A Dissent on UNophilia

When you visit the United Nations in New York, and get over your amazement at not being mugged while on the way, you notice the antiquated modern architecture. Does anything become outmoded faster than yesterday's contemporary?

Then you are conscious of being on alien ground, for ever since the Rockefeller family and their Chase Manhattan Bank donated this land to the U.N., it has been very foreign territory.

Surrounded by limousines and stuffed with indolent world bureaucrats living high on tax-free incomes, the U.N. is a place where – noted former ambassador Daniel P. Moynihan – a vote can be bought for a blonde or a case of scotch. It is also, we are told, the "last, best hope of mankind."

The typical U.S. history book lauds the "four great presidents": Washington, Lincoln, Wilson, and Franklin Roosevelt. I guess a score of 25% correct isn't bad for the education establishment.

George Washington warned us against political entanglements with foreign governments, although he never envisioned a world state. Abraham Lincoln didn't concern himself with foreign policy, of course, as he fastened the federal leviathan on the body of the old republic.

Woodrow Wilson, who gave us the income tax and the federal reserve, also wanted a war. So he invaded Mexico and was disappointed when the Mexicans wouldn't fight. So, to overcome "isolationist" sentiments among the American people, he helped instigate a phony war atrocity – not for the first or last time in American history – to justify our entry into Europe's world war, and the engorgement of government that it would inevitably bring.

Once over there, we helped England and France overthrow the Kaiser and crush the German people, and overthrow the Emperor and wipe the Austro-Hungarian Empire off the map (even though Germany and Austro-Hungary had been much less responsible for starting the war than England, France, and Russia). The result – in addition to millions more dead – was to clear the way for Hitler (and Lenin), and to foment ethnic hatreds with artificial boundaries that cut across ancient nations, and placed others in unnatural combinations.

Not satisfied with this, Wilson sought to establish a world authority that would take decisions of war and peace out of the hands of such parochial interests as the American people, and enshrine them in a new cartel of governments called the League of Nations.

But isolationist sentiments came roaring back after the armistice, and conservative senators defeated the League treaty. Wilson, the textbooks all tell us with a catch in their voice, died a broken man because he hadn't abolished his country's sovereignty.

Franklin D. Roosevelt would not make the same mistake. After establishing domestic tyranny in the New Deal, Roosevelt also sought a war. When he got it, he started planning for another cartel of governments, one that this time would be ratified by the Senate.

Alger Hiss, later exposed as a Soviet spy, traveled to Yalta as FDR's State Department advisor, and it was at Yalta that Roosevelt and Stalin first formally agreed to establish the U.N.

Hiss was also the U.N.'s first head. As Time magazine noted at the time, "the Secretary General for the San Francisco Conference was named at Yalta but announced only last week – lanky, Harvard-trained Alger Hiss, one of the State Department's brighter young men."

During the U.N. ratification campaign, the great anti-New Dealer John T. Flynn said: "As one who has been watching propaganda for a great many years, I take off my hat. You cannot rum on the radio at any hour of the day – morning, noon, or night – whether you listen to the Metropolitan Opera or to a horse opera, a hillbilly band, a commentator or a newscaster, that you do not hear a plug for this great instrument of peace. It is the same kind of propaganda that Hitler taught the world so effectively." And it worked. The Senate ratified the U.N. treaty with only two dissenting votes – William Langer's (R-ND) and Henrik Shipstead's (R-MN). Even Robert Taft (R- OH) nodded on this one.

Alger Hiss ran not only the initial U.N. conferences, but he oversaw the drafting of the organization's charter and other founding documents. So it can be no surprise that, like the Soviet Constitution, the U.N. grants spurious rights to jobs, clothing, medical care, education, housing, welfare, leisure, etc., while making real rights dependent on government approval.

The U.N. tells us we have the "right to freedom of expression," but "subject to certain penalties, liabilities, and restrictions ... as provided by law." Freedom of religion is also protected, "subject only to such limitations as are provided by law."

All individual rights, the U.N. says, may be overridden by government for reasons of "morality, public order, and the general welfare." No wonder Stalin could happily sign these documents.

There is no mention of real economic rights, such as the right to property, but the U.N. does say that government has the "right" to "nationalize foreign property. " It also tells us that government – not individuals, families, churches, companies, and charities – must be in charge of "economic, social, and cultural development."

The U.N.'s Genocide Convention, long opposed by constitutionalists like Sen. Sam Ervin (D-NC) but passed at the behest of the Reagan administration, outlaws "causing mental harm" to members of any identifiable group. These days that could include opposing the civil rights or welfare agenda. Ile first amendment to the American Constitution would be irrelevant.

Worried by exactly this prospect, and by modem Supreme Court holdings that make treaties superior to the Constitution, Sen. John Bricker (R-OH) in the early 1950s submitted an amendment to restore the original meaning of the Constitution: that no treaty could abrogate the liberty or the property of the people of the United States.

Dwight D. Eisenhower endorsed the Bricker amendment while campaigning, but opposed it as president, and it failed.

The Constitution does call treaties "the supreme law of the land," but as Thomas Jefferson wrote, this applies to "only those objects which are usually regulated by treaty, and cannot be regulated otherwise.... for surely the President and the Congress cannot do by treaty what the whole government is interdicted from doing in any way."

The Supreme Court had held in New Orleans v. U.S. in 1836 that the U.S. government has "limited powers. It can exercise authority over no subjects except those that have been delegated to it. Congress cannot, by legislation, enlarge the federal jurisdiction, nor can it be enlarged under the treaty-making power. " But today, as in so many other areas, this wisdom has been erased, and a statist interpretation substituted.

But even with all its flaws, don't we need the U.N. for world peace? As J. Reuben Clark, Jr., former undersecretary of state noted in 1945, "there is no provision in the Charter itself that contemplates ending war. It is true that the Charter provides for force to bring peace, but such use of force is itself war... The Charter is a war document, not a peace document." And we can see that at work today, as a minor incident is turned into a major war.

The U.N. is most worried by violations of existing boundaries. But many of them, such as those of the Soviet Union, are unjust and illegitimate. How can it be wrong for the Ukraine to seek its independence, or a Polish expeditionary force to invade the U.S. S. R. to liberate the Lithuanians?

The U.N. claims to prevent "aggression," but the word is slippery in the organization's hands. For example, Red China's invasion of Tibet did not constitute aggression to the U.N., while Iraq's invasion of Kuwait does.

The U.N. promised to stay out of the internal affairs of member countries, then hypocritically named Rhodesia and South Africa as "threats to international peace" so it could intervene in their internal affairs.

Every day, it seems, some new U.N. treaty is proposed to limit national sovereignty and independence even more.

In the name of children's rights, the U.N. seeks to take responsibility for children away from parents and give it to an international bureaucracy, which is charged with eliminating illiteracy, neglect, abuse, poverty, hunger, homelessness, and diarrhea. As Dr. Samuel Francis of the Washington Times has pointed out, "what the departments of Education and Health and Human Services have done to American society, the bureaucracies to be created under this convention will do to the planet. "

In the name of ending discrimination against women, the U.N. would impose pay "equity" on the world economy. "Comparable worth" schemes, which set wages by bureaucratic fiat, have brought chaos wherever they have been adopted. This would do so worldwide.

In the name of fighting drugs, the U.N. makes bank secrecy a global crime, to be enforced through economic sanctions and U.N. asset seizures.

And in the name of international cooperation, the U.N. seeks to combat "tax avoidance and evasion." A new treaty, already signed by the Bush administration, though not yet passed by the Senate, places the "assessment, examination, collection, recovery, and enforcement" of all taxes, even local property taxes, under U.N. auspices, and sets up an international enforcement corps and international data bank.

We all know how much trouble it is to deal with city hall, let alone the state house or Washington, D.C. Imagine if we had a world state taxing, regulating, and controlling our lives. It would be time for 1776, Part II ... if the U.N. hadn't achieved another one of its objectives: the confiscation of all privately held weapons.

The United Nations is based on the notion that world problems can be solved by world politicians redistributing the West's wealth. Too much government has caused most of the world's problems. How can we think that even bigger government will do anything but make things worse?

The last time I went in the voting booth, I don't remember seeing "New World Order" on the ballot. Yet that is what we're getting, as Bush and Gorbachev announced at their Helsinki summit – whether we want it or not.

When interventionist governments combine, it is to oppress. That is why every patriot, and every believer in the free market, ought to work for a Disunited Nations. Without that, we will have little hope in cutting its component parts down to size.