I read EXPANDED UNIVERSE over the last week, Robert Heinlein’s collection of short stories, essays and personal anecdotes collected over a long and distinguished writing career. The thing that struck me most was how, subsequent to WWII, this champion of individual responsibility for a time became a slavish champion of global dictatorship.
One thing that people who came of age in the nuclear age cannot understand is the extreme level of fear that nuclear weapons and radiation instilled in adults who had never known them. For a while, Heinlein seriously believed that the survival of all humanity depended solely on the immediate establishment of a one-world totalitarian government and wrote several short stories and essays calling for it.
This is the spirit in which the United Nations was formed, and I believe it provides the reason for the messianic attitude which the organization and its cheerleaders project. It is a spirit of fear, which, as every reader of Paul’s letters knows, is not given to us by God. It is also important to understand that this belief in the supreme importance of the UN is so strong, so emotionally-tied to the functioning of the globalist faithful, that literally any means justifies another step towards the end of world dictatorship imposing world peace by force.
Perhaps we are unwise to prefer to put our trust in the belief that mutually-assured destruction is better than totalitarian slavery. But even if we are, the technological imperative, as predicted by Carroll Quigley, ensures that the UN vision is untenable anyhow. Increasingly miniaturized weapons will only make the individual more and more powerful and dangerous; this will tend to weaken government institutions at all levels, even at the global level.
As always, those who sacrifice liberty for security will find that they have neither.