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CHAPTER TWELVE: POISON IN THE AIR In 1955 Congressman Lawrence H. Smith of Wisconsin described the United Nations and UNESCO (the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) as "a permanent international snake pit where Godless Communism is given a daily forum for hate, recrimination, psychological warfare against freedom, and unrelenting moral aggression against peace."1 That same year, at its annual national convention in Miami, the American Legion formally passed the following resolution:
As the true nature of UNESCO became better understood by more and more Americans, popular opposition began to rise against it. Patriotic organizations and service clubs all over the nation began to speak up and demand corrective action. To stem the tide, the State Department issued a series of lengthy bulletins which asserted that a few people had been "making some misstatements about UNESCO, some of them attaining the proportions of deliberate misrepresentation. Many of these statements repeat irresponsible charges which were long ago shown to be groundless."2 And, a few days after the American Legion passed its resolution condemning UNESCO, President Truman told newspaper reporters: "The Legion doesn't know what it is talking about. They have gone haywire in the last few years. They don't know what they are doing."3 The purpose of this chapter is to examine some of the "groundless, irresponsible charges and misrepresentations" that have led the American Legion, the Daughters of the American Revolution and many other patriotic societies to go "haywire" against UNESCO. Friedrich Engels wrote that under Communism the youth of the world "will grow up in new, free social conditions and will be in a position to cast away all this rubbish of state-ism."4 William Z. Foster amplified this by stating:
And in 1936, speaking before the ninth national convention of the Communist party in the United States, Earl Browder declared: "Who wins the youth, wins the future of America."6 In these three brief statements, the Communists themselves have fully explained what UNESCO in America was designed to accomplish:
As former Communist Joseph Z. Kornfeder expressed it: "UNESCO corresponds to the agitation and propaganda department in the Communist party. This department handles the strategy and method of getting at the public mind, young and old."7 The Senate Internal Security Subcommittee disclosed that Alger Hiss and Harry Dexter White were the principal architects of UNESCO along with Communists from other countries. For instance, Elen Wilkenson who had been an open Communist in England, was even elected to a city council position on the Communist party ticket, and who later called herself a socialist, was made president of UNESCO's preparatory commission. Clement Attlee had made her British minister of education.8 And, as the Senate Committee on the judiciary stated:
On August 2, 1953, Dr. Luther Evans, who was then the new director of UNESCO, inadvertently confirmed the above Senate report when he declared "that the U.S. drive against Communist infiltration in UN groups was a factor threatening to destroy UNESCO."10 [Italics added.] The following item appeared in newspapers on September 25, 1954. The article is speaking about the Institute of Pacific Relations, which, as previously mentioned, has been officially described as Soviet dominated. The news dispatch said: "Two problems confront the organization. One is that the work it set out to do is now being duplicated by wealthier and better equipped world organizations such as the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO)."11 In its own literature and periodicals, UNESCO makes its position clear. The Communist Guardian of Melbourne, England, in its May 28, 1959, issue, recommended the UNESCO Courier to its readers as "a monthly magazine deserving of wide distribution."12 The Courier is so blatant in its Communist propaganda that even the most unobserving reader can scarcely miss it. As we have pointed out several times, not all of the people who are advancing the cause of the United Nations and its specialized agencies are doing so with malice aforethought. As a matter of fact there are relatively few who are. It has always been the pattern of successful Communist operation to have unsuspecting idealists do most of the work while the Communists stay in the background pulling the strings and issuing the directives. Consequently, many good people are victimized into lending their time, their reputations and their money. Unfortunately once a person has done this he gradually acquires a vested interest in his own error and even though he finds more and more aspects of the United Nations which run counter to his sensibilities, he tends to brush them aside rather than swallow his pride and admit that he made an original mistake in judgment. Most humans are like that, but occasionally there is an exception. Mr. John M. Larson, as an active, respected and well-known citizen in his community, had been invited by the State Department to become a member of the United States National Commission for UNESCO. Like most Americans, he considered this to be an honor and felt that it was his duty to accept, which be did. He soon discovered, however, that he had been invited solely for the prestige that his name would add to the commission. He was expected to be satisfied with the role of a yes-man for all the decisions of the full-time staff and senior members of the commission. He expressed a desire to participate in UNESCO planning sessions as he was theoretically allowed to dož volunteering to travel at his own expense. But he was not advised of the meetings. He tried to make his voice felt through correspondence and personal visits with the commission secretariat. He was ignored as were his recommendations. Finally he resigned in protest. Here is what Mr. Larson revealed:
Look at a few examples. The book How the United Nations Works by Tom Galt is one of the children's books recommended by UNESCO.14 It also comes highly praised by the New York Times, the Saturday Review of Literature and the New York Herald Tribune as well as the United Nations Information Service. In the opening paragraphs the reader is informed that the United Nations is "the most important organization that has ever been created on this earth." As for accuracy of information in this book, the following is typical. The author describes the UN organizational meeting in San Francisco in 1945. On page 20 he says that while the delegates were meeting in the opera house, Japanese bombs drifted overhead on balloons and exploded in the hills near the city! On page 9, the author skillfully plants a typical UNESCO attitude in the minds of his young readers by saving that when he was a boy his teachers and school books told him:
You and the United Nations This is the kind of conditioning of children's attitudes that Luther Evans had in mind when he addressed a UNESCO meeting and said:
Writing as one of UNESCO's special consultants in a symposium on human rights, Borris Tchechko provides us with an example of just what these new frames of reference might be. He explained that the Soviet constitution "not only constitutes one of the most decisive stages in the advance of the ideas of the democratic emancipation of man, but also-and this is of vital importance-sets man as a worker in ideal political, social and economic conditions and gives him facilities for work and intellectual life."17 On February 14, 1963, American newspapers carried a UPI report from Paris revealing that UNESCO had just published a booklet entitled Equality of Rights Between Races and Nationalities in the USSR. The book is pure Soviet propaganda denouncing race discrimination in the United States while praising Soviet race relations as one of the major social triumphs of the twentieth century:
Through our membership in the United Nations, the American people were required to pay for over a third of the total cost of publishing this booklet and giving it worldwide distributionž a great deal more than the Soviet Union paid. As previously noted, William Z. Foster, who was at the time the head of the Communist party in the United States, predicted that in the future Communist world "there will be no place for the present narrow patriotism, the bigoted nationalist chauvinism that serves so well the capitalist warmakers." And in the constitution of the United States Communist party, we find the same sentiment: "The Communist party . . . fights uncompromisingly against . . . all forms of chauvinism." With this in mind, it is doubly interesting to note the following passages taken from a UNESCO publication entitled
Touching on the subject of teaching, geography in our schools, the same UNESCO publication states:
In Volume 10 of UNESCO's Toward World Understanding, George Washington is given as an example of the "hero-type" which has to be expunged from history. This volume condemns all "presentation to the young of 'hero-types' in whom virtues are, so to speak, incarnated." UNESCO bemoans the fact that such figures are
Volume 6 is rich in variations on the theme that the government must replace the family. It stresses the importance of "freeing the child more and more from the family." Getting back to the question of ways and means, UNESCO's Volume 5 of Toward World Understanding said:
For older children, Volume 1 has this to say:
Over the past twenty years the concept of education in America has gradually changed until today it is shockingly UNESCO-oriented. And this includes more than attitudes toward patriotism and religion. Increasing emphasis has been placed on UNESCO's program of replacing scholastic achievement with such vagaries as "human adjustment," "group consciousness," and "social cooperation." Our educational system has been shifting away from one which trains children to think and to understand, toward one which is preoccupied with turning out intellectual paralytics who do not question the authorities but readily conform with the group. Our primary concern here, however, is not with UNESCO's program of mental paralysis, but with its assault on patriotism, religion and moral standards among our youth. One clear example of how far this poison has seeped into the air of American academic circles is a series of psychological tests called Reading for Understanding which was prepared by an organization known as Science Research Associates (SRA). These tests have been widely used in approximately seven thousand public school districts across the United States and are highly praised by teachers' associations and school administrators. As the following sample questions will reveal, however, the tests not only require the student to assume the veracity of a preliminary statement which is loaded with editorial opinion, but they use half-truths and untruths to undermine traditional concepts of religion, morality and constitutional government. Question 34-S-2: [Correct answer: "fear of death."] Question 42-S-7 [Correct answer: "way of life."] Question 64-C-3 [Correct answer: "nationalism."] Question 72-S-8: [Correct answer: "man-made."] Question 78-C-5 [Correct answer: "no horses ever lived."] Question 84-S-4: [Correct answer: "hated."] Question 96-C-10: [Correct answer: "happiness and unhappiness."] If we would but open our eyes and look, we would be shocked at the extent to which this UNESCO virus has spread. On Flag Day in a school in White Plains, New York, American children were presented with a flag at an impressive ceremony in which even the city government participated. It was not Old Glory; it was the flag of the United Nations.21 A University of Chicago instructor by the name of Milton Mayer was quoted by the Syracuse Post-Standard as saying in a public speech: "We must haul down the American flag; and if I wanted to be vulgar and shocking, I would go even further and say, haul it down, stamp on it and spit on it!" The newspaper reported that "most of the audience of nearly 200 persons greeted Mayer's statement with prolonged applause."22 How did this come about? How have our youngsters been brought to accept this insidious mental conditioning? If you would really like to know the answer, write to the United States Department of Health, Education and Welfare, Office of Education, and ask for information on how to better teach about the United Nations in our schools. One such booklet, entitled Teaching About the United Nations in United States Educational Institutions, goes into minute detail explaining how the following school programs can be made most effective: panel discussions, notebooks and reports, audio-visuals, reading assignments, UN clubs, UNICEF drives, essay contests, speech contests, field trips to UN headquarters, and model UN meetings. It is a total saturation program that no child can escape. On March 4, 1962, the National Broadcasting Company put on an NBC Special entitled Regards to George M. Cohan. You will remember that Cohan wrote many patriotic songs including "It's a Grand Old Flag." In this NBC Special, one of the actors came forward holding an American flag and said: "I guess everybody knows that George M. Cohan wrote a lot of songs about this. The Cohan brand of patriotism is a little old fashioned and naive for these confused times."23 Things have even gone so far that in 1963 the community of Catonsville, Maryland, selected "Salute to the UN" as the theme for its Independence Day parade! In 1958 the McDonnell Aircraft Company made UN Day its seventh paid holiday. Company officials stated that they hoped the idea would "spread throughout the world." Consequently, on June 21, the Philadelphia Bulletin ran a story headlined "Firm Makes UN Day a Paid Holiday." And on the very next day, the same paper had another news story with the heading: "Some Philadelphia Banks Drop Flag Day as a Holiday." What effect has this anti-American conditioning had so far on the minds of our youth who have been subjected to it? How do we go about measuring the results? Unfortunately, there are so many unhealthy indications all around us that it is hard to begin. They range all the way from the rising juvenile crime rate, which is the inevitable result of a philosophy that says "truth is man-made" and "good is happiness," to student riots against congressional committees investigating Communist subversion. But perhaps the most tangible or measurable results were those observed among our fighting men who were captured in Korea. These boys represented a fairly accurate cross section of the American youth that had been processed by our educational system since this thinking came into favor. They came from the same kind of homes and backgrounds as our soldiers in all previous wars. Yet, their behavior as prisoners was startlingly different. For the first time in American military history, very few captured American soldiers escaped. Many of them signed "confessions" and in other ways collaborated with the enemy, not as a result of torture, but because they got better treatment that way and because they did not think it mattered anyway. And some even chose to defect to Communism rather than return to America after the war. The underlying reason for this unexpected behavior was explained rather dramatically by the Communists themselves. During the course of the fighting several secret Communist intelligence reports were intercepted by American forces. Some of these dealt with the handling of American prisoners of war. The following message was written by the chief of intelligence of the Chinese Peoples Volunteer Army in North Korea to the chief of intelligence of the Chinese Peoples Republic in Peiping:
In 1962 the Senate Armed Services Subcommittee conducted an investigation of Military Cold War Education and Speech Review Policies. During the course of the hearings, Admiral George W. Anderson, chief of naval operations, testified as follows:
General David M. Shoup, commandant of the Marine Corps, said:
All of which is right to the point. Who on earth would be willing to risk his life to defend America if he had been taught from kindergarten that love of one's own country is the major evil of our modem world? And if no one is willing to take such a stand, how long can we hold out against the fiercely aggressive force of world Communism? While the Soviet Communists are busy inculcating in their youth a strong loyalty to the Russian fatherland and to a precise dogma, UNESCO encourages Americans to deny their own children comparable convictions. When there no longer appears to be anything worth defending, America will be lost. It should come as no surprise, therefore, to find that UNESCO has chosen to locate a western hemisphere headquarters in Communist Cuba since Cuba is, at present, the most solid Soviet satellite in this hemisphere. From there, it can carry on its subversion and propaganda activities throughout all of North and South America. An interesting sidelight on this development occurred during a UNESCO conference held in Paris in 1960. Castro's Cuba submitted a report to the other delegates at the conference which read in part:
And now UNESCO is hoping that the United States Senate will ratify a proposed treaty known as the convention against discrimination in education. What would this treaty accomplish? As summarized in a joint statement by Congressmen John Ashbrook, William Ayres, Donald C. Bruce, Edgar Hiestand and David Martin:
Unless Americans wake up soon and do something to clear away this UN poison in the air, the treaty will be ratified and we will then learn the full meaning of Earl Browder's words when he declared: Who wins the youth, wins the future of America
NOTES 1. Congressman Lawrence H. Smith, Congressional Record (April 18, 1955). 2. Undated seven-page memorandum on the official letterhead of the U.S. National Commission for UNESCO, Washington 25, D.C., released approximately January 1, 1962. 3. "Legionž Trumanž UNESCO," Washington News (October 14, 1955). 4. As quoted by Leon Trotsky, The Revolution Betrayed (Garden City, L.I., Doubleday, Doran & Company, Inc., 1937), p. 161. 5. Foster, pp. 316, 327. Also, as quoted in the 6th report of the California Senate Investigating Committee on Education (1949), p. 36. 6. As quoted in the 6th report of the California Senate Investigating Committee on Education (1949), p. 36. 7. "The Communist Pattern in the UN," speech by Joseph Z. Kornfeder before the Congress of Freedom, Veterans War Memorial Auditorium (San Francisco, April 1955). 8. Who Was Who 1941-1950 (London, A. & C. Black, Ltd.), p. 1277. Also, The Annual Register 1947 (London, Longmans, Green & Co., Ltd., 1948), p. 568. Also, John H. Snow and Paul W. Shafer, The Turning of the Tides (New Canaan, Conn., The Long House, Inc., 1953), p. 102. 9. SISS annual report (1956). 10. Congressman Fred E. Busbey, Congressional Record (August 3, 1953). 11. Reuter's dispatch datelined September 25, 1954. As quoted in a speech by Florence Fowler Lyons before the Congress of Freedom, Veterans War Memorial Auditorium (San Francisco, April 1955). 12. Ewell, p. 79. 13. "UNESCO Renounced," Congressional Record (September 16, 1961). 14. Tom Galt, How the United Nations Works (New York, Thomas Y. Crowell Company, 1955). 15. Lois Fisher, You and the United Nations (Chicago, Children's Press, Inc., 1958). 16. UNESCO Leaders Speak, Department of State publication #841574 (1949), p. 2 17. Human Rights: Comments and Interpretations; a Symposium Edited by UNESCO (London and New York, Allan Wingate, 1949). 18. Congressman John M. Ashbrook, Congressional Record (March 21, 1953), p. A-1604. 19. Toward World Understanding (19 Avenue Kleber, Paris, UNESCO). 20. Ibid. 21. Florence Fowler Lyons, Reports on UNESCO, syndicated column (June 24, 1962). 22. The Syracuse Post-Standard (February 16, 1947), p. 15. 23. Congressman James B. Utt, Congressional Record (April 11, 1962). 24. "Communist Indoctrination: Its Significance to Americans," speech by William H. Mayer before the Freedom Forum (Searcy, Ark., April 15, 1957). 25. Military Cold War Education and Speech Review Policies, hearings before the Special Preparedness Subcommittee, Senate Committee on Armed Services (1962), pt. 1, pp. 216, 266. 26. Reports of Member States, presented to the UNESCO general conference at its eleventh session in Paris (November, December 1960), pp. 43-46. 27. Minority report of the House
Committee on Education and Labor (July 11, 1961).
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