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It was the grandest United Nations confabulation ever: some 150 presidents, premiers, dictators, and potentates — along with their lavish entourages — converging on New York City during the first week of September for the UN Millennium Summit. In the introduction to his UN 2000 report, UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan stated that this mega-gathering of Heads of State and Government was being convened "to address the role of the UN in the twenty-first century." And clearly, for Mr. Annan and his many like-minded, one-world confreres, this means a vastly expanded role for the UN, along with new and expanded powers.

The proposals for this immense expansion of UN powers came forth from a multitude of voices and documents, presented both at this global conclave and at a number of other fora occurring simultaneously with, or prior to, the Summit. Many of the proposals echoed and paid homage to We the Peoples: The Role of the United Nations in the 21st Century, a report authored by Annan to guide the UN’s "reform agenda" at the Summit.

Annan’s We the Peoples proposes nothing less than a global, socialist New Deal, even adopting Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s Brain Trust rhetoric of "Freedom from Fear" and "Freedom from Want" as titles for the report’s sub-themes. It calls for, among other things:

• a global war on poverty (imagine a planetary version of our costly federal Department of Health and Human Services!);

• ending "gender discrimination" (i.e. mandated gender quotas) "in wages, property rights, and access to education";

• government-provided education, school lunches, and health care for all;

• a global youth employment initiative, under the direction of the International Labor Organization and the World Bank;

• a global initiative by the World Health Organization to combat malaria and AIDS;

• an ambitious "Cities Without Slums" action plan, under the guidance of South Africa’s terrorist-cum-president, Nelson Mandela;

• "digital bridges initiatives" such as UNITeS (United Nations Information Technology Service), a consortium of high-tech volunteer corps coordinated by the United Nations Volunteers;

• increased foreign aid to "developing countries";

• creation of an International Criminal Court; and

• adoption of the Kyoto Protocol which mandates reductions in so-called "greenhouse gases."

Semantic Deception

Kofi Annan’s millennial manifesto, like the speeches that typified the Summit, is replete with the current buzzwords of UN globalspeak: "transparency," "accountability," "shared values," "global solidarity," "sustainable development," "globalization," "the global village," "world order," and "interdependence."

We the Peoples also proposes "new forms of global governance," "a new ethic of global stewardship," "global norms," and "global rules" — all of which assume a role for the UN as global legislator. According to Annan, "the challenge is clear" that "we must learn to govern better, and we must learn to govern together."

"What do we mean by ‘governance’ when applied to the international realm?" he asks. "In the minds of some," he notes, "the term still conjures up images of world government, of centralized bureaucratic behemoths trampling on the rights of people and states." These fearful conjurations, he assures us, have no basis in reality. "Nothing is less desirable" than world government, says Annan, insisting that "the very notion of centralizing hierarchies is itself an anachronism in our fluid, highly dynamic and extensively networked world — an outmoded remnant of nineteenth century mindsets."

Don’t be fooled by the glib and silky assurances of Annan and company; they have been practicing and honing these semantic dodges for several years. The "governance" deception received its big sendoff in 1995 with the publication of Our Global Neighborhood: The Report of the Commission on Global Governance (Oxford University Press), which was issued just prior to, and with the purpose of influencing, the UN’s 1995 "World Summit for Social Development," in Copenhagen, Denmark.

The "independent" Commission on Global Governance (CGG) is funded by United Nations trust funds, UN member states, the Ford Foundation, the Carnegie Corporation, and the MacArthur Foundation. The CGG’s founders and current co-chairmen are Ingvar Carlsson, former prime minister of Sweden, and Sir Shridath Ramphal, former foreign minister of Guyana and president of the World Conservation Union. The eminent "world citizens" who comprise this private clique include: Allan Boesak, a member of the Executive Committee of the terrorist African National Congress which now runs South Africa; Jiri Dienstbier, chairman of the Czech Council on Foreign Relations; Barber Conable, member of the Council on Foreign Relations and former president of the World Bank; Jacques Delors, socialist former president of the European Commission; Yuli Vorontsov, former adviser to Boris Yeltsin; and Maurice Strong, secretary-general of the 1992 Earth Summit, chairman of the Earth Council, and co-chairman of the World Economic Forum.

According to the CGG’s celebrated report Our Global Neighborhood, "the interdependence of nations is wider and deeper" today. Therefore, they asserted, "There is a need to weave a tighter fabric of international norms, expanding the rule of law worldwide." Moreover, they said, "The development of global governance is part of the evolution of human efforts to organize life on the planet...."

Then, to mollify those who would certainly take alarm at their audacious proposals, the CGG authors offered this prefigurement of Kofi Annan’s linguistic subterfuge:

As this report makes clear, global governance is not global government. No misunderstanding should arise from the similarity of terms. We are not proposing movement towards world government....

And a punch in the eye is not a "poke" in the eye. Of course, "global government" is precisely what they are proposing, as they well know. As we have noted before, the Commission is playing with semantics. This is obvious from an objective evaluation of their program, the membership of the CGG, and the well-documented world government sympathies of the overwhelming number of individuals and organizations prominently involved in CGG’s work — and recurrence to a standard dictionary. Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary (1975 edition) gives but a one-word definition for "governance," and that is "government." The proposals of the CGG invariably involve increasing strictures on national sovereignty and the transferring of legislative, executive, and judicial powers to the United Nations or its subsidiary multilateral institutions — always in the name of peacekeeping, nationbuilding, saving the environment, helping the poor, disarmament, fighting organized crime, etc.

"There should be no question of which way we go," assert Carlsson and Ramphal in their foreword to Our Global Neighborhood. "But the right way requires the assertion of the values of internationalism, the primacy of the rule of law worldwide, and institutional reforms that secure and sustain them." Ah yes, the "rule of law." Favorite weasel words of globalists seeking to conceal their true world-government ambitions. Obviously, it takes government to promulgate law, and for that law to have any meaning and effect, it must be backed up by government force. Genuine world law requires real world government force capable of overwhelming any national resistance to its rule. That is elementary and indisputable.

One of the major challenges we face today is that most one-worlders have learned to avoid explicit references to world government and to cloak their subversive schemes in soothing verbiage. They have learned that the open appeal to world government is counterproductive "because it frightens people." We have this from no less an authority than former Senator Alan Cranston (D-CA), a former national president of the United World Federalists, a member of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) and the Trilateral Commission (TC), and a director of the Gorbachev Foundation. Back in 1949 Cranston successfully pushed through the California legislature a resolution memorializing Congress to call a national convention to amend the U.S. Constitution to "expedite and insure the participation of the United States in a world federal government." Cranston’s goal has not changed; he just knows he has a better chance of obtaining it if he goes about it quietly and calls it by another name.

In an interview in the April 1976 issue of Transition, a publication of the Institute for World Order, Cranston said he remains a World Federalist because "I believe deeply in the need for world law.... I believe in the concept of federalism on the world scale." But, he admonished, "the more talk about world government, the less chance of achieving it, because it frightens people who would accept the concept of world law." Clearly, he understands that a lot of folks still have a strong suspicion of, and aversion to, big government. And a world government is about as big as government can get.

Like Mr. Cranston, Messrs. Carlsson and Ramphal are longtime advocates of socialist world government. They note in Our Global Neighborhood, "It was Willy Brandt who brought the two of us together as co-chairmen of the Commission on Global Governance." The late Willy Brandt was at the time (and for many years before) the president of the Socialist International, which boasts that it is the lineal descendant of the First International founded by Karl Marx. Brandt was also, it was later revealed, a longtime agent of the Soviet KGB. The other principal founders of the Commission along with Brandt were President Gro Harlem Brundtland of Norway (a vice president in the Socialist International) and Julius Nyerere, the Marxist former dictator of Tanzania. CGG co-chairman Ingvar Carlsson was a vice president of the Socialist International. Other certified one-worlders listed as endorsers of and participants in the CGG’s initiative are Jimmy Carter (CFR, TC), Boutros Boutros-Ghali, Robert Strange McNamara (CFR, TC), Michael Manly, Eduard Shevardnadze, Benazir Bhutto, and Vaclav Havel.

Messrs. Cranston and Ramphal were both prominent participants at the Millennium Summit and the parallel, Gorbachev Foundation-sponsored State of the World Forum, which was held concurrently at the New York Hilton and Towers, just a short distance from the UN headquarters (see article on page 18). Presided over by Mikhail Gorbachev, the Forum featured literature tables and spokesmen from the World Federalist Association, the World Constitution and Parliament Assembly, the World Humanity Action Trust, the Global Peoples Assembly, the World Service Authority, the World Government House, Global Citizen, the American Movement for World Government, and other organizations openly favoring full-blown world government.

Mr. Ramphal was a featured speaker and panelist at the Gorbachev Forum, and his new CGG report, The Millennium Year and the Reform Process, was distributed and prominently featured at both the Forum and the Millennium Summit. The CGG report mirrored Kofi Annan’s We the Peoples, calling on the governments of the developed nations to increase their foreign aid to the dictators and socialist wastrels who run the developing countries. It also endorsed giving the UN a "standing rapid reaction capacity" (i.e., a permanent global army), creating an Economic Security Council, and taking up the so-called Tobin Tax — a global tax on financial transactions, which, potentially, could provide the UN and its institutions with a revenue windfall amounting to tens (or hundreds) of billions of dollars per year.

Multilateral Treaty Trap

One of the key objectives of the Millennium Summit, in the ongoing effort to enlarge the organization’s governance "mandate," was to boost the ratification process of the more than 500 treaties and conventions now deposited at the UN. To this end, Kofi Annan, in a letter sent on May 15th to all world leaders, announced that he would provide special facilities to enable them to add their signatures to any of the treaties. He drew special attention to a "core group of 25 multilateral treaties," including:

• The Convention on Genocide;

• The Convention on the Rights of the Child;

• The Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court;

• The Kyoto Protocol on Climate Change;

• The Convention on Biological Diversity;

• The Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights; and

• The Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty.

In a September 8th press release, the UN announced that throughout the three-day Summit, "some 40 instruments of international law were signed, ratified, or acceded to by the leaders of at least 85 countries, in an action which significantly advanced the rule of international law." Altogether, the press release reported, there were more than 300 different actions on treaties, conventions, and additional protocols. "By far the largest number of signatures," it noted, "went to two new optional protocols to the Convention on the Rights of the Child, which each received close to 50, as well as ratifications. The protocols seek to prevent children under the age of 18 from participating in armed conflict, and to eliminate the sale of children, child prostitution and child pornography."

However, the North American Man-Boy Love Association (NAMBLA), the militant pedophile organization that seeks to legalize adult-child sexual relations, sees the Convention as a legal document that could be used to support its belief that children as young as six have the right to choose to have sex. And the NAMBLA perverts have good reason to expect that under UN "governance" they would find support for their wicked agenda. After all, the UN’s Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) has effectively endorsed the pederasts by granting "consultative status" to the International Lesbian and Gay Association (ILGA), a coalition which included NAMBLA and a Dutch pedophile organization. The decision to admit ILGA was approved by representatives of 22 governments, including the Clinton administration. (ECOSOC, embarrassed by negative publicity, suspended ILGA in September 1994).

It is also worth remembering that the Belgian office of UNICEF (United Nations Childrens Fund) was home to a very large international child pornography/child prostitution ring. UNICEF official Jozef Verbeek, and UNICEF volunteer Michel Felu, a recidivist child pornographer, were caught with thousands of pornographic photographs of children, many of which depicted children 10 years of age and younger. The predators had compiled names of 400 pedophiles in 15 countries on a UNICEF office computer.

The UN press release also offered this status report on its push for global judicial powers:

The advent of the International Criminal Court drew nearer as the Rome Statute, under which the Court will be established, was signed by 12 countries and ratified by four. The Statute now has a total of 110 signatures and 19 ratifications. The Statute will enter into force following the sixtieth ratification.

As this magazine has repeatedly pointed out, the proposed ICC mentioned above is a staggeringly audacious power grab, even for the United Nations. In an unprecedented act of hubris, the delegates at the 1998 ICC Summit in Rome declared that once the ICC Statute had been ratified by 60 nations (a number which was arbitrarily picked out of thin air), the newly established Court would have binding jurisdiction over the entire planet, even over those countries which had not ratified the Rome Statute! The Court’s "global prosecutor" (and an unspecified number of assistant prosecutors) would be able to initiate investigations and prosecutions of individuals anywhere in the world for the alleged commission of alleged crimes. Under this global judicial monstrosity, American citizens conceivably could be arrested and transported overseas to stand trial under hostile foreign judges, without any of the due process guaranteed under the U.S. Constitution, including the right to trial by jury.

Pressure From Below

Building on a formula that has proven wildly successful at previous UN summits (on Environment, Habitat, Population, Women, International Criminal Court, etc.), the Millennium Summit was closely paired with a Millennium Forum involving thousands of radical activists from non-governmental organizations (NGOs) around the world. These NGO cadres — subsidized by governments, the UN, tax-exempt foundations, and corporations — constitute an indispensable rent-a-mob that can be used to agitate for more UN power. As a run-up to the Summit, the Millennium Forum met at the UN headquarters from May 22nd to 26th. According to the UN’s Backgrounder on the Forum, the event "was organized by a coalition of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) at the suggestion of Secretary-General Kofi Annan." As per usual, many of the NGO radicals (eco-extremists, feminists, homosexuals, Marxists, union organizers, racial agitators, and other assorted "grievance" exploiters) stuck around after the Forum (indeed many have offices in or near the UN) and had plenty of time to plan demonstrations and other activities to help influence the "main event" when it arrived in September.

The NGO agitators are reverently referred to in the one-world argot as "representatives of global civil society." In truth, the NGOs function as "soviets," the councils of workers, peasants, artists, and intellectuals organized and run by the Communist Party in Russia and other Communist countries to give the appearance of popular support for the Party’s totalitarian agenda. The NGOs serve to "mobilize the masses" in true Marxist-Leninist form, giving the appearance of a bottom-up, grass-roots movement, when in fact, they are promoting top-down, elitist-led initiatives. This is a classic implementation of Communist-style "pressure from above-pressure from below" tactics.

The Millennium Forum held detailed "consultations" on six major themes: peace; poverty; human rights; sustainable development; globalization; and strengthening the United Nations. The event culminated in the production of a 23-page Forum Declaration and Plan of Action, which calls for the UN to, among other things:

• immediately establish a Global Poverty Eradication Fund;

• establish a standing UN Peace Force;

• introduce binding codes of conduct for transnational companies and tax regulation of international financial markets;

• integrate the IMF, World Bank and WTO into the UN’s Economic and Social Council;

• create and fund a Global Civil Society Forum which would meet "in the period leading up to the annual session of the General Assembly; and

• establish a Global Habitat Conservation Fund.

Power From the Barrel of a Gun

The Millennium Forum Action Plan also calls on the UN "to expand the United Nations Arms Register, including specific names of arms producers and traders, in order to show production and sale of small arms and light weapons."

For those familiar with the UN’s record over the past several years in promoting an increasingly hostile attitude toward individual private ownership of firearms, this is a clear call for accelerated pressure on national governments to ratchet up their gun control efforts at all levels. Well aware of Mao Zedong’s dictum that "political power grows out of the barrel of a gun," the one-world revolutionaries are accelerating their pressure from above and below to restrict (and eventually outlaw) private ownership of firearms and concentrate all power in the hands of government.

In the section of We the Peoples entitled "Freedom from Fear," Kofi Annan asserts: "Controlling the proliferation of illicit weapons is a necessary first step towards the non-proliferation of small arms. These weapons must be brought under the control of states...." Further, he announced: "The United Nations is convening a conference on the illicit trade in small arms and light weapons in 2001." NGO activists and government delegates alike have made it very clear in disarmament fora already held by the UN that virtually all private firearms ownership is considered illicit.

Terrorists R Us

In her essay on human rights in the Millennium Summit report UN 2000, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (and formerly the ultra-leftwing president of Ireland) Mary Robinson wrote: "We must never allow the violators of human rights to avoid being held accountable nor their victims the belief that we have looked the other way."

Similarly, in We the Peoples, Kofi Annan declares that "we must reassert the centrality of international humanitarian and human rights law. We must strive to end the culture of impunity." Moreover, he says, we must engage in "naming and shaming" the culprits who prey upon the weak and vulnerable.

Nice sound bites — and empty clichés. Annan, Robinson, and company were more than content to "look the other way" when they met with the motley assortment of criminals, butchers, and oppressors who assembled at the UN Summit. There was no "naming and shaming" of the world’s mass murderers; indeed, they were given the usual, royal UN treatment.

The UN Millennium Summit provided a nonstop parade of terrorists, tyrants, butchers, and dictators traipsing to the General Assembly rostrum to bloviate about "world order," "globalization," "equitable distribution of world resources," "ending oppression and exploitation," etc., ad nauseam.

But what else could one expect from a summit co-chaired by Sam Nujoma, "president" of Namibia and head of SWAPO (South West Africa People’s Organization), one of the most brutal Soviet-sponsored terrorist organizations in the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s? In an adulatory biographical note prepared for the Summit, the UN press office exults: "In 1971, Mr. Nujoma became the first leader of an African nationalist movement seeking independence to address the United Nations Security Council."

Nujoma succeeded in his bloody, violent climb to power thanks largely to the unstinting efforts of Chester A. Crocker, assistant secretary of state for African affairs under President Reagan and architect of that administration’s "Constructive Engagement" policies in Africa. Crocker, a member of the CFR, first floated his Constructive Engagement concept in the CFR’s journal Foreign Affairs. It was, of course, warmly endorsed at that time by Mikhail Gorbachev, who was then busy selling "perestroika" to Reagan.

In his address to the Millennium Summit, Nujoma said:

We have come to the United Nations Headquarters to exchange views and agree on all the necessary steps that we must take, individually and collectively, to strengthen and I quote "The Role of the United Nations in the 21st Century" unquote. We are here because we believe in the United Nations, in its Charter and in the common objectives and principles for which our indispensable Organisation stands.... United Nations Peace Operations is another area of common concern. Armed conflicts, civil wars as well as the vicious and destructive acts of terrorist groups should be condemned, for, they prolong human suffering and severe hardship in the world.

For the record, no one at the UN was seen to protest, or even laugh, at this audacious and phony condemnation of terrorism by a leading practitioner of that deadly "art."

Fidel Castro, the bearded master of interminable bombast and bloviation, delighted his assembled adoring fans by his childish histrionics, placing a handkerchief over the timing lights, which was sure to signal that his Marxist rant was running overtime — as usual.

Among his comments:

There is nothing in the existing economic and political order that can serve the interests of Humankind. Thus, it is unsustainable and it must be changed.... Nature is being devastated. The climate is changing under our own eyes and drinking water is increasingly contaminated or scarce.... Anyone understands that the United Nations’ basic role in the pressing new century is to save the world not only from war but also from underdevelopment, hunger, diseases, poverty and the destruction of the natural resources indispensable to human life. And it should do so promptly before it is too late!

Other stellar performers, in the Nujoma-Castro tradition, included:

• Vladimir Putin, "president" of the Russian Federation and lifelong KGB henchman;

• Jiang Zemin, "president" of Communist China;

• Yasser Arafat, "president" of the Palestinian National Authority and chairman of the Executive Committee of the terrorist Palestine Liberation Organization;

• Hugo Chavez, "president" of Venezuela, avid Marxist and admirer of Communist Cuba and Red China;

• Tran Duc Luong, "president" of Communist Vietnam;

• Nursultan A. Nazarbayev, "president" of Communist Kazakstan;

• Eduard Shevardnadze, "president" of Communist Georgia.

Peace. Brotherhood. Harmony. Justice. Accountability. Democracy. Freedom. Human rights. The rule of law. Every honest person knows that at the United Nations these words are, at best, pious platitudes, and, at worst, cynically manipulative and deceptive verbiage employed by some of the worst despots humanity has ever known. Behind the smoke screen created by such words, the international socialists and despots of the world gathered at the Millennium Summit to call for totalitarian world government through "global governance" and the empowerment of the United Nations that such governance would necessarily require. Now, Kofi Annan and the UN can point to the Millennium Summit and claim a "mandate" upon which they can act to continue the accretion of power to the world body, at the expense of American pocketbooks and sovereignty.

Instead, Americans should raise a resounding cry of outrage and demand that Congress not allow one more iota of U.S. sovereignty to be ceded to the world body nor one more cent of our tax monies to be appropriated to prop up this colossal fraud, this vile Tower of Shame. The Millennium Summit manifestly demonstrated the urgent necessity to "Get Us out! of the United Nations."