Sustainable Development is the greatest threat ever perpetrated against the American ideal of liberty. Under Sustainable Development, there can be no free enterprise, no individual liberty or private property.

As I attend traditional Conservative meetings around the country where the defense of property rights should be paramount, Sustainable Development is rarely mentioned. Speaker after speaker addresses the audience about issues like abortion, taxes, and national defense. They declare their dedication to the fight for limited government. I've even heard some of these speakers gleefully declare that we are in a "Conservative era."

If they believe this, then they are seriously deluded. There can be no hope of living in a nation of limited government with Sustainable Development as official government policy. The two are diametrically opposed. Today, the Bush administration is continuing to help entrench Sustainable Development policies that were started under the Clinton administration.

The Conservative movement appears to be ignoring this threat. Indeed, many Conservative foundations and major Conservative donors are actually providing funds to sucn proponents of Sustainable Development as the Nature Conservancy and the Sierra Club. By sharp contrast, proponents of property rights who are on the front lines to stop this massive expansion of government control and directio receive few dollars of support from those who should be their champions.

Conservative donors are woefully ignorant of Sustainable Development. They think they are giving their money to help the environment or to preserve historic places. Instead, they are only helping to murder the very freedoms they profess to uphold. Conservatives would never concede their liberty to any movement or system holding up the Swastika or the Hammer and Sickle as its emblem. But tuck their liberty in a Green blanket called "environmental protection," and tossing that liberty on the fire like an old-fashioned book burning.

Conservatives must heed the warning now! Sustainable Development is anti-science, anti-knowledge, anti-human, and anti-reason. It is the creed of the mindless savage who seeks brute force over liberty.

If Conservatives don't learn of its evil now, if we don't heed the warning and rip Sustainable Development out of every level of government by its well-entrenched roots, then American life, indeed human existence as we know it, will enter a new dark age of pain and misery unlike any ever experienced by the community of man.

The Conservative philosophy advocates limited government and limited governmental intrusion into the lives of individual citizens. The roots of that philosophy go back to the ideas and beliefs of the American Founding Fathers and those of the 17th century English statesman and political philosopher, John Locke, who said, "man creates value and therefore property out of his own labor." Locke said that no government could morally and legally take the fruits of one's labor without a compelling public need and without just compensation--and then only through the rule of law (government acting in strict accord with and its powers limited by the law of the land).

James Madison used that theory to write the Fifth Amendment to the United States Constitution. John Adams said, "the moment the idea is admitted into society that property is not as sacred as the laws of God and there is not the force of law and public justice to protect it, anarchy and tyranny commence."

Under the guarantee that government's only real job is to protect the rights of individual Americans to engage in commerce and to protect their property and person from thieves and murderers, Americans set about creating the most prosperous and free nation on earth. Today, these American ideals are under severe challenge from the international community under the banner of Sustainable Development. Time and again, news reports indicate that Sustainable Development is an environmental issue. It is not. Sustainable Development is the driving force of what Al Gore called a "wrenching transformation" that society must endure to repair what he perceives as the "damage of the 20th century's Industrial Revolution." It is the same Industrial Revolution that gave us modern transportation, medicine, indoor plumbing, healthy drinking water, central heating, air conditioning, and electric lighting.

Sustainable Development is not about environmental clean up of rivers, air, and litter. It is an all-encompassing Statist and Socialist scheme to combine social welfare programs with government control of private business, socialized medicine, national zoning controls of private property, and restructuring of the school curriculum in order to enable it to more effectively and thoroughly indoctrinate children and adolescents into "politically correct" group think.

Sustainable Development advocates seek oppressive taxes to control and punish behavior of which they don't approve, and there is much these advocates disapprove, including air conditioning, fast foods, suburban housing, and automobiles.

Every aspect of our lives is affected by Sustainable Development policies. It is top-down control from an all-powerful central government. Specifically, the United Nations seeks to assert such control and become an all-powerful one-world central government. That is the true significance of the World Conference on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg.

The question is whether Conservatives will rally to American principles of freedom against the onslaught of Sustainable Development's authoritarian Socialist tyranny?

Tom DeWeese is the publisher/editor of the DEWEESE REPORT and president of the American Policy Center, an activist think tank headquartered in Warrenton, VA. The American Policy Center maintains an Internet site at http://www.americanpolicy.org.

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