Fact, fiction add to confusion about Agenda 21
By Roy Ockert Jr.
Dec. 2, 2014
At the conclusion of the United Nations Conference on Environment & Development on June 14, 1992, President George H.W. Bush and the leaders of 177 other nations signed a document known as “Agenda 21.” At the time it was considered a conservative planning paper designed as a guide to sustaining the development of an increasingly crowded world.
Since then, Agenda 21 has been turned into the hobgoblin of far-right groups that contend it is a socialistic attempt to establish a one-world government. On the Web are such claims that Agenda 21 “will make our nation a vassal of the U.N.,” is a “comprehensive plan of social engineering,” will lead to “collectivist world government” and could even result in “90 percent of the world’s population being murdered.”
Increasingly, Agenda 21 is being cited in meetings of city councils and other local government organizations as the sinister motive behind green projects and other developments.
Yet Agenda 21 was non-binding and carries no force of law. A treaty on climate change came out of the same Rio conference, but Bush declined to sign it, one of only two nations to do so. Later, his successor, President Bill Clinton, established a Council on Sustainable Development to consider how Agenda 21 objectives could be achieved, but the council did little and died when Clinton left office.
Meanwhile, though, according to a Southern Poverty Law Center study issued last April, various right-wing groups took up the cause of demonizing Agenda 21. The study says that Tom DeWeese, who founded a non-profit organization called the American Policy Center in 1998, was the first to focus on Agenda 21, contending that it would impose “a new kind of tyranny” similar to socialism and fascism.
On the American Policy Center Web site are various books, DVDs and documents, including a “Stop Agenda 21 Action Kit 2,” which sells for $159.
DeWeese didn’t get much attention for quite a while, but after a time the John Birch Society, which had a correspondent at the Rio conference, got into the act. The Birch group, which became notorious for claiming that President Dwight D. Eisenhower was a communist agent and that fluoridation of water was an attempt to poison Americans, began sponsoring 1-day clinics around the country. The theme: Agenda 21 is a new religion for environmentalists.
But the movement found its most effective voice in Fox News commentator Glenn Beck, whose antics fanned the flames, especially for his Tea Party followers.
“Those pushing ... government control on a global level have mastered the art of hiding it in plain sight and then just dismissing it as a joke,” the SPLC quotes Beck saying around 2011. “Once they put their fangs into our communities and suck all the blood out of it [sic], we will not be able to survive.”
Beck left Fox News in 2011 to start his own online TV and radio show and later admitted to a Fox interviewer that he wished he “could go back and be more uniting in my language because I think I played a role, unfortunately, in helping tear the country apart ...”
However, Beck continued to use Agenda 21 as a whipping boy and profit-maker.
In 2012 he published a science fiction novel called “Agenda 21,” which is described thusly in promotional materials: “Just a generation ago, this place was called America. Now, after the worldwide implementation of a UN-led program called Agenda 21, it’s simply known as “the Republic.” There is no president. No Congress. No Supreme Court. No freedom. There are only the Authorities.”
Actually, Beck didn’t even write the novel. Its author was Harriet Parke, a registered nurse, but Beck bought the rights to publish it under his name with Parke as “ghost writer.” Many celebrities do that in reverse — contracting with a ghost writer to put words on paper.
Beck added a few pages at the end of the book, warning: “[I]f the United Nations in partnership with radical environmental activists and naive local governments get their way, then the themes explored in this novel may start to look very familiar, very quickly.”
No doubt, the novel created some confusion between the facts and the fiction about Agenda 21, playing into the hands of those who use fear as a political tool.
Some public officials took the bait. U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, claimed that Agenda 21 seeks to abolish “golf courses, grazing pastures and paved roads.” Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, in his short-lived run for president in 2012, pledged to repudiate the plan, blaming it on President Barack Obama and conveniently ignoring the fact that a Republican president had signed it.
The Republicans’ national platform in 2012 said: “We strongly reject the U.N. Agenda 21 as erosive of American sovereignty.”
Conservatives have introduced anti-Agenda 21 bills or resolutions in 26 states as of May, according to Slate magazine. Most of them have failed, but Alabama passed legislation and various projects around the country have been scrapped after encountering anti-Agenda 21 activists. The SPLC study, which can be found at its Web site (www.splcenter.org), provides many case studies and spotlights the anti-Agenda 21 groups involved in the fight, as well as their tactics.
Anyone concerned about Agenda 21 should read this study.
Roy Ockert is editor emeritus of The Jonesboro Sun. He may be reached by e-mail at royo@suddenlink.net.