Brown's Global Ideals Threaten U.S. Sovereignty

By Phyllis Schlafly
Monday, April 28, 2008

It's a good thing that British Prime Minister Gordon Brown's U.S. visit was upstaged by the dramatic reception Americans gave Pope Benedict XVI. Brown might have been booed if he hadn't delivered what aides called his "signature" speech within the cloistered walls of Harvard's Kennedy Center.

Brown's tedious, hour-long speech impudently demanded that we issue a "Declaration of Interdependence" in order to submit to global governance. That's another way of calling on the United States to repeal the Declaration of Independence.

No thanks for the advice, Mr. Brown. Brave Americans rose up and rejected Britain's royalist rule in 1776, and we've gotten along mighty well without trans-Atlantic interference in our government for more than two centuries. We certainly don't want to reinstate any foreign supervision today.

The redundancy of Brown's outrageous semantics was oppressive. His speech used the word global 69 times, globalization 7 times, and interdependence 13 times. He referred to Kennedy 19 times, lavishing fulsome praise on John F. Kennedy ("his influence abides everywhere"), Robert Kennedy (he sent forth "ripples of hope"), and Edward "Ted" Kennedy ("one of the greatest senators in more than two centuries").

Brown rejected the traditional concept of national sovereignty, which means an independent nation not subservient to outside control, telling Americans to replace it with "responsible sovereignty," which he defined as accepting what he calls our global "obligations." Hold on to your pocketbook.

Brown admitted that his "main argument" is that the United States must accept "new global rules," "new global institutions" and "global networks." Brown's global rules include massive U.S. cash handouts and opening U.S. borders to the world.

Brown's use of well-known American political phrases was tacky. He tried to morph Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal into a "New Global Deal," and JFK's New Frontier into "the New Frontier is that there is no frontier."

Brown even slipped in an attempt at thought control: "Americans must learn to think inter-continentally." He declaimed, "We are all internationalists now."

Using the rhetorical device of inevitability, Brown warned Americans that his vision of the globalist future is "irreversible transformation." He wants to "transcend states" and "transcend borders" as he builds the "architecture of a global society."

Brown peddled the nonsense that the peoples of the world "subscribe to similar ideals." He tried to tell Americans that all religions (Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs and Buddhists) have "common values" and "similar ideals." No, they certainly do not.

Brown wants to increase the power of the United Nations to become the source of "an international stand-by capacity of trained civilian experts, ready to go anywhere at any time," and even be able to exercise "military force." Americans do not intend to cede such authority to the corrupt United Nations.

The silliest part of Brown's ponderous speech was his claim that "a global society" is "advancing democracy widely across the world." In fact, he doesn't even practice democracy in his own country.

Brown refused to allow the British people to vote on whether or not they want to accept the constitution of the European Union. He acquiesced in the plot of the constitution's author, Valery Giscard d'Estaing, to put the EU constitution into effect by calling it a treaty so it did not have to be voted on by the people.

Brown was chicken about the treaty subterfuge and did not permit a photographic record of his participation. He sent his foreign secretary to perform the official treaty signing in front of cameras.

The EU constitution, now called the Treaty of Lisbon, requires all signers to surrender their sovereignty and democracy to unelected bureaucrats in Brussels, Belgium, and judges in Strasbourg, France. The EU constitution takes away England's right to pass its own laws, forces England to surrender more than 60 United Kingdom vetoes of EU decisions, and gives the EU bureaucracy and tribunals total control over England's immigration policy.

Instead of a self-governing nation whose democratic system was developed over centuries, England is now ruled by what former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher called "the paper-pushers in Brussels."

Brown made his globalism speech emphatic by repeatedly invoking the words "New World Order." The New World Order Brown tries to con the United States into accepting would mean taxing Americans for foreign handouts so immense they would make the Marshall Plan look puny, global warming rules to drastically reduce the U.S. standard of living, and putting American workers in a common labor pool with the world's billions who subsist on less than $2 a day.

Gordon Brown invited Americans to march forward to globalism "where there is no path." He's correct that there is no path on which we can expect globalism to lead the United States to a better world; in fact every path toward global government is a surrender of our liberty and our prosperity.

Gordon Brown should go back home and study how Americans refused to accept orders from King George III.