World Citizenship?
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Posted: 08/04/08
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World Citizenship?
By Thomas E. Brewton
It means different things, depending upon your religious faith.
Responding to "Senator Obama, Citizen of the World,"
a reader emailed this observation:
"June 17, 1982 - Ronald Reagan speaking to the United Nations General
Assembly, "I speak today both as a citizen of the United States and
of the world. I come with the heartfelt wishes of my people for
peace, bearing honest proposals and looking for genuine progress."
"Would you care to come to the same conclusions about President Reagan?"
My response is that the difference between Senator Obama's usage and
President Reagan's is a matter of intent.
If Ronald Reagan said, for example, that he believed in fair play, he
would have meant that every individual, without affirmative action,
is entitled to an equal opportunity and equal treatment under the law.
When liberal-progressive-socialists like Senator Obama, and the
ruling element of the Democrat/Socialist Party, say that they are in
favor of fair play, they mean something very different: that the
government should intervene in the normal processes of human activity
in order to give special treatment to favored economic and social
classes and to redistribute income in the name of social justice.
It is undeniable that, for more than three generations, students in
our colleges and universities have been schooled in the religious
beliefs of socialism, which broadly looks to the restructuring of
society by collectivized government. The meaning of multi-
culturalism and environmentalism, drummed into kids from kindergarten
onwards, is that all cultures are equally valid and that they should
think of themselves as inhabitants of the planet earth. From there,
it's only a short step to the one-worldism inculcated at the college
level.
That is precisely the cultural milieu that shaped Senator Obama and
his wife.
If you believe in the secular religion of socialism, you worship the
collectivized political state, and the greater the collectivism, the
better, the end point being a single world government. Liberal-
progressive-socialists' paradigm is an industrialized world in which
the individual is both powerless and meaningless. Meaningful units
for socialism, ultimately, are capitalist monopolists vs. the workers
of the world.
Since the early days of Marxist socialism, its adherents have thought
of socialism as a worldwide religion uniting an abstraction called
"the workers of the world," (cf. "The Communist Manifesto," by Karl
Marx and Friedrich Engels). In that vein, the Socialist
International, at the outbreak of World War I, called upon workers of
the world to unite and to refuse to fight in a war they believed to
have been instigated by capitalists to make larger profits.
This is the origin of liberal-progressives' belief both that wars are
unnecessary, and that they can be eliminated by socializing private
enterprise and dividing its assets and income equally among all
peoples of the world. This is the background of Senator Obama's
pronouncements in Berlin:
"...the burdens of global citizenship continue to bind us
together. ...Partnership and cooperation among nations is not a
choice; it is the one way, the only way, to protect our common
security and advance our common humanity.
"...Now is the time to join together, through constant cooperation,
strong institutions, shared sacrifice, and a global commitment to
progress, to meet the challenges of the 21st century.
"...This is the moment when we must build on the wealth that open
markets have created, and share its benefits more equitably.
"...Our allegiance has never been to any particular tribe or kingdom..."
Liberal-progressivism, no matter its good intentions, made the 20th
century the most barbaric period in human history. The collectivized
political state a couple of times approached the scope of world
government. Hitler's National Socialism and Soviet socialism
degraded and enslaved hundreds of millions of people, and liquidated
tens of millions of dissidents, in the name of liberal-
progressivism's social justice.
There is no world government, nor can there ever be, without the most
unbearable despotism imaginable. There is, however, a common
humanity. We all are children of God, made in his image,
individually capable of good and evil.
If you are a religious Jew or a Christian, you envision the heart and
soul of every individual as the nexus to God. Every individual must
pray for God's Holy Spirit to guide him to more righteous conduct and
thereby to make human societies more humane. Societies in that
paradigm are, most fundamentally, the family, the church or
synagogue, and the local community or town.
The Judeo-Christian ethos, standing against collectivism and for
individual responsibility, created Western civilization, which ended
slavery, vastly raised the standard of living for all Western
peoples, made literacy nearly universal, and created flourishing
arts, architecture, music, and literature.
All of this is targeted for destruction in the name of modernism by
liberal-progressivism, which in the last half of the 20th century
shunted aside individual responsibility, obliterated the norm of
stable, two parent families, levered crime to horrific levels,
degraded education, fostered drug addiction, and lauded sexual
promiscuity and marital infidelity as liberating social policies.
Thomas E. Brewton is a staff writer for the New Media Alliance, Inc.
The New Media Alliance is a non-profit (501c3) national coalition of
writers, journalists and grass-roots media outlets.
His weblog is THE VIEW FROM 1776
http://www.thomasbrewton.com/
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