Abortion-Pushing UN Committee Must be Held Accountable

Pro-life leaders worldwide are saying, “enough is enough” regarding the abortion push and other radical social engineering being imposed on the world via the United Nations.

LifeSiteNews.com spoke with pro-life leaders in various countries today, all of whom were outraged that the United Nations Human Rights Committee (UNHRC) urged Poland to liberalize abortion laws, and implement sex-ed, contraception and gay rights programs. (see LifeSiteNews.com coverage http://www.lifesite.net/ldn/2004/nov/041109a.html )

The same committee also urged Morocco to decriminalize abortion last week. Moreover the UNHRC has a history of promoting abortion and acting as an unofficial implementing agent for the nefarious anti-people and racist International Planned Parenthood.

In March this year the committee told Colombia that denying abortion in rape cases was an “outrage”. The UNHRC abortion push is longstanding. In July 2000, the committee expressed concern over Ireland’s restrictive abortion legislation, and in July 2001 the committee urged Guatemala to loosen its abortion law. (see below for references)

Some pro-life leaders are encouraging citizens of the countries represented on the UNHRC to engage in local political actions to stop any of these unaccountable nationals from participating in United Nation’s attempts to force sovereign nations to accept abortion and gay rights.

Until only recently, UN delegates and other representatives have often been able to act and speak with impunity at critical UN meetings against the wishes of their own people and even without any awareness from most legislators in their nations about what they are proposing at the UN.

Part of the reason for this extreme independence is that much of what is said and decided at UN meetings is not regularly reported or critiqued in the local media of UN member countries. As well, the general public and even most elected officials view the world body and its workings as being far beyond their competence or, very naively, not related to their local affairs.

Hence, scheming national government leaders, working quietly with non-accountable UN bureaucrats and delegates, have frequently supported or allowed the initiation of world mandated policies that would never be accepted in their own nations.

Pro-life, pro-family lobbyists at the UN have frustratingly learned that few people outside the UN, with the exception of powerful special interests such as Planned Parenthood, are paying close attention to UN shenanigans or questioning who should be sent there and what representatives have been saying on their nations’ behalf.

Despite the fact that the United States has, since Bush’s first election, usually been a strong defender of traditional morality, the United States representative on the UNHRC, Ruth Wedgewood, did not absent herself from the committee’s attempt to force Poland to legalize abortion. Wedgewood’s action is all the more concerning since US legislation forbids American funds to support organizations that promote abortion. The US provides the lion’s share of funds to the United Nations.

The Canadian representative on the Committee, Max Yalden will also have to answer for his actions, Jim Hughes, National President of Campaign Life Coalition told LifeSiteNew.com. While the Canadian Liberal party leadership is known for its fondness for abortion and gay rights, partisan politics pushed through the United Nations should nonetheless be taboo, he said.

Latin American leaders were surprised to see representatives from their pro-life countries pushing Poland to allow abortion. Panama’s Alfredo Castillero Hoyos, Colombia’s Rafael Rivas Posada, and Argentina’s Hipolito Solari-Yrigoyen all sit on the 18-member UN committee.

Most surprisingly, Malta, one of only six countries in the world which prohibits all abortion, had a representative on the UN committee - Franco Depasquale. UN committees will almost certainly place the tiny, principled European nation on its hit list in the near future. No exceptions can be allowed to the New World Order of abortion and other de-population measures.

Lech Kowalewski, spokesman for the Polish Federation of Pro-life Movements told LifeSiteNews.com yesterday that the committee’s action was an "attack on the sovereignty of Poland." Kowalewski is concerned that the UN report may influence the Polish government to adopt a pro-abortion bill which is under consideration (See LifeSiteNews.com coverage of the bill http://www.lifesite.net/ldn/2004/oct/04101802.html )

The complete list of UNHRC members and their country of origin follows:

Abdelfattah Amor (Tunisia)
Nisuke Ando (Japan)
Prafullachandra Natwarlal Bhagwati (India)
Alfredo Castillero Hoyos (Panama)
Christine Chanet (France)
Franco Depasquale (Malta)
Maurice Glèlè-Ahanhanzo (Benin)
Walter Kälin (Switzerland)
Ahmed Tawfik Khalil (Egypt)
Rajsoomer Lallah (Mauritius)
Rafael Rivas Posada (Colombia)
Sir Nigel Rodley (United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland)
Martin Scheinin (Finland); Ivan Shearer (Australia)
Hipolito Solari-Yrigoyen (Argentina)
Ruth Wedgwood (United States of America)
Roman Wieruszewski (Poland)
Maxwell Yalden (Canada).

Related LifeSiteNews.com reports:
United Nations Tells Morocco to Decriminalize Abortion
http://www.lifesite.net/ldn/2004/nov/04111002.html
United Nations Orders Guatemala To Loosen Abortion Law
http://www.lifesite.net/ldn/2001/jul/01073102.html
United Nations Tells Colombia Denying Abortion in Rape Cases is an 'Outrage'
http://www.lifesite.net/ldn/2004/mar/04031701.html
UN Committee Asks About Abortion And Homosexuality In Ireland
http://www.lifesite.net/ldn/2000/jul/00071704.html

Waiting for Iraq

Most Americans don't realise how much the rest of the world opposed their country's invasion of Iraq, because most US mass media shield them from the knowledge. Watching the domestic service of CNN just after the election, I heard three different newsreaders in the same day explain to their American audience that France and Germany had been "cool" to the American attack on Iraq.

They weren't "cool" to it; they opposed it utterly. They saw it as an illegal act intended to undermine the entire multilateral system and replace it with a unilateral system in which America is the global policeman -- indeed, the global judge, jury and executioner. They refused to support it at the United Nations, and in that refusal they had the support of every other great power except Britain. So what do all these great powers -- France, Germany, Russia, China, and India -- do now?

They were never that confident that President George W. Bush would lose the election, or that Senator John Kerry would make much difference if he won. They know that there is now a broad consensus in the United States on the desirability of imposing a "Pax Americana" on the world through the unilateral exercise of overwhelming US military power. They will never accept that, but they still want to avoid a direct confrontation with the United States as that would also destroy the multilateral system. So they are hoping that the war in Iraq will erode US popular support for the whole unilateralist adventure.

To be specific, they are hoping for the rise of an anti-Iraq-war movement in the United States like the one that ultimately destroyed popular support for the US war in Vietnam a generation ago. And they need it to happen soon, because their no-confrontation policy has a limited shelf life. It must succeed before popular pressures at home push them into open confrontation with the US.

So how fast can Iraq go bad in the eyes of the American public? In Iraqi eyes, of course, it has already gone bad, with every opinion poll since last spring showing massive support among Arab Iraqis for the resistance forces and a huge majority in favour of immediate US withdrawal. But it is Americans who must be convinced that the whole neo-conservative project for re-ordering the Middle East and establishing US global hegemony is foolish and doomed.

That may take more time than is available, for what US public opinion responds to is American casualties. If too many American soldiers get killed in Iraq, then the public will eventually pull the plug on the war, just as they did on Korea in the 1950s, on Vietnam in the 1960s and
70s, on the US military intervention in Lebanon in the 1980s, and on Somalia in the 1990s. But how many is too many? That depends.

American military deaths in Iraq are now nearing 1,100, but there is little likelihood that the total will rise as fast as it did in the Vietnam war. American soldiers are basically fighting lightly armed guerillas in Iraq, not a regular army like North Vietnam's, and US tactics are deliberately designed to minimise American casualties by a massive use of firepower, especially air power.

This does have the side-effect of killing large numbers of Iraqi civilians. A survey of 33 randomly selected Iraqi neighbourhoods conducted in September by the Bloomberg School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore and published online by the British medical journal "The Lancet" late last month concluded that there have been between 100,000 and 200,000 "excess deaths" among Iraqi civilians since the March, 2003 invasion, and that most of these deaths were due to American air strikes in civilian areas. But Iraqi deaths have little impact on American public opinion.

The number of American military casualties that the US public will tolerate fluctuates over time, and is certainly much higher than it was before 9/11. Nobody knows what the magic number actually is now, but it is probably well above a thousand American dead a year. It remains to be seen if Iraq will cause American casualties on a much larger scale than that.

Iraq is already a quagmire for the US armed forces: even as thousands of American troops prepare to level the defiant city of Falluja, the city of Samarra, which US forces allegedly "pacified" in September, is slipping out of their control again. But it is a relatively small quagmire, and it may not produce a powerful anti-war movement in the United States as quickly as the other great powers hope. Especially if al-Qaeda, freed from the need to abstain from terrorist attacks on the US for fear of sabotaging President Bush's reelection, manages to carry out an attack or two, however small, on US soil.

If the US does not change course, the other great powers will eventually give up on the waiting game and move to counterbalance and contain American power. That would mean alliances, arms build-ups, all the lethal nonsense we thought that we had left behind us. Nobody wants to go down that road, but they inevitably will if US policy doesn't change. We probably have a few years before that starts, but we don't have a long time.

Gwynne Dyer is a London-based independent journalist whose articles are published in 45 countries.

Copyright: Gwynne Dyer

It's the Corporate State, Stupid

"Fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it is the merger of state and corporate power." - Benito Mussolini.

The early twentieth century Italians, who invented the word fascism, also had a more descriptive term for the concept -- estato corporativo: the corporatist state. Unfortunately for Americans, we have come to equate fascism with its symptoms, not with its structure. The structure of fascism is corporatism, or the corporate state. The structure of fascism is the union, marriage, merger or fusion of corporate economic power with governmental power. Failing to understand fascism, as the consolidation of corporate economic and governmental power in the hands of a few, is to completely misunderstand what fascism is. It is the consolidation of this power that produces the demagogues and regimes we understand as fascist ones.

While we Americans have been trained to keenly identify the opposite of fascism, i.e., government intrusion into and usurpation of private enterprise, we have not been trained to identify the usurpation of government by private enterprise. Our European cousins, on the other hand, having lived with Fascism in several European countries during the last century, know it when they see it, and looking over here, they are ringing the alarm bells. We need to learn how to recognize Fascism now.

Dr. Lawrence Britt has written an excellent article entitled “The 14 Defining Characteristics of Fascism.” An Internet search of the number 14 coupled with the word fascism will produce the original article as well as many annotations on each of the 14 characteristics of fascism that he describes. His article is a must read to help get a handle on the symptoms that corporatism produces.

But even Britt’s excellent article misses the importance of Mussolini’s point. The concept of corporatism is number nine on Britt’s list and unfortunately titled: “Corporate Power is Protected.” In the view of Mussolini, the concept of corporatism should have been number one on the list and should have been more aptly titled the “Merger of Corporate Power and State Power.” Even Britt failed to see the merger of corporate and state power as the primary cause of most of these other characteristics. It is only when one begins to view fascism as the merger of corporate power and state power that it is easy to see how most of the other thirteen characteristics Britt describes are produced. Seen this way, these other characteristics no longer become disjointed abstractions. Cause and effect is evident.

For example, number two on Britt’s list is titled: “Disdain for the Recognition of Human Rights.” Individual rights and corporate rights, at the very least conflict, and often are in downright opposition to one another. In the court system, often individuals must sue corporations. In America, in order to protect corporations, we have seen a steady stream of rules, decisions and laws to protect corporations and to limit the rights of the individual by lawsuit and other redress. These rules, decisions, and laws have always been justified on the basis of the need for corporations to have profit in order to exist.

Number three on Britt’s list is the identification of scapegoats or enemies as a unifying cause. Often the government itself becomes the scapegoat when the government is the regulator of the corporations. Often it is lawyers or administrators who take on the corporations. Often it is liberals who champion the rights of individuals, or terrorists who might threaten state stability or corporate profit. Any or all may become scapegoats for the state’s problems because they pose problems for corporations.

Other notable characteristics of fascism described by Britt which are directly produced by corporatism are:

< The suppression of organized labor (organized labor is the bane of corporations and the only real check on corporate power other than government or the legal system);

< Supremacy of the military (it is necessary to produce and protect corporate profits abroad and threats from abroad);

< Cronyism and governmental corruption (it is very beneficial to have ex-corporate employees run the agencies or make the laws that are supposed to regulate or check corporations);

< Fraudulent elections (especially those where corporations run the machinery of elections and count the votes or where judges decide their outcomes);

< Nationalism (disdain for other countries that might promote individual rights);

< Obsession with national security (anti-corporatists are a security risk to the corporate status quo);

< Control of the media (propaganda works);

< Obsession with crime and punishment (anti-corporatists belong in jail); and

< Disdain for intellectuals and the arts (these people see corporatism for what it is and are highly individualistic).

All of these characteristics have a fairly obvious corporate component to them or produce a fairly obvious corporate benefit. Even Britt’s last two characteristics, the merger of state with the dominant religion and rampant suppression of divorce, abortion and homosexuality produce at least some indirect corporate benefit.

In sum, it’s the corporate state, stupid.

As I have pondered what could be done about America’s steady march toward the fascist state, I also have pondered what can be done internally to stop it. The Germans couldn’t seem to do it. The Italians couldn’t seem to do it. The only lesson from recent history where an indigenous people seemed to have uncoupled the merger of economic power with governmental power is the French Revolution. The soft underbelly of consolidated economic power is that the power resides in the hands of a few. Cut off the money supply of the few and the merger between economic power and government becomes unglued. The French systematically took out their aristocracy one by one. It was ugly; the French couldn’t seem to figure out when there had been enough bloodletting to solve the problem.

The thought of an American twenty-first century French Revolution is ugly. But the thought of an American twenty-first century fascist state is far uglier. It would be a supreme irony that the state most responsible for stopping worldwide fascism would become fascist 60 years later. But far worse than this irony is the reality that an American fascist state with America’s power could make Nazi Germany look like a tiny blip on the radar screen of history.

For some years now we have lived with the Faustian bargain of the corporation. Large corporations are necessary to achieve those governmental and social necessities that small enterprises are incapable of providing. The checks on corporate power have always been fragile. Left unchecked, the huge economic power of corporations corrupts absolutely. Most of the checks are badly eroded. Is there still time to get the checks back in balance? Or will we be left with two unthinkable options?

David G. Mills is an attorney who lives in Memphis, TN. Email - mmillsas@midsouth.rr.com