As Hitler’s Mein Kampf is selling well in Germany and Italy the British scientist Stephen Hawking floats the idea of “world Government” – one of the most totalitarian concepts in politics.
Like so many of the highly educated specialists of the liberal left wrapped in the safe cocoon of State patronage and relieved of the burden of economic and social responsibilities, Hawking sees a specific threat and calls for permanent supranational control. Like Merkel calling for “more Europe” the answer to every crisis is to concentrate power where the crisis arose!
Hawking is worried that “technology has advanced at such a pace that this (human, hard wired) aggression may destroy us all by nuclear or biological war. We need to control this inherited instinct by our logic and reason.” He suggests “some form of world government”. At least he admits that the idea “might become a tyranny”
Indeed! It was just as big corporations, big investment funds and political notions of “world government” distorted democracy, investment and free trade in the 1930s that Nazism and Fascism were presented as the solutions – utilising the very autocratic, centralising, State/corporatist power (including Government by decree!) with which their “democratic” predecessors had provided them.
We have the same supranational, corporate, anti democratic systems at work today, alienating voters and driving consumers to penury and the millions of unemployed into emigration and destitution. Perhaps that is why the most popular book among Italian secondary students is Hitler’s Mein Kampf and in Germany the book is within a short period already in its sixth reprint.
I am surprised that someone as intelligent as Stephen Hawking could even play with the totalitarian words “World Government”. All corrupt powers emerge from two pillars – absolute control and absolute reach – and “World Government” has them both.
In a generally recognised crisis we accept limited military rule on the streets but never as a system of continuous control. Equally a kind of temporary world government emerges from alliances of nations when confronted by a fascist or communist or religious imperialist menace. But we see from the perversion of eg NATO in the subsequent peace that even supranational engines of control for benign purposes can turn their past authority into present hegemony. The more absolute the control of the “peacemakers” the more they turn by degrees into war provokers – even when their enemy has disappeared!
I have met Germans (born after the war) in recent times who both support the supranationalist “Europe” and yet show strong nationalist and socialist tendencies and a willingness to accept a dictatorship “if it were benign”. They sound just like a majority of Germans before Hitler came to power.
They have evidently learned nothing from their history. And Stephen Hawking, along with UN “world Government” addicts, Euro-State builders and authoritarian politicians of all colours seems (in a different context) to have joined them.
