VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: What is
the United Nations going to do? And the answer is they
can't do anything. In the ancient world,
Socrates, of all people, said that he was not a
citizen of Athens alone, he was a citizen of the world. Our term cosmopolitan
comes from that concept, that he had affinities
with all the city-states and, indeed, with all
the people in the world. In a very cynical fashion,
when Alexander the Great in the latter fourth century BC
at the demise of the city-state went into Asia Minor and then on
to conquer the Persian empire, he needed a propaganda
talking point. And one of it was he
was going to usher in what he called the
Brotherhood of Man, a new ecumenical idea that
whether you were Persian or Greek, you were a human. It sounds wonderful. But the idea was that
enlightened rulers from the Hellenic
world would spread their superior civilization
all over the world. And it didn't last very well. In Roman times, Romans
being far more practical, they didn't talk
about globalization as much as reified it. They made it concrete. But immediately, there
were voices within Rome that said the further a
sovereign nation expands and globalizes,
the more difficult it is to maintain the solidarity
of the people, the purity of the original
founding concepts. The more we think we're
making people into Romans, the more they think
they are making us into other peoples
other than Romans. One of the problems that the
globalists or cosmopolitans learned very early
in the 20th century during the progressive
movement was when you surrender sovereignty
to these international bodies, then who is the police? Who polices the police? So the League of Nations,
which was envisioned under Woodrow Wilson's
Versailles agenda, for a very brief time seemed to
be successful in adjudicating international disputes of trade
or jurisdiction or borders until Adolf Hitler or the
Japanese militarists or Josef Stalin said, I don't
need to listen to you. And so World War II doomed
the first incarnation of a united group of nations,
the League of Nations. After World War II, the
same suspicious idea resurfaced with
the United Nations. But this time, we were going
to have a Security Council. And they were going to be
the world's top powers, the strongest, the
most successful, and then they could
be the enforcer. But the problem, of course, was
that very early on the Soviet Union was not the
solution to the problem, but it was the problem itself. Because there's always going
to be some country who's powerful by breaking
the rules and going beyond its own prerogative. In other words, an
anti-democratic China that has currently a million
and a half people in camps, and yet, they're on
the United Nations, and they're a
citizen of the world. And if the United
Nations would decide that the Chinese, contrary
to the UN Charter, are putting people in
concentration camps, or they're harvesting
organs from people deemed not necessary, or
they're forcing people to have abortions that don't fit
their idea of family planning, or they're bullying
their neighbors, or they illegally created a base
in the Spratly Islands, what is the United Nations going to do? And the answer is they
can't do anything. In 2020, we saw an
international pandemic. And our United Nations
charter medical organization, the World Health
Organization, warned us from the very beginning-- do not issue a travel
ban against China. And then, we learned that
the World Health Organization was essentially parroting or
mimicking what China wanted. And why did they do that? Because of Chinese money
and Chinese pressure. This is not an aberration. It's inherent in the
idea of global governance that there is always going to be
strong powers who have agendas that are not global
in scope, but they're national and sovereign. But if all the other
countries in the world surrender their sovereignty,
and one powerful nation doesn't, then they have to come
up with a mechanism of collective defense. And so far in the history
of man, that's never worked.
