Western Elites Collide with Chinese Tyranny
In September [1995] the United Nations will stage its Fourth World Conference on Women. The venue is China with its capital Beijing hosting UN officials and 35,000 feminists from various NGO’s. Conflicts similar to those at September 1994’s Cairo Conference on population control are likely to recur in China.
UN globocrats and the foundations and clubs that use them are a strange lot. They criticize the West even while trying to export the debased post-Modern version of the civil rights that have grown from the Western religious heritage. Political rights to be free in act and conscience from coercive State powers, rooted in the free will, personal responsibility and personal relationship with G-d have been redefined as economic and cultural “rights” (entitlements) supplied by governments via prejudicial preferences. Thus rights designed to limit state power over citizens have, in UN and statist hands become programs that expand state power. It’s a new form of bread and circuses where everyone loses…
The 1994 conference at Cairo became a global referendum on abortion which proponents call “family planning services” (a eupehism for profitable destruction of life). The United States delegation, joining with UN groups sought to re-educate other cultures about the most intimate matters of life. Birth, like pregnancy is no longer a joyous, hoped-for outcome of marriage. Now it’s a “choice” (for the woman only, — not for the father or the fetus); the tiny developing person and world of relationships extending through time it concenters are now an object that the woman and her doctor (the de facto new ‘marriage’) can decide to destroy whenever she gives the word.
Similarly, the world’s other cultures, like Americans and Europeans must accustom them selves to a rainbow of ‘non-traditional families’ whose “rights” to “marry,” acquire children (by sperm banks or whatever) and behave as they choose must be respected, afforded “equal protection” and taught as legitimate choices in public schools and “sensitivity” workshops for those not quick enough in affecting “correct” attitudes.
Communists should love this approach…
Last year the imperial attitudes and self-absorption of the UN bureaucrats and NGO’s were exposed when they collided with the values of the Egyptian hosts… The conference was a fiasco for the UN and the Clinton administraton who were trapped between their multi-cultural rhetoric and the fact that billions of women and men from a wide range of cultures refused to have their lives reshaped by Western elites and their sense that the world’s problem is that there are too many people.
In the 1960s, Robert McNamara (remember him) said that “the birth rates must come down or the death rates must go up. There is no other way.” That explains a lot of geopolitics since the western powers let Russia go communist, watched while Hitler built his juggernaut, and did their worst to re-ignite jihad. Then there are cultural issues…
This year the multi-culturalists and internationalists thought they’d get it right. The Chinese government not only supports abortion, it enforces it, limiting most families to one child. Now that’s power that the proponents of “choice” and entitlements would love to have (it was part of Margaret Sanger - Planned Parenthood’s original agenda). Yet a wrinkle developed: Beijing announced that the feminist NGO’s could not stay in the capital but thirty miles away in a “Scenic Tourist Area” which lacks the amenities to which international lifestyle advocates are accustomed.
A media uproar ensued.