Don't Implausibly Mess With Texas

You've probably heard about what's come out of Texas lately. If you haven't, well, you're in for a hell of a trip to the other side of the looking glass. In recent television and radio interviews, Lubbock County Judge Tom Head--who, despite his title, is in fact the county's chief executive--attempted to justify the tax increase his government is trying to levy by saying that it's necessary to properly equip Lubbock County's law enforcement personnel so they can resist a United Nations invasion.

Let that one just sink in for a minute.

Fear of the United Nations has a long provenance in certain parts of the United States. I really have difficulty understanding why. If the United States had, say, turned over its nuclear weapons to the organization in 1946 to give it the necessary teeth to enforce world peace, as people such as Robert Heinlein advocated at the time, it would make sense--after all, I mean, when words are backed with NUCLEAR WEAPONS they're not quite as easy to ignore. But words are all the United Nations is about. It's the biggest debating society on the planet. So, instead, it seems that much of the anti-UN fear has coalesced around the concept of the UN leading a "one world government" charge in line with some Biblical prophecy of the End Times or another.

Fear because if President Obama gets re-elected, he's going to surrender American sovereignty to the United Nations and become a dictator, even though I always thought that in order to be a dictator of something you had to retain sovereignty over it. Maybe he means that Obama would instead become the dictatorial viceroy, like the Vice President in Metal Wolf Chaos. Sure, that would trigger civil war, and so Obama would call in the UN troops. Yes, the 124,000 UN peacekeeping troops, significant chunks of which are provided by such cutting-edge military powerhouses as Bangladesh, Nigeria, and Senegal. I can certainly see such a force making progress in a country where there's a rifle behind every blade of grass.

But he's serious. Judge Head wants to keep the UN invaders out of Lubbock County, and so his brilliant plan to defend American liberty is to "[stand] in front of their personnel carriers and say, 'You're not coming in here.'"

Yeah, I think the gas pedal over here has something to say about that.

There's a certain amount of doublethink that's necessary for people who think like this. First off, there's the simple fact that the United States is a juggernaut, commanding the single most powerful military force that has ever existed. Yet, nevertheless, it must also be vulnerable. How? Well, that's the crux of it, isn't it? The new Red Dawn had to give its North Korean invaders a way to turn off technology, and even then it's still ridiculous.

To put it simply, people who believe that this sort of thing is possible, that this sort of thing is a legitimate threat, do not live in the same world as the rest of us. I mean, where are all those UN troops going to come from? How are they going to be brought to the United States? How are they going to be supplied in the United States? Why not just nuke a few American cities to demonstrate that they mean business?

The killer part of it is, Head's plans don't even make sense in the context of his fears. If he was seriously worried about an invasion, he should be organizing things like hidden ammo dumps and supply caches out in the countryside, known to the local defenders but not officially marked, so that they could have equipment reserves to fall back on once the invaders arrive in force. He should be arranging things so that a county police force has the equipment it needs to fight a military. Most importantly of all, he shouldn't be bloody well telling people about it! The United States government is intelligent enough to hide its black ops budgets underneath $30,000 wrenches. I mean, do you think the activities of Area 51 are going to show up as individual line items in a publicly-available budget?

The other possibility is that Head knows this is all bull, but is using it as a necessary smokescreen to get the voters to approve a tax increase. If that's the case, well... if that's the case maybe Texas would be better off invaded by the UN.

In the Common Interest

If anything, it was a pleasant encounter when I saw the flag of the United Nations was flying high over United Nations Plaza, the blue of its threads only a little brighter than that of the open San Francisco sky beyond. Taking into account this city's general reputation, it's the one American city other than New York where I would not be surprised to find the UN flag given equal prominence to the Stars and Stripes. It was there, surrounded by the vendors and customers of the Heart of the City Farmers' Market, that I really got a sense of the optimistic idealism that informed the organization at the start, back when the world was still smoldering.

Pity that we let it get away from us. It's hardly the most popular thing in some parts of the world these days - that is, when people think about it at all.

The United Nations and United States flags fly equally, but from their own flagpoles, in San Francisco's United Nations Plaza.

Plenty of people dislike or distrust the UN. I won't pretend there aren't perfectly valid reasons to do so, but it almost seems as if the loudest opponents aren't basing their opposition on things like its problems with peacekeeping or corruption in Turtle Bay, but on black helicopters and the New World Order. This is, realistically, bunk - the UN has less teeth than a pitcher plant. The only "military" it has is those peacekeeping forces that have been seconded to it. We could've gone another way, of course - speculatively speaking, after the Second World War, the United States could've turned its nuclear arsenal over to the new organization as a guarantee that no country would be allowed to start the Third World War.

Whether it would have been considered politically feasible was another matter entirely; aside from Robert A. Heinlein suggesting it in one of the essays he included in Expanded Universe, I've never encountered it having ever been advanced as a serious policy. But then, there were only four years in which it was even an option; once the Soviet Union exploded Joe-1 in 1949 the jig was up, as Stalin would never have handed his bombs over to a tool of the Western capitalist oppressors.

Now, though - if it was unfeasible in 1945, it would be purely impossible in 2011. Twenty years after the Cold War, everyone would rather we all forget about those thousands of warheads that are still kicking around and good riddance to them. It's true, the threat of nuclear annihilation did end up guaranteeing the general peace, but it was pretty damn dicey for a while there. A world where the United Nations maintained a nuclear monopoly would be a world that didn't have to worry about nuclear war. Granted, though, such a situation easily leads in to a world where the United Nations becomes a world government - because he who has the nukes, makes the rules. could be an interesting story setting. Regardless--

You can also read the Preamble to the United Nations Charter at United Nations Plaza, and there's one part of it that really struck me as I walked along: its intention "to ensure, by the acceptance of principles and the institution of methods, that armed force shall not be used, save in the common interest" - that is, the United Nations comes along and tells its members that they can't go around declaring war for the lulz anymore.

Fighting is an intrinsic part of human nature. Hell, it may well go back to the time before there were humans; groups of chimpanzees have been observed to go to war with each other over territory. Sure, every once in a while there were attempts by some group or another to try and keep Europe from being ground into dust for a generation or two, but they generally did not produce lasting results. The United Nations, on the other hand, came from the crucible of the most destructive conflict in all of human history; it meant to stick.

Stick around, at least - one might argue that the UN ideally functions as the world's conscience, something which the right people can ignore. The United States certainly wasn't listening to the United Nations when it invaded Iraq back in 2003, just as the most recent example I can think of. The UN's presence in the Korean War was possible only because the Soviet Union was boycotting proceedings at the time and thus not around to veto Resolution 84.

I'd like to think this is baseless speculation, that the real reasons have more to do with things like perceptions of a more powerful UN overriding national sovereignty, and whether its dedication to the interests of the people of the world is questionable; because otherwise, I really worry it might come down to, somewhere in the reptile brain, "Who the fuck do they think they are to tell us we can't kill the bastards?"