UNESCO GOT WHAT IT HAS LONG DESERVED
When President Reagan notified UNESCO that the United States will withdraw at the end of this year, it proved that our representative government can finally catch up with grassroots opinion. There is nothing new about the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization being a menace to America and our values; what is new is a President who is willing to say that we are not going to be abused by UNESCO any longer.
The first Lincoln Day Dinner I ever attended was in 1952 in Belleville, Illinois. I expected the usual Republican oratory; instead, the speaker, Clerk of the Illinois Supreme Court Earle Searcy, gave a scholarly address on UNESCO mischief.
Mr. Searcy had obtained advance copies of a series of ten booklets called “Toward World Understanding” which were published by UNESCO the following year. He quoted directly from those booklets, which made clear that UNESCO was working to belittle patriotism (which UNESCO labelled “nationalism”) and family values, and to promote world government and behavior modification by the schools in its place. Here are some direct quotations.
“The ideal to be pursued is that, whether in the home, the social environment or the school, our children should be educated to live with others and to prepare themselves for citizenship in a world society.”
“The kindergarten or infant school has a significant part to play in the child’s education. Not only can it correct many of the errors of home training, but it can also prepare the child for membership, at about the age of seven, in a group of his own age and habits — the first of many social identifications that he must achieve on his way to membership in the world society.”
“We shall come to nationalism later on. For the moment it is sufficient to note that it is most frequently in the family that the children are infected with nationalism, hearing what is national extolled and what is foreign disparaged. As chauvinism, this may be more ridiculous than dangerous, but it must, none the less, be regarded as the complete negation of world-mindedness. We shall presently recognize in nationalism the major obstacle to the development of world-mindedness.”
“As long as the child breathes the poisoned air of nationalism, education in world-mindedness can produce only rather precarious results. We have pointed out, it is frequently the family that infects the child with extreme nationalism. The school should therefore use the means described earlier to combat family attitudes that favor jingoism.”
The Congressional resolution which authorized U.S. participation in UNESCO provided “that such agency shall not interfere with educational systems or programs within the several nations or their administration.” Obviously, UNESCO paid no attention to this.
Three decades later, the State Department finally recommended U.S. withdrawal because of its “hostility toward the basic institutions of a free society, especially a free market and a free press,” and because UNESCO “has extraneously politicized virtually every subject it deals with.”
The United States was a charter member of UNESCO in 1946. It started with a staff of 12 and a small budget; it now has a staff of 2700, a base annual budget of $50 million, and an actual budget (due to grants and contributions) in the hundreds of millions.
Nobody knows the full extent of its mischief-making. It has been 23 years since the public has had a detailed report of its activities. The United States has no control and little influence; we have only one vote out of 157.
Now that President Reagan has made the break, the New York Times admits what it never admitted before, that “since ’45, UNESCO has been a Political Battlefield.” That’s the understatement of the year; at UNESCO’s December meeting in Paris it was revealed that, of the 47 Soviet spies expelled from France by Mitterand, nine were members of the Soviet delegation to UNESCO, including three who were on the Director General’s personal staff.
UNESCO has even been encouraging third-world governments to put restrictions on the Western press and to endorse the notion that governments have a right to control information for their own purposes. UNESCO wants to draw up an international “code of conduct” for journalists and issue I.D. cards to journalists that could be withdrawn at the pleasure of the governments.
All the years that UNESCO was peddling the liberal-internationalist line to American schoolchildren, it enjoyed fulsome support in the U.S. media. But when UNESCO started meddling with freedom of the press, that was going too far even for the liberals.
