COMMISSARS

In this article by DAVID BROOKS of The New York Times, the clown with a brown nose once again shows contempt for democracy, human rights and the rule of law. He is just one of the commissars, those intellectuals whose role is to serve power by 'explaining' and justifying it to other intellectuals and to the rest of us. Hitler, Mussolini and Stalin could have never had the power they had without commissars who would sing the greatness of the leader. Today these servants of the master keep working to ‘explain’ the angelic virtues of ‘our’ system: Democracy & Freedom. Two items our elites know so well and love so much to export all over the world. Their role is paramount. How could we otherwise understand that attacking a defenceless country that didn’t do anything to us is actually “exporting Freedom & Democracy” and “making the world more safe”? How could we possibly understand that murdering hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians is simply “self defence” and “collateral damages”? Without these commissars with such fine a mind we could never get that capitalism is the answer to all the problems, the god to pray and obey, the virgin system without sins. They know. We are just too ignorant or too stupid or too naïve or too liberal or simply radical, socialist, communist, anarchist. Plainly, wrong. We should now know that Freedom, Democracy and Justice are whatever they say they are. As simple as that. Thank you!
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'Loudly, With a Big Stick' by DAVID BROOKS, The New York Times

I don't like John Bolton's management style. Nor am I a big fan of his foreign policy views. He doesn't really believe in using U.S. power to end genocide or promote democracy. But it is ridiculous to say he doesn't believe in the United Nations. This is a canard spread by journalists who haven't bothered to read his stuff and by crafty politicians who aren't willing to say what the Bolton debate is really about. The Bolton controversy isn't about whether we believe in the U.N. mission. It's about which U.N. mission we believe in. From the start, the U.N. has had two rival missions. Some people saw it as a place where sovereign nations could work together to solve problems. But other people saw it as the beginnings of a world government. This world government dream crashed on the rocks of reality, but as Jeremy Rabkin of Cornell has observed, the federalist idea has been replaced by a squishier but equally pervasive concept: the dream of "global governance." The people who talk about global governance begin with the same premises as the world government types: the belief that a world of separate nations, living by the law of the jungle, will inevitably be a violent world. Instead, these people believe, some supranational authority should be set up to settle international disputes by rule of law. They know we're not close to a global version of the European superstate. So they are content to champion creeping institutions like the International Criminal Court. They treat U.N. General Assembly resolutions as an emerging body of international law. They seek to foment a social atmosphere in which positions taken by multilateral organizations are deemed to have more "legitimacy" than positions taken by democratic nations. John Bolton is just the guy to explain why this vaporous global-governance notion is a dangerous illusion, and that we Americans, like most other peoples, will never accept it. We'll never accept it, first, because it is undemocratic. It is impossible to set up legitimate global authorities because there is no global democracy, no sense of common peoplehood and trust. So multilateral organizations can never look like legislatures, with open debate, up or down votes and the losers accepting majority decisions. Instead, they look like meetings of unelected elites, of technocrats who make decisions in secret and who rely upon intentionally impenetrable language, who settle differences through arcane fudges. Americans, like most peoples, will never surrender even a bit of their national democracy for the sake of multilateral technocracy. Second, we will never accept global governance because it inevitably devolves into corruption. The panoply of U.N. scandals flows from a single source: the lack of democratic accountability. These supranational organizations exist in their own insular, self-indulgent aerie. We will never accept global governance, third, because we love our Constitution and will never grant any other law supremacy over it. Like most peoples (Europeans are the exception), we will never allow transnational organizations to overrule our own laws, regulations and precedents. We think our Constitution is superior to the sloppy authority granted to, say, the International Criminal Court. Fourth, we understand that these mushy international organizations liberate the barbaric and handcuff the civilized. Bodies like the U.N. can toss hapless resolutions at the Milosevics, the Saddams or the butchers of Darfur, but they can do nothing to restrain them. Meanwhile, the forces of decency can be paralyzed as they wait for "the international community." Fifth, we know that when push comes to shove, all the grand talk about international norms is often just a cover for opposing the global elite's bêtes noires of the moment - usually the U.S. or Israel. We will never grant legitimacy to forums that are so often manipulated for partisan ends. John Bolton is in a good position to make these and other points. He helped reverse the U.N.'s Zionism-is-racism resolution. He led the U.S. rejection of the International Criminal Court. Time and time again, he has pointed out that the U.N. can be an effective forum where nations can go to work together, but it can never be a legitimate supranational authority in its own right. Sometimes it takes sharp elbows to assert independence. But this is certain: We will never be so seduced by vapid pieties about global cooperation that we'll join a system that is both unworkable and undemocratic.