Chris Bertram has taken Steven Den Beste to task for his ruggedly anti-tranzi views. Chris has pointed out that Steve’s attack on the tranzis for their promotion of ‘group’ rights over individual rights is flawed by the resultant support for the Nation State which, in itself, is an exercise in ‘group’ rights over individual ones.
I am not jumping to Steve’s defence here because I am sure that he is more than capable of fighting his own corner, but I think the real grist of the complaint about tranzi ideology lies not so much in its collectivism but its basis in Gramscian Deconstruction i.e. true equality cannot be achieved until people have been stripped of their internalised bourgeois values and reconstructed as ‘new’ citizens. A philosophy which later heavily influenced Pol Pot among others. This is what Steve may have been driving at and, if so, he is quite right.
But Chris’s counterpunch is not without merit. As a libertarian, I have mistrust of national governments hard-wired into every single one of my response mechanisms but even the likes of me is not so warped by disappointments and frustrations that I am prepared to leap from the frying pan and into the fire.
The fire I speak of is World Government and that is precisely the tranzi agenda (‘Global Governance’ is already on the curriculum of every UK law school); the replacement of sovereign countries with mere districts universally bound by one set of laws, one set of standards, one set of morals and (as sure as night follows day) harmonised taxes. Elected leaders would become nothing more than the Gauleiters of the Third Reich; equipped with some degree of autonomy but finally answerable to Berlin.
This is quite the worst idea ever devised by man, not just because that World Government is likely to govern on deeply unhealthy principles but because it will render extinct the one thing that keeps stupid and rapacious politicians (and are there any other kind?) in check: a means of escape.
I have lost count of the number of men and women I have met who were born behind the Iron Curtain and in every single case they recounted the stories of how they were dazzled and inspired by the increasing preponderance of images seeping in from the prosperous West and convincing them there was a better world out there that was being denied to them. A few years of that and bang went the Soviet Union.
Just like bad ideas need to be pushed out by good ideas, so bad regimes will eventually fall because of the existence of good (or better regimes). There is nothing more sobering for political classes drunk with power than the ability of their wealth-producing and ambitious citizens to up sticks and bugger off somewhere more conducive to their aspirations, leaving said political classes without a pot to piss in or a window to throw it out of. Global governance will have no such impediments, having, in effect, a captive citizenry with nowhere to escape to improve their lives. One standardised world bereft of all diversity (and , ironically, diversity is one of the cornerstone principles the tranzis obsessively purport to promote). Yes, it will a borderless world in which you can roam freely but there will be no point in doing so. Different landscape, same old shit.
Besides, there is the no small matter of elections in nation states. David Blunkett may be a son of a bitch but at least he’s our son of a bitch and if he presses too many buttons on too many Britons he will rapidly become an ex-son of a bitch. Would that a similar facility existed for dealing with the likes of Kofi Annan. It doesn’t and it never will.
Free from any disincentives, it is only a matter of time before Global Governance becomes Global Tyranny. There will simply be no reason for it not to do so.
So Chris and Steve may have been having an eloquent argument but it was the wrong argument. Rather like a market in goods and services means choice and prosperity for consumers, so a market in governments, a diversity of different jurisdictions with radically different ways of doing things, gives choice and freedom to us all. For sure it means that some regimes will be rotten and vile but, equally, others will not and the latter will prevail over the former by sheer dint of their existence.
Until such time as our species has conquered the far reaches of the cosmos (an exciting prospect, but I ain’t holding my breath) then a world of sovereign, independent nations is our means of escape in case of fire. It is a universal slave railroad and an insurance policy for mankind that should be defended at any cost.
[My thanks to Patrick Crozier for the heads-up]
