the “Little House On The Prairie” series. In her short booklet “Give Me Liberty” she started off with the startling phrase: “In 1919 I was a communist.”
“Give Me Liberty” is the story of how Mrs. Lane came face to face with the brutal reality of collectivism and rekindled the fires of individual liberty. Talking about what she called “parrot intellectuals” who established the New Deal philosophy, she said: “Blind to America and worshipping Europe, these reactionary pseudo-thinkers shifted American thought into reverse, … They called it ‘liberal’ to suppress liberty; ‘progressive’ to stop the free initiative that is the source of all human progress; ‘economic freedom’ to obstruct all freedom, and ‘economic equality’ to make all men slaves.”
It is obvious that the Marxist labor card has been played out. Real wages have risen significantly, not fallen, for centuries under free markets, even for the poor. The working class has not been banished to destitution. The collectivists needed another stick with which to beat up on individual rights. The environment has been a winner so far. That card, however, is also playing out against them. By all measures, conditions are getting better, not worse. Many significant works have laid out the scientific and statistical evidence that the planet is significantly better off than it was decades ago, due to the progress of human society, despite radical claims that have been proven demonstrably false over the last decades.
The problem for America is that so many other heads have sprouted on the collectivist beast, and the message repeated so often, in the name of education, children’s advocacy, health care, welfare and numerous others, that many have come to accept it’s premises. A North American Union and loss of national sovereignty is in the cards being played by our trusted leaders at this time.
Individual liberty is the truth behind the incredible progress of Western society. The ability to reap the benefits of your own efforts fuels innovation and progress for all. Freedom is the necessary condition. As collectivism rejuvenates itself, Americans need to challenge all of its forms if we are to regain the honored place as bearers of the torch of Liberty, leaders in the progress of the human race.
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Daniel Mclaughlin
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