Two days ago, on the golden sands of Bondi Beach—where one expects nothing more menacing than an overzealous seagull or a rogue wave—two gunmen turned a joyous Hanukkah celebration into a scene of calculated slaughter, mowing down fifteen innocent souls, including a ten-year-old girl and a Holocaust survivor, in what authorities have rightly branded an act of anti-Semitic terrorism. The perpetrators, a father-and-son duo armed with licensed firearms and improvised explosives, chose the first night of the Festival of Lights to extinguish as many as they could, proving once again that hatred requires no grand ideology, merely opportunity and a willingness to pull the trigger. And yet, in the very wake of such barbarism, our global guardians of progress press on undeterred.
They promised us utopia by 2030, and being generous souls, we believed them. After all, who could resist seventeen goals so radiant with altruism that they required their own colour wheel? End poverty, end hunger, end war, end climate change, and—while we’re at it—end the tedious business of letting individual nations decide anything for themselves. This, ladies and gentlemen, is Agenda 2030, the United Nations’ modest proposal for turning the planet into one vast, pastel-coloured kibbutz run by people who have never in their lives missed a connecting flight at Davos.
The document itself is a masterpiece of the genre known as “bureaucratic erotica.” Page after page throbs with phrases like “interoperable digital architectures,” “whole-of-society approaches,” and—my favourite—“leave no one behind,” which is diplomatic code for “we know where you live.” The latest flourish, courtesy of the World Health Organization’s October 2025 Bulletin (funded, naturally, by that noted philanthropist and mosquito fancier Bill Gates), is a proposal for a lifelong digital health passport, stitched at birth to your socioeconomic metadata so that 'equity' can be delivered with the precision of a drone strike. Nothing compulsory, you understand. Merely a gentle, lifelong nudge toward compliance, administered by algorithms too polite to call themselves totalitarian.
One is reminded of earlier, less sophisticated attempts at human improvement. The Khmer Rouge, for example, also wanted to end inequality; they simply did it the old-fashioned way, with ditches and slogans. Stalin’s planners were similarly obsessed with five-year targets, though they preferred the aesthetic of the gulag to the cheerful infographics of the Sustainable Development Goals. Even the Nazis, those tireless innovators, dreamed of a thousand-year Reich complete with biometric registration—admittedly tattooed on the forearm rather than encoded in a QR code, but one mustn’t quibble over delivery systems. The difference, we are told, is intention. Pol Pot wanted to murder; the UN merely wants to help. The road to hell, as we know, is paved with good intentions, but Agenda 2030 has upgraded the surface to solar-powered asphalt and added cycle lanes.
What staggers the imagination is the sheer banality of the evil on offer. Genocide used to require passion—marching music, hysterical speeches, the odd torchlit parade. Today’s version arrives as a 91-page PDF full of footnotes and stakeholder consultations. The new totalitarianism doesn’t goose-step; it PowerPoints. It doesn’t send you to the camps; it adjusts your social-credit score until the camps become superfluous because you have already incarcerated yourself in a life of approved behaviours. One almost misses the honesty of the old monsters. At least they had the decency to look like villains. Our current crop resemble the nicer sort of estate agent—smooth, interchangeable, and convinced that the future will be grateful for their spreadsheets.
And the crowning joke? They call it “inclusion.” You will be included whether you like it or not, rather like a lobster is included in a bisque. The Global Digital Compact—adopted with the solemnity usually reserved for treaties ending world wars—commits us to “an open, free, secure and human-centred digital future.” Translation: every baby born after 2025 will be issued with a digital leash at the same moment it draws its first breath, the better to ensure that its carbon footprint, vaccine status, and opinions remain within the acceptable parameters set by a committee in Geneva that has never once had to queue for anything in its life.
There is, however, a delicious irony at the heart of this enterprise. The architects of Agenda 2030—those fragrant technocrats who jet between climate conferences in fleets of private aircraft—genuinely believe they are the first people in history to have discovered the secret of perpetual human happiness. They are like children who have found their father’s gun and decided to play doctors with the planet. One longs for the day when their names—Tedros, Guterres, the entire roster of the World Economic Forum—will be spoken in the same breath as Himmler or Beria, not because they have murdered millions (they are far too efficient for anything so labour-intensive), but because they have attempted something even more sinister: the murder of human freedom under anaesthetic.
Let us be clear. The only moral response to supranational governance in all its forms—UN, WHO, WTO, IMF, and the rest of the alphabet soup of condescension—is immediate, irreversible, and cheerfully profane abandonment. These bodies should be dissolved with the same ceremony we reserve for bankrupt casinos: lights turned off, locks changed, and a polite notice on the door reading “Gone away—try minding your own damned business.” The European Union can be next; it has already perfected the art of turning democracy into a multiple-choice questionnaire written in Brussels.
I have no doubt that this will happen, because history has a sense of humour darker than anything I can muster. The peoples of the earth—those irritating, ungovernable, magnificently obstinate creatures—will eventually tire of being improved by their betters. They will rise, not with pitchforks (too carbon-intensive), but with the far more devastating weapon of laughter. They will mock the goals, boycott the apps, and delete the QR codes until the whole suffocating edifice collapses under the weight of its own sanctimony.
And when that glorious day arrives, may the technocrats who dreamed of a managed planet be remembered only as cautionary tales—footnotes in the history books, their smug faces preserved in grainy photographs next to captions reading: “Here were men who thought they could replace God with a dashboard.” May schoolchildren giggle at their solemn declarations. May their names become synonyms for murderous vanity. And may the rest of us, delivered from their tender mercies by the twin forces of popular contempt and divine exasperation, raise a glass to the only future worth having: one in which no one, ever again, is required to ask permission to be human.