Absence of the Sacred

In his book The Globalisation of Poverty,
Michel Chossudovsky exposes UN agencies like the International Monetary
Fund and World Bank as part of the credit cartel subverting state
sovereignty and undermining indigenous autonomy. I thought about this
book the other day when reading the declaration by the Indigenous
Peoples Forum on Climate Change, simultaneously noting the divisive
tactics deployed by UN agencies in manipulating media in order to
protect their carbon market trading scheme from the moral sanction
imposed by aboriginal societies.

While corrupting states and
corroding nations is a commonplace occurrence at the UN, crushing them
through coercive measures such as those described in Chossudovsky’s book
are not well known outside activist-scholar milieus. What the World
Indigenous Peoples’ Movement is likely to find, is that the genocidal
policies of the past by UN member states have now been reinforced not
only by the present economic austerity measures of globalization, but
are being devised for the future under the rubric of responding to the
climate change crisis as well.

What the indigenous delegates
advancing on the UN might be surprised to find, is just how few friends
they have when it comes to advancing their agenda of sanity and
sustainability in an institution organized to maintain the privileges of
tyrannical powers. When the autochthonous peoples enter the labyrinth
of the UN system, they will indeed be enveloped in the absence of the sacred.