-> SNETNEWS Mailing List The Progressive Review 5/24/99 Sam Smith There is a long tradition of those educated beyond their intelligence believing that politics could be vastly improved if the annoying question of consent of the governed were eliminated and matters left to people like themselves. In this century, manifestations of this self-serving perversion have included the early progressive movement with its government by experts, the rise of government by foundation, and urban regionalization with its transfer of power from elected officials to appointed technocrats. W.J. Clinton and the other Third Wayers are out of the same mold, except that instead of seeking to destroy a city's politics they apparently hope to regionalize and de-democratize the whole globe. These are people, after all, who believe firmly that they -- rather than any policy or program -- are the solution to our problems. This megalomania is rarely expressed directly but a recent article by Vaclav Havel in that intellectual Leisure World for decaying liberals -- The New York Review of Books -- comes close. Here are two excerpts of Havel's defense of the war: "In the next century I believe that most states will begin to change from cultlike entities charged with emotion into far simpler and more civilized entities, into less powerful and more rational administrative units that will represent only one of the many complex and multileveled ways in which our planetary society is organized." "The practical responsibilities of the state -- its legal powers -- can only devolve in two directions, downward or upward; downward, to the nongovernmental organizations and structures of civil society; or upward, to regional, transnational and global organizations." Thus in a few paragraphs, Havel scraps democracy at every level of society leaving us to be run, presumably, by business improvement districts and NATO. It is a profoundly anti-democratic view, because at none of Havel's levels is the consent of the governed considered. We are being asked, I suppose, to scrap that "cultlike entity," the United States of America, for that far more humane one run by General Wesley Clark. Even the United Nations gets short-shrift in this new world order, which should surprise no one observing the Clinton's regime's contempt for that body. The UN -- unlike such independent, non-elected virtual empires such as the World Bank, IMF and NATO -- at least is a controlled creature of representative and non-representative governments. In Havel's vision -- clearly not his alone -- such control will be dispensed with. In his new book, former UN Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali describes Madeleine Albright, that leader of the new world order. She seemed to have, he writes, "little interest in the difficult diplomatic work of persuading her foreign counterparts to go along with the positions of her government, preferring to lecture or speak in declarative sentences, or simply to read verbatim from her briefing books. She seemed to assume that her mere assertion of a US policy should be sufficient to achieve the support of other nations." This is the not the way of a new humanitarianism but of old, pathological imperialism. Hear now the extraordinary reaction to Boutros-Ghali's book by Albright's flack James Rubin: "It was always unfortunate that Mr. Boutros-Ghali did not have the skills to successfully manage the most important relationship for any Secretary General, which is smooth cooperation with the United States." Such shameless and braggartly talk is the sort of thing that is leading the Chinese, Russians and Indians to think in terms of countering empire. Thus through the ignorant arrogance of the most small-minded, narcissistic, and incompetent western leaders of our lifetime, we find ourselves once again in grave danger of global catastrophe. -> Send "subscribe snetnews " to [EMAIL PROTECTED] -> Posted by: "Bartch, Robert" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
