We used to call them "suicide bombers." Now, in acknowledgement of an indescribably murderous intent of random mayhem, we call them "homicide bombers."
On the basis of similar surgical logic, I have taken to calling the United Nations "oil for food" program by its proper name: "oil for money." I doubt anyone has taken notice, whether in print or conversation. I haven't seen a twinge or moment of doubt pass over anyone's visage.
It is passing strange to me how things and language change and do not change with the times -- often as a form of amelioration that erases proper distinctions when alternatively it is not acting as a defender of proper order and understanding/s: I was an active member of the International Relations Club both in high school and early college. It was clear and made clear to us that IRC was offspring (by gestational budding) of the United Nations and we were told this was a good thing. After listening to enough visting international speakers, especially from Africa, the Middle East, and to a lesser degree South America, I began to develop a point of view -- one that has matured and is the one I hold today. I'll attempt to articulate it here and beg your patience with what may be a wandering description.
Entropy. There is a reason why all manner of things tend toward order amidst disorder, disorder making for inconvenient differences, including point of view. In the world of my childhood there was an unfenced Armory and Tank Company almost directly across the street from our home, and on Sundays soon after church services the crews would gather and the tanks roll out onto Route 4 heading for the surrounding countryside where there were gneiss. loess. and shale pits in a variety of locations, each sizeable enough to suffer resounding blasts that echoed for hours throughout those Sunday afternoons. By the time I took note of these happenings the Korean Police Action was on and in good weather I would pause and rest my arms across the handlebars of my tricycle and attempt to understand where the tanks were going or where the crews were blasting. [Indeed, K-o-r-e-a was the first exotic word I spelled without benefit of teaching at about four years of age, sitting at the corner of Potter and Poultney streets, leaning on the handlebars in a kind of drumbeat reverie. I recall the moment well.]
At some point in my IRC training -- and that is what I now consider it to have been -- I developed an understanding that IRC activities and speakers were artifacts of a determined propanganda to prepare interested youg people for allegiance to United Nations rule. This being incompatible and incapable of melding with my allegiance to the United States of America, I recoiled from it and began what is now a long period of observation of the ways of the United Nations; but I have not stopped at observation: I have read the Charter -- more than once -- and certain other agreements that have the force of treaty that exist between the UN and the USA. In general, I do not like what I have seen or read, which has the appearance of sweet life on the one hand but treads on national sovereignty and personal guarantees and choices on the other. In short, the emergence of the oil for money program has not surprised me, although the apparent breadth and depth of the corruption has been astonishing, I do admit.
Being old enough to remember Josef Stalin and to have seen what he was willing to do and what he did inflict upon the peoples of the then-Soviet Union, early on I developed a point of view about what totalitarianism is. It is hungry. It is omnivorous. I shall not come to terms with it because I cannot and yet be myself.
The night that the fall of the Soviet Union and the "death of communism" was first reported on television, I turned to my wife and asserted that, much as I would that it were as reported, that dream would soon reveal itself as a nightmare when Communist Party officials who were taking a dive into obscurity all over the former Soviet Union would rally to undermine the democratic spirit of Russia if they were able to get away with it. [Like Tom Daschle whose divisive words dashed any hope of a fullsome spirit of bipartisanship during W's first term of office and amidst the 9/11 tragedies, Russia's Vladimir Putin has most sorrowfully begun the long march back from hope to despair -- jailing entrepreneurs, choking off what had been an expanding voice of the Russian free press, and taking control of election rules and processes.] Events have not disabused me of my point of view.
I think what we want in the world is as much orderly diversity of nations, culture, and government as possible. I have come to believe that such a vision is incompatible with the appetites of the unelected but well spoiled bureaucrats who are the delegates to the United Nations: they believe in the sweet life vision to the degree that, if need be, they would impose it upon us unto the starvation of our souls, and feed themselves well off our product. (Few USA citizens realize that environmental control of several USA sites is governed not by local, state, or federal statute but by the UN: e.g., Yosemite, under UN fiat for the good of the people of the world it is said.)
United Nations rule is incompatible with the Bills of Rights to the Constitution of the United States and the Constitution itself: make no mistake, sovereignty is at stake. Small wonder the United Nations promotes activities designed to "understand" the UN in schools.
There is a picture of Half-Dome rising above Yosemite Valley and the small meadow where I was married 34 years ago on the wall above the computer where I sit. While the UN may have apparent control-by-treaty of this scene for the moment, I trust that it will be for a short term, and the end of that soon: I do not understand how we might allow it to be otherwise and yet claim to be an independent nation. (There is a reason why the United Nations is promoting a worldwide program to disarm every individual who is not a member of the police or military and, should you ask me what I suppose that means, I will speculate it has almost nothing to do with damping insurgent violence, as is claimed, and everything to do with ensuring that, were the UN to develop a credible military force, no people could resist its power; but that is the direction in which certain treaties to which the USA is signatory take us insomuch as they guarantee paced disarmament of USA people, police, and military in favor of a world force. You can find this in your local Federal Repository Library just as I did at the State Library* in Albany, NY, some years past.)
Indeed, I do not comprehend how the peoples of the world might transfer allegiance to the United Nations or any single other mock-government without loosing totalitarianism upon us all. Surely none of us would stick our heads in that guillotine? Variety upon variety is the better way. And we can well do it without homicide bombers or schemes of corruption.
The terms of my allegiance are plain: freedom and liberty -- fulfillment of the guarantees to each person under the Bill of Rights to the Constitution of the United States and that Constitution: e.g., these include not only the right of self-defense but the means to ensure I might defend, for this is a duty and obligation of each individual, and a further insurance that the individual might defend his neighbor and compatriots against ... homicide bombers, maddened insurgents, or -- as the Bill of Rights makes clear -- tyrannical governance/government.
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* The New York State Library is the only state library that is also a Federal Repository Library ... well, at least it was up until 2002 when I left the Legislature.
