Yesterday we started looking at the career of the late Maurice Strong, a Canadian business magnate and top-level UN bureaucrat who – supposedly to save the environment – sought to enhance UN power and weaken national sovereignty.

As James Delingpole noted in his obit in Breitbart News,  Strong “was the main instigator of the blueprint for arguably the most sinister and insidious assault on liberty and free markets: Agenda 21.” What is Agenda 21? Well, let’s put it this way: for decades, people who view the UN as a nefarious plot to establish a world government were mercilessly mocked as far-right lunatics. Strong’s Agenda 21, an action plan that emerged from the Rio Conference, is exactly what those people feared: as Delingpole described it, “a blueprint for one-world government by an unelected bureaucracy of technocrats, enabled by diehard progressive activists.” Here’s Strong’s own summing-up:

The concept of national sovereignty has been an immutable, indeed sacred, principle of international relations. It is a principle which will yield only slowly and reluctantly to the new imperatives of global environmental co-operation. It is simply not feasible for sovereignty to be exercised unilaterally by individual nation states, however powerful. The global community must be assured of global environmental security.

But what was Strong’s real motive? Was he really passionate about the environment? Did he sincerely think the planet’s climate was imperiled? Or was “environmental security” merely a convenient excuse for trying to impose UN domination?

John Izzard, writing at the Australian website Quadrant, forcefully argues that it was the latter. Strong, as Izzard recounts, “was the driving force behind the idea of world governance by the United Nations,” one of his ideas being “a world tax on monetary transactions of 0.5% which would have given the UN an annual income of $1.5 trillion.” Strong made this proposal, note well, at a time when that sum represented the gross income of the entire United States of America (!). When he wasn’t able to push this idea through because of the veto power of the Security Council, Strong actually tried to get the Security Council eliminated. According to Izzard, it was only after that effort failed that Strong conceived of “the idea that global warming might just be the device to get his World Governance proposal up and running.” It would appear, in other words, that Strong’s prime objective was not to preserve the environment – it was to institute “World Governance” by himself and his pals at the UN.

This doesn’t mean he had no interest in the environment. Izzard tells a bizarre story about Strong’s purchase of 200,000 acres in Colorado where he wanted to pump out and sell the water “but was stopped by the locals as they feared it would destroy the delicate environment.” There’s more: according to Izzard, Strong bought that tract not just because he wanted to monetize the H2O but because he’d bought into the nonsense served up by some “mystic” who told him that that particular patch of Colorado land “would become the centre for a new planetary order which would evolve from the economic collapse and environmental catastrophes that would sweep the globe in the years to come.” In accordance with this inane augury, Strong established something called the Manitou Foundation, a “New Age institution” whose headquarters were constructed directly “above the sacred waters that Strong had been denied permission to pump out.” As if that weren’t enough, he then founded something called the Conservation Fund, whose assigned task was  “to study the mystical properties of the Manitou Mountain,” and built “a circular temple devoted to the world’s mystical and religious movements.”

To sum up, then, so far: Maurice Strong was a dangerous fanatic for World Governance and a far-out New Age nut. Oh, and one more little detail: he was also a big-time crook. We’ll get around to that tomorrow.