Sunday, March 29, 2009

One World

I saw in the news today that, with work starting on the new trade center in New York, the Port Authority is changing its name from Freedom Tower to One World Trade Center, because, they say, it's more marketable.

Governments are euphoric over the possibility that man is going to bring about a world-wide, Utopian, society where everyone is tolerant and sharing. Then we can destroy all our warheads and defense shields because nobody will fight another nation and there won't even be "smack talk" between heads of state. It would be a laughable concept, given the nature of man and his propensity to selfishness, except for its fearful possibilities. History is full of "one-world" government wanna-bees: Assyria, Babylon, Macedonia, Rome, Napoleon's France, Hitler's Germany, Stalin's USSR. They only failed because there were still people left with the power to oppose them, other nations strong enough to say, for example, "Your annihilation of people groups within your borders is wrong. We are willing to fight for our freedom and for theirs", or, at very least, "we will accept your fleeing refugees and record for history their tales of your savage treachery."

Why would anyone want a government to be worldwide in scope? Well, it leaves no opposition; no options; no place to run. "As long as that government is morally sound, protective of individual freedoms, and run by exceptional, self-actuated men, it could work", they say, "Men of integrity. Honest. Upright."

Those kinds of people might start a revolution, because they have high hopes for man's goodness, and great pity for the downtrodden? But they don't run the revolution, and certainly not the resulting government. They haven't the callous barbarism it takes to stay in power and crush the opposition. They fade quickly from the halls of authority, taking with them the constitutions and compacts that soothed the masses.

Who is left in power? People who have no respect for promises, for rules and constitutions; who vacillate with the political wind; who decry loudly and indignantly the very crimes they are guilty of committing; who hide behind the tangle of a cancerous bureaucracy.

Hello, "One World"
Goodbye, "Freedom"