Unlawful Government: The Gathering Threat Of Global Hegemony

From Liberty Defense League:

Unlawful Government: The Gathering Threat of Global Hegemony


Tue, Jul 20, 2010

Federal Gov. Tyranny, Political Philsophy, Wilton Strickland

by Attorney Wilton Strickland



This column is a modified version of the introduction to my book Unlawful Government: The Gathering Threat Of Global Hegemony. I re-print it here because it sheds light on why America’s “leaders” are behaving in what appears to be an insane and destructive manner. The truth is they know exactly what they are doing, and their behavior is calculated to empower themselves and destroy what sets America apart from the rest of the world.



Today’s federal government casts a shadow over virtually every aspect of American society, leaving nothing of circumstance beyond the taxing, spending, and commandeering reach of politics. As a consequence, the once-rich tapestry of American life has faded into a spiritual and cultural wasteland characterized by stifling political correctness; larcenous wealth redistribution; a vanishing middle class; the mainstreaming of obscenity and profanity; the subsidizing of illegal aliens; and the militarizing of civil authority. Our ability to elect the persons who perpetrate these outrages does nothing to make us free, but rather invites us to partake in our own ruin.



What makes this state of affairs somewhat tolerable is that the American government counts as only one among many, and that no single government dictates terms for the entire human race. Competition among sovereignties, a noble pursuit once safeguarded by our Constitution among the States, now survives only by the grace of foreigners. So even though our American experiment has been hijacked, we can find some comfort in that we now inhabit a global economy where we can move our money and ourselves with greater ease than ever, a refreshing reality that thumbs its nose at the political class and its delusions of grandeur. Recent data indicate that approximately ten percent of households in the United States have already committed to moving abroad or are seriously considering doing so, while another eleven percent express a desire to reside abroad part-time – astonishingly high numbers that run the gamut across all professions and age groups. Better yet, the sheer number of countries is exploding, as bloated centers of political power such as the old Soviet Union and the former Yugoslavia fracture and crumble. In today’s world of nearly two hundred competing sovereignties we find unprecedented variety and freedom from central control.



However, our cause for celebration strikes terror in our rulers, who see their influence on the wane as we grow more nimble-footed in an ungoverned world. Faced with this quickening flight from their tightening grip, the members of the political class have refused to admit the error of their ways or accept their well-deserved irrelevance; instead, they have chosen to swim against the tide of history and strive for a universal control from which no one may escape. To advance this quest for global hegemony, they employ a spectrum of tactics ranging from transnational regulations to economic sanctions to outright military violence. But most important of all, they swaddle these tactics in idealistic verbiage such as “democracy,” “human rights,” and “free trade” in order to de-fuse popular suspicion or criticism, thus re-enacting the domestic saga of the United States whereby the federal government flattened all competing sources of power in the lofty names of “equality” and “civil rights.” Now, instead of murdering the sovereignty of mere component States, the political class aims to murder the sovereignty of nation-states so as to erect a uniform, global authority in which political power is preserved against all external challenge. By accomplishing this, the political class will at last have a free hand to carry out massive wealth redistribution and its corresponding evils, ensuring that the remaining pockets of civilization yield to a worldwide ghetto presided over by oligarchs.



To destroy national sovereignty, the political class must destroy and re-make international law, whose very name bespeaks an arrangement of affairs between independent actors. International law leaves each nation-state the master of its own destiny and with presumptive power to govern itself in its own way. The very sources of international law are rooted in national consent, such as treaties, customary practices, and general principles of law that nation-states observe domestically.



This de-centralized legal system poses a direct threat to the political class, which conceives of “law” as simply whatever the central power might decree on a given day. Resenting the persistence of a global arrangement whose rules are not arbitrarily handed down by a single sovereign, the political class has made disturbing progress towards radically transforming international law from a limited system addressing national rights and responsibilities to an all-encompassing system addressing individual rights and responsibilities. By muscling aside the nation-state as the primary subject of international law, the political class hopes to melt down each nation’s independence into a homogenized political system that regulates us as individuals, crushing the very rights and freedoms that the political class claims to be protecting.



It is undeniable that nation-states often behave in a callous and brutal fashion, but for all the abuses that nation-states commit, a world with an unrivaled sovereign represents a cure far worse than the disease. National sovereignty and international competition are essential to the survival of human civilization, for they limit the reach of any single government, and they compel governments to face external enemies in a creative struggle whereby good ideas have a chance to outlast and defeat bad ones. If Weimar Germany of the 1920s and ’30s had been a global democracy rather than a merely national one, Hitler’s election to high office and subsequent seizure of absolute power would have spelled a worldwide Third Reich rather than a localized dictatorship that, fortunately, could be resisted with outside military force. In a uniformly governed world, any opponent of such tyranny would be merely internal; he would be labeled as an outlaw; and he would be imprisoned or executed. One can run this “thought experiment” to envision any number of nightmarish outcomes, such as a global Mao Tse-tung, a global Pol Pot, or a global Stalin.



We know that governments kill far more of their own people than each others’; during the twentieth century alone, governments murdered roughly 160 million of their own citizens in bloody orgies of “democide,” while killing only a fraction of that number through international warfare. So if the nation-state system seems lawless and vicious, it surely cannot match the potential brutality of a world under a single government. In light of this knowledge, it is folly to exchange a world of divided sovereignties, however imperfect, for a single worldwide sovereignty, however promising.



Yet the political class wishes to wrap us in the chains of global government on the slender inferences that we can make such a government “good” and keep it “good.” This assertion falls to pieces upon considering what these people believe constitutes good government in the first place: a Leviathan unbounded by the rule of law, whose power to legislate, regulate, tax, spend, and destroy continues to swell with no end in sight. A glimpse at history likewise disproves the political class’s rhetoric, for the precious few governments we can rank as admirable did not remain so for very long. Mankind is imperfect and will remain so, and any government we construct will eventually regress to the mean and indulge in the affronts to life, liberty, and property that typify the story of civilization. We would be much wiser to evolve by allowing for the birth and death of diverse societies, just as nature evolves by allowing for the birth and death of diverse individuals.



Sadly, the “mainstream” debate ignores asking whether a global centralization of power should occur and concerns itself solely with how it should occur, much the same way that political discourse degenerated within the United States. “Conservatives” call for global rule under American influence, pursuing their vision with mass murder and violations of bedrock norms governing the initiation and use of military force. On the other side of the coin, “liberals” pursue a softer, more systemized version of hegemony by promoting international bureaucracies that will impose “human rights” and “environmentalist” principles that, when viewed up close, amount to little more than warmed-over Marxist schemes for micromanaging our lives and depriving us of any dignity or choice. Both the “conservative” and “liberal” sides of this loaded debate discard the wisdom that all governments are a menace unless offset by other competing governments. Forgotten is that the best way to curtail abuses of power is to disperse it far and wide, depositing it into so many hands that large-scale transgressions lack the raw material to take shape. As shown by the tragic experience of the United States – a nation conceived in liberty but increasingly bereft of it now – internal legal restraints do not prevent the accumulation and abuse of political power, no matter how ingeniously those restraints may be devised. Only external restraints suffice, and only in a world of multiple sovereignties do we have any hope of safeguarding life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.



This all may seem overwhelming, but we are not powerless to stop it. A healthy start is to take care of matters close to home by undoing the obscene and unconstitutional power concentrated in Washington, D.C., either by nullification or secession. That alone would spark an explosion of competition and creativity worldwide, as the current network of bribery, corruption, and coercion emanating from the federal government would dissipate. If this is what the political class fears, let us do all we can to make those fears justified.