One of the few international hindrances to unilateral United States military actions has been it's membership in the United Nations. Although an imperfect institution, the UN is serving now as the crucible for a newly emergent multilaterally-supported alternative to a United States strike on Syria. As the Washington Post reports, France is backing a proposal, already supported by both Russia and China and also accepted by the Syrian government, to place Syria's enormous stockpile of chemical weapons under international control.
Among prominent voices speaking out against American military intervention in the ongoing Syrian civil war has been Former U.S. Congressman Ron Paul, who over the past decade has emerged as a steadfast opponent and critic of U.S. military interventionism.
Thus the irony -- in 1997, Representative Paul introduced a bill, the American Sovereignty Restoration Act, that called for a complete United States withdrawal from the United Nations. In the unlikely event that Paul's bill had cleared the Congress and Senate, and been signed into law by then-President Clinton, constraints that the United Nations, and the U.N. Security Council, impose on the unilateral American use of military force would have been swept away.
The United States would no longer be involved in the U.N. system, which may now provide an internationally acceptable alternative to an American military strike on Syria, for allegedly having carried out a chemical weapons attack on Syrian civilians.
This is one of the ways that Ron Paul's actions undermine his stated anti-war positions.
Backing Representative Paul's American Sovereignty Restoration Act at the time was the John Birch Society, which in 1998 released a 30-minute video, featuring Ron Paul and various figures associated with the JBS and with the fringe, schismatic Catholic group the Fatima Center.
That 1998 JBS video [link to partial transcript of video] portrayed the United Nations as bent on imposing a totalitarian one world government that would impose population control and draconian environmental laws - justified by perpetrating hoaxes involving possibly global warming or the Ozone Layer, force all children into "government schools", seize all firearms, take over or burn all churches and places of worship, imprison uncooperative pastors and religious leaders, impose a one-world religion based in atheism, paganism, and the occult, place American military under UN command, violently crush all dissent, and even carry out acts of genocide against targeted societal groups.
Meanwhile, on Wednesday, September 11, 2013, Ron Paul is slated to give a keynote address at the Fatima Center, an apocalyptic fringe schismatic Marionist Catholic group that viciously demonizes Jews and claims they are, together with homosexuals, feminists, and environmentalists, part of a vast Masonic plot to institute a "New World Order" that will slaughter much of the Earth's population and enslave those who remain.
Leading the alleged vast conspiracy is no less than the prince of darkness, Satan.
As researcher Rachel Tabachnick reports, Ron Paul's collaboration with Fatima Center leaders traces back at least as far as 1998, when he appeared with several Fatima Center leaders in the aforementioned 1998 John Birch Society video.
The title of the Fatima conference is "Path to Peace", and, like Ron Paul, the Fatima Center leaders strongly oppose U.S. military intervention in the ongoing Syrian civil war. But Ron Paul's presence at the conference will raise the legitimate question - how serious is Paul about his non-interventionist stance, really ?
The basic problem is that for years Fatima Center leaders have promoted conspiracy theories claiming that various constituencies - liberals and humanists, gays and feminists, environmentalists, Jews, Freemasons, communists, and even elements of the Catholic Church, are working together in a vast anti-Christian, anti-God conspiracy ultimately controlled by the devil.
If there's one underlying imperative for effective populist movements that might help shift or influence national policy, on both domestic and foreign policy fronts, it's this: build coalitions, across the political spectrum, from left to right.
Under the leadership of Former Congressman Ron Paul, over the past decade we have seen the rise of the non-interventionist Libertarian right. But even as Paul has helped build opposition, on the right and among Libertarians, to U.S. military interventionism, he has simultaneously undercut the potential of his nascent movement to become truly effective, because Paul has also promoted, for decades, magical conspiracy theory-driven narratives that demonize a large portion of the American body politic.
Pro-interventionism hawks within the Military Industrial Complex could hardly have conceived of a better strategy for quietly undermining potentially effective opposition.
How can Ron Paul help build a coalition, spanning right to left, that can effectively oppose interventionist U.S. policies while simultaneously supporting groups that demonize wide swaths of that potential coalition ?
I'll be expanding upon this theme in subsequent essays.