A MESSAGE FROM A FORMER PRESIDENT
We have before us the opportunity to forge for ourselves and for future generations a new world order. A world where the rule of law, not the law of the jungle, governs the conduct of nations. When we are successful (and we will be), we have a real chance at this new world order, an order in which a credible United Nations can use its peace-keeping role to fulfill the promise and vision of the U.N.’s founders.
VIDEO: ©2014 AMERICORPS AUDIO: ©2008 PBS/CELTIC WOMEN
As we remember and commemorate this most patriotic and solemn date in our nation’s history, we should not again allow ourselves to forget the very real possibility that this could be our last. There is no doubt but that individual rights and liberties are fewer today than ever before in America’s history, and if elected representatives are any indication, American citizens have remained too silent for too long, failing to respond to at least five different, official notices from their government leaders during the past twenty-five years: four of them, since March; two of them (the latest and last), on the same day. Drastically different than the first (above, from a famously forgotten 9/11 presidential address), the four deliveries concentrated into 2014 portend certain danger and an irreversibility, which, apparently, no one (not even the Washington Post) saw coming.
July 4th 2014
America’s fate was signaled by silence
VIDEO: Five White Flags ~ America’s Silence Signals Surrender of Sovereignty
“The world is changing, with accelerating speed,” admonished the President in his May 28th address to West Point graduates. “This presents opportunity, but also, new dangers.”
Two time zones away, the Vice President gave a similar warning in his equally foreboding address to Air Force Academy graduates, whom he referred to as “strategic thinkers, as well as warriors, and the future of the new world order.”
“This is the world you are graduating into,” Biden proclaimed. “It allows us to refocus our intelligence and military assets and resources to other parts of the world, where they are needed… where we face new challenges.”
Both leaders charged this particular generation, that represented by these graduating classes, with the responsibility of responding to “this new world” and taking the “lead in shaping a new world order for the 21st Century in a way consistent with American interests, and the common interest.”
Six days earlier, Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel expressed hope in overcoming inevitable obstacles; prevailing among them, the constitutions of individual sovereign nations. “We are seeing a new 21st Century world order being built, and though there are conflicts and complications, I think that what’s more hopeful, maybe than any other time in the history of the world, is that we have more opportunities, and more possibilities… and more resources.”
It is President Obama, however, who will be remembered for accepting the responsibility of imposing international rules of law on the people of America by formally acknowledging, in his March 26th “Signal Speech” in Brussels, that the international order “we have worked for generations to build,” had finally reared its hideous head… that American ideals, having been tested and “threatened by an older, more traditional view of power,” reflected the struggle societies have grappled with throughout history: “the proper relationship between the individual and the state.”
This alternative vision argues that ordinary men and women are too small-minded to govern their own affairs… that order and progress can only come when individuals surrender their rights to an all-powerful sovereign.
In looking back to the night when we first heard the words, “new world order,” one can only wonder who changed what Americans were intended to believe, and why.
At 9:09 PM on September 11th 1990, television and radio stations throughout the nation, broadcasting live, captured President George Bush as he delivered the most famously forgotten September 11th Presidential Address in the history of American freedom:
We stand today at a unique and extraordinary moment. The crisis in the Persian Gulf, as grave as it is, also offers a rare opportunity to move toward an historic period of cooperation. Out of these troubled times, our fifth objective — a new world order — can emerge: a new era — freer from the threat of terror, stronger in the pursuit of justice, and more secure in the quest for peace. An era in which the nations of the world, East and West, North and South, can prosper and live in harmony.
A hundred generations have searched for this elusive path to peace, while a thousand wars raged across the span of human endeavor. Today that new world is struggling to be born, a world quite different from the one we’ve known. A world where the rule of law supplants the rule of the jungle. A world in which nations recognize the shared responsibility for freedom and justice. A world where the strong respect the rights of the weak. This is the vision that I shared with President Gorbachev in Helsinki. He and other leaders from Europe, the Gulf and around the world understand that how we manage this crisis today could shape the future for generations to come.
Thank you. Good night. And God bless the United States of America.
On Judging v. Legislating in the International Legal System
A Comment on The International Court of Justice and the Judicial Function
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