The committee to save the world

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Members of the dream team committee to save the world -- Barack Obama, Nicolas Sarkozy, Angela Merkel, Gordon Brown and other leaders assembled at the Copenhagen climate talks -- share the classic leftist fantasy of elitist global management ... or, perhaps we should we say totalitarian micro-management. Janet Daley, "There'll be nowhere to run from the new world government" (Telegraph.co.uk, December 19, 2009), writes:

If the impact of our behaviour on humanity at large is much greater or more rapid than ever before then we shall have to find ways of dealing with that which do not involve sacrificing the most enlightened form of government ever devised. There is a whiff of totalitarianism about this new theology, in which the risks are described in such cosmic terms that everything else must give way. "Globalism" is another form of the internationalism that has been a core belief of the Left: a commitment to class rather than country seemed an admirable antidote to the "blood and soil" nationalism that gave rise to fascism.