Javier Milei’s speech of 24 Sept 2024 at the United Nations General Assembly
YouTube extract:
FULL TRANSCRIPT
To the authorities of the United Nations, the representatives of the various countries that comprise it, and all the citizens of the world who are watching us, good afternoon. For those who do not know, I am not a politician. I am an economist, a libertarian, liberal economist who never had the ambition to engage in politics and who was honored with the position of President of the Argentine Republic in the face of the resounding failure of over a century of collectivist policies that destroyed our country.
This is my first speech before the United Nations General Assembly, and I want to take this opportunity to, with humility, alert the various nations of the world about the path they have been following for decades and the danger that implies if this organization fails to fulfill its original mission. I do not come here to tell the world what it has to do. I come here to tell the world, on one hand, what will happen if the United Nations continues to promote the collectivist policies that it has been promoting under the mandate of the 2030 agenda, and on the other hand, what values the new Argentine Republic defends.
I want to start by giving credit where credit is due. The United Nations was born from the horror of the bloodiest war in global history, with the main objective of ensuring that it would never happen again. To this end, the organization engraved its fundamental principles in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. There, a basic agreement was recorded regarding the fact that all human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. Under the auspices of this organization and the adoption of these ideas, humanity has lived in a period of global peace for the last 70 years, the longest in history, which also coincided with the period of greatest economic growth in history.
An international forum was created where nations could resolve their conflicts through cooperation instead of immediately resorting to arms, and something unthinkable was achieved: to permanently seat the five largest powers in the world at the same table, each with the same veto power, despite having completely opposing interests. All this did not make the scourge of war disappear, but for now, it has been achieved that no conflict escalated to global proportions. The result was that we went from having two world wars in less than 40 years, which together claimed more than 120 million lives, to having 70 consecutive years of relative peace and global stability under the mantle of an order that allowed the entire world to integrate commercially, compete, and prosper, because, where trade enters, bullets do not, said Bastiat. Trade guarantees peace, freedom guarantees trade, and equality before the law guarantees freedom.
What the prophet Isaiah foretold has ultimately come to pass, as it is read in the park across the street: ‘God will judge between the nations and will arbitrate for many peoples. They will forge their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks. Nation will not take up sword against nation; they will never again know war.’ This is what has mostly occurred under the tutelage of the United Nations in its early decades. For this reason, from this perspective, we are talking about a remarkable success in the history of nations that cannot be overlooked.
At some point, and as often happens with most of the bureaucratic structures that we humans create, this organization stopped upholding the principles outlined in its founding declaration and began to mutate. [Sanjeev: Melei needs to realise that socialism was EMBEDDED into the DNA of the united nations, e.g. my analysis of WHO’s origin.] An organization that had been conceived essentially as a shield to protect the realm of men transformed into a multi-tentacled Leviathan that seeks to decide not only what each nation-state should do but also how all the citizens of the world should live. [Sanjeev: Once again, this was EMBEDDED into the DNA of UN] This is how we went from an organization that pursued peace to an organization that imposes an ideological agenda on its members regarding a myriad of issues that pertain to human life in society.
The model of the United Nations that had been successful, whose origins we can trace back to the ideas of President Wilson, who spoke of a society of peace without victory and was based on the cooperation of nation-states, has been abandoned. It has been replaced by a model of supranational governance by international bureaucrats who intend to impose a certain way of life on the citizens of the world. What is being discussed this week here in New York at the Summit for the Future is nothing other than the deepening of that tragic course that this institution has adopted, from a model that, in the words of the United Nations Secretary himself, demands the definition of a new social contract on a global scale, doubling down on the commitments of the 2030 agenda.
I want to be clear about the position of the Argentine agenda. The 2030 agenda, although well-intentioned in its goals, is nothing more than a supranational socialist government program that aims to solve the problems of modernity with solutions that undermine the sovereignty of nation-states and violate the right to life, liberty, and property of individuals. It is an agenda that aims to solve poverty, inequality, and discrimination with legislation that only deepens these issues because the history of the world shows that the only way to guarantee prosperity is by limiting the power of the monarch, ensuring equality before the law, and defending the right to life, liberty, and property of individuals.
It has been precisely the adoption of this agenda, which responds to privileged interests, and the abandonment of the principles outlined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of the United Nations that has distorted the role of this institution and set it on the wrong path. Thus, we have seen how an organization that was born to defend human rights has been one of the main drivers of the systematic violation of freedom, such as the global quarantines during the year 2020, which should be considered a crime against humanity.
In this very house that claims to defend human rights, they have allowed the entry of bloody dictatorships like those of Cuba and Venezuela without the slightest reproach. In this very house that claims to defend the rights of women, it allows countries that punish their women for showing skin to enter the Committee for the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women. In this very house, there has been a systematic voting against the State of Israel, which is the only country in the Middle East that defends liberal democracy, while simultaneously demonstrating a total inability to respond to the scourge of terrorism.
In the economic sphere, collectivist policies have been promoted that undermine economic growth, violate property rights, and hinder the natural economic process, preventing the most disadvantaged countries in the world from freely enjoying their own resources to move forward. Regulations and prohibitions driven precisely by the countries that developed by doing the same things they now condemn. A toxic relationship has also been promoted between global governance policies and international credit organizations, demanding that the most marginalized countries commit resources they do not have to programs they do not need, turning them into perpetual debtors to promote the agenda of global elites.
The oversight of the World Economic Forum has also not helped, where ridiculous policies with Malthusian blinders are promoted, such as zero-emission policies, which primarily harm poor countries, and policies related to sexual and reproductive rights when the birth rate in Western countries is collapsing, signaling a bleak future for all. The organization has also not satisfactorily fulfilled its mission to defend the territorial sovereignty of its members, as we Argentinians know firsthand in relation to the Malvinas Islands, and we have even reached a situation where the Security Council, which is the most important body of this house, has become distorted because the veto of its permanent members has begun to be used in defense of the particular interests of some.
This is where we stand today, with an organization powerless to provide solutions to the real global conflicts, such as the aberration and abhorrent Russian invasion of Ukraine, which has already cost the lives of more than 300,000 people, leaving over 1 million injured in the process. An organization that, instead of addressing these conflicts, invests time and effort in imposing on poor countries how and what they should produce, who they should associate with, what they should eat, and what they should believe, how it intends to dictate the present and the fact of the future.
This long list of errors and contradictions has not been without consequence, as it has led to a loss of credibility for the United Nations among the citizens of the free world and has distorted its functions. That is why I want to issue a warning: we are facing an end of a cycle. Collectivism and the moral posturing of the UN agenda have collided with reality and no longer have credible solutions to offer for the real problems of the world. In fact, they never did. If the 2030 agenda has failed, as its own promoters acknowledge, the response should be to ask ourselves if it was not a poorly conceived program from the start, accept that reality, and change course. One cannot insist on persisting in error, doubling down on an agenda that has always failed.
The same happens with ideas that come from the left; they design a model according to what they believe humans should do, and when individuals freely act otherwise, they have no better solution than to restrict, repress, and curtail their freedom. We in Argentina have already seen with our own eyes what lies at the end of this path of envy and passions, poverty, ignorance, anarchy, and a fatal absence of freedom. We still have time to steer away from that course.
I want to be clear about something to avoid any misunderstandings. Argentina is currently undergoing a profound process of change. It has decided to embrace the ideas of freedom, those ideas that state that all citizens are born free and equal before the law, that we have inalienable rights granted by the Creator, among which are the rights to life, liberty, and property. Those principles that govern the process of change we are undertaking in Argentina are also the principles that will guide our international conduct from now on.
We believe in the defense of the life of all. We believe in the defense of the property of all. We believe in freedom of expression for all. We believe in equal treatment under the law for all. This is the foundation of the society of the future that we intend to build. We believe in the market, competition, and the division of labor because they promote human cooperation. We defend competition and reject monopolies of all kinds, especially government monopolies. That is why we reject all attempts by this organization to impose centralized, collectivist solutions that restrict the free actions of people around the world. We believe that trade promotes peace, and that is why we will pursue free trade agreements with all countries that respect our sovereignty and our freedoms.
We do not accept the interference of supranational organizations in issues that pertain to the sovereignty of the Argentine people, and we defend the right of other countries to do the same. We reject collectivism in all its forms because collectivism does not respect the inalienable rights of individuals. Collectivism, in any of its forms, only brings poverty, violence, and decay. Our country, Argentina, will be an example of how freedom brings peace, prosperity, and progress.
Thank you very much.
