The UN

While the name Alger Hiss may mean nothing to you, his legacy lives on through the United Nations.

A Harvard trained lawyer and former clerk for Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Alger Hiss was a U.S. State Department employees in the mid 1930s. Hiss was the assistant to Francis Sayre, son-in-law of one Woodrow Wilson (father of the League of Nations that quickly unraveled in the post WWI period). Hiss went on to become an assistant to U.S. Secretary of State Edward Stenttinius, Jr. and was later tapped as a special assistant to the Director of the Office of Far Eastern Affairs. In 1944, he moved on to become special assistant to the Director of the Office of Special Political Affairs charged with making policy involving postwar plans for international organization. In that position, he was executive secretary at the Dumbarton Oaks Conference where plans were formulated for what would become the United Nations.

Hiss attended the 1945 Yalta Conference between FDR, Churchill and Stalin. At Yalta, the “Big Three” nations ostensibly coordinated a strategy to defeat Germany, essentially drew what would become the map of postwar Europe (not incidentally consigning the bulk of central and eastern Europe to virtual slavery under Stalin’s Soviet tyranny and setting the stage for what came to be called the “Cold War”) and moved ahead with plans to establish what we now know as the United Nations. At Yalta, Hiss was charged with leading the work on the UN. At one point in the negotiations, Stalin demanded that the Soviet Union be given 16 votes (one for each of the arbitrarily created Soviet sub-divisions placed under Stalin’s boot heel by the Yalta map). It is believed that Hiss led the opposition to that demand and ultimately brought about the compromise of 2 additional votes for the USSR (a total of 3). In the later McCarthy House Un-American Activities Committee hearings, his having allegedly engineering that compromise was presented as evidence that Hiss WAS NOT the Soviet agent many in Washington and the country believed him to be.

Hiss’ activities at Yalta, and later, led many anti-Soviet hard-liners to believe that Hiss was, in fact, a Soviet agent and pointed to files ultimately made public concerning the VENONA project established to monitor encrypted Soviet message traffic with its agents (moles) in the West. Although Hiss denied it, based on similarities in travel patterns and other evidence, an agent code name “ALES” was believed by many in the intelligence community to be Hiss.

Hiss personally hand-carried the draft of the UN charter to the 1945 organizational meeting in San Francisco and served as the secretary-general of the conference there. He later became full Director of the State Department’s Office of Special Political Affairs.

Hiss left the State Department in 1946. His reward for his work on the utopian UN was to be named president of the equally utopian Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, lecturing through this period for the Quaker organization, the American Friends Service Committee. He remained at Carnegie until May 1949.

In December of 1948, Hiss had been indicted on two counts of perjury. Since the statute of limitations on espionage had run out, perjury was the only charge available to prosecutors for a man many suspected had, indeed, committed espionage. The first trial ended in a hung jury. At the second trial, Hiss was convicted and the Supreme Court upheld the conviction. Hiss was sentenced to 5 years in prison. He died on November 15, 1996 after spending the interim period in an unsuccessful attempt to clear his name in the face of further proof of his guilt trickling into the public domain.

The Yalta agreement set the stage for perhaps one of the bloodiest periods in world history. It is estimated by some historians that Stalin’s 1930s forced collectivization of agriculture led to the starvation deaths of 30 million Ukrainians and other Soviet citizens. His infamous pre and post-war purges sent millions more to Siberian forced labor camps. The lucky ones took a quick bullet to the brain in a prison corridor.

While there is an argument that the USSR was a key instrument in the defeat of Hitler, the rigid state socialist system imposed by Stalin was a miserable failure, requiring the West – mainly America – to institute programs such as Lend Lease to prop them up materially. Under Lend Lease, thousands of tons of food and technologically advanced U.S. weaponry were shipped to the Soviets. As we’re STILL awaiting those lease payments, the program SHOULD have been called “Free Stuff to Prop Up Your Miserable Failed System of Communism So We Who Wish The Same System World-wide Can Point To Its Wonders to Sell It Everywhere.”

One of the key provisions of the Yalta agreement to which the Big Three agreed was the forced repatriation back to the USSR of all Soviet citizens then located within the Soviet sector at the end of the war. In May and June 1945, tens of thousands of these refugees who had fled the USSR before and during the fighting were rounded up by the US Army and sent to collection points in Austria for transit back to the USSR. When the day arrived, US troops entered the detention barracks where -- in a number of documented cases -- they were greeted with the sight of people thrusting their heads through the windows, pressing their jugulars to the broken glass and cutting their throats, preferring to die there than to be sent back to Stalin’s tender mercies. Many of the Yugoslavian citizens returned were summarily shot within feet of the British soldiers who escorted them.

This, then, is the bargain the West made with the devil called Stalin.

I cite this bit of history with the USSR as an effort to drive home the historical FACT that nations – even those, like America, established on the principles of freedom and justice – often make deals with devils for what the leaders at the time view as proper and necessary and in the “national interest.”

Read that last paragraph as many times as required for it to sink in and imagine what YOUR world might be like if the internationalist double-domes succeed in erasing national borders – such as is now under way even as we speak between the U.S., Mexico and Canada.

In 1979, a family in East Berlin constructed a crude gas balloon and somehow made it over the Berlin Wall to the West. I did some radio commentaries about that and ended with the question “If America and what remain of the more-or-less free West fail – where will you fly YOUR balloon?”

Think about all of that as we move into a discussion of more recent events involving the United Nations.

It is always my intention to create unique essays for the Madison Forum. That is what I HAD intended to do on this one -- until the mail brought Ron Paul's excellent "Freedom Report" and I read his concise and spot-on piece posted below. And since reinventing the wheel is such a waste of time, I've posted it verbatim.

Dr. Paul, a pediatrician, served in the House for several terms in the 1970s and early 80s. He and fellow physician Larry McDonald had the highest conservative ratings in the House during that period. In 1984, Ron became disgusted with what he called the "silliness" and "unconstitutionality" of nearly all of the activities in Washington, he returned to his medical practice and family in Lake Jackson, Tx.

In 1996, as he watched the country drift further and further into socialism and a America become a place he simply could not leave to his kids without standing up, he again offered for the House and was overwhelmingly elected for a second time.

It was my distinct pleasure to meet and speak on the same program with Ron in the summer of 1983 at the Money and Miracles Seminar here in Atlanta.

If you would be interested in reading Ron's essays on a wide variety of freedom issues, visit the site at http://www.house.gov/paul/.
While I don't agree with Ron on every issue, I'm with him 99% of the time -- and that's a better rating than I achieve with my bride of 45 years.

Let me preface Ron's remarks with a personal experience that I hope will reinforce his important message.

Some time in the early 80s, I attended a speech by one Arkady Shevchenko, then the highest ranking Soviet official to defect to the West. He had been their top guy at the UN.

He spoke, interestingly, at KENNESAW COLLEGE -- and we all know what Kennesaw is famous for! I’m proud to have played a role in helping Mayor Darvin Purdy get that legislation through a reluctant City Council.

His talk dealt with the clear intent of the leadership of the old Soviet Union to somehow take America. He mentioned their ICBMs and the nuclear blackmail threat THEY posed.

Then he broke from his prepared remarks and offered this: "The leaders of my country are as AFRAID OF YOUR 200 MILLION PRIVATE FIREARMS as they are of your ICBMs. NEVER GIVE UP YOUR GUNS."

Frankly -- and, while he had to be careful as he was under FBI protection at the time, Shevchenko alluded to this in his remarks -- I'm as concerned about some domestic tyrant (say, a Hillary or Chuck Schumer) as I am about some foreign enemy.

And it is THAT threat -- about which Ron's last seven words warn us -- which prompted the Founding Fathers to leave us the Second Amendment.

The United Nations is holding a conference beginning this week in New York that ironically coincides with our national 4th of July holiday. It’s ironic because those attending the conference want to do away with one of our most fundamental constitutional freedoms of the right to bear arms.

The stated goal of the conference is to eliminate trading in small arms, but the real goal is to advance a worldwide gun control movement that ultimately supercedes national laws, including our own 2nd Amendment. Many UN observers believe the conference will set the stage in coming years for an international gun control treaty.

Fortunately, U.S. gun owners have responded with an avalanche of letters to the American delegation to the conference, asking that none of our tax dollars be used to further UN anti-gun proposals. But we cannot discount the growing power of international law, whether through the UN, the World Trade Organization, or the NAFTA and CAFTA treaties. Gun rights advocates must understand that the forces behind globalism are hostile toward our Constitution and national sovereignty in general. Our 2nd Amendment means nothing to UN officials.

Domestically, the gun control movement has lost momentum in recent years. The Democratic Party has been conspicuously silent on the issue in recent elections because they know it’s a political loser. In the midst of declining public support for new gun laws, more and more states have adopted concealed-carry programs. The September 11th terrorist attacks and last summer’s hurricanes only made matters worse for gun control proponents, as millions of Americans were starkly reminded that we cannot rely on government to protect us from criminals.

So it makes sense that perhaps the biggest threat to gun rights in America today comes not from domestic lawmakers, but from abroad.

For more than a decade the United Nations has waged a campaign to undermine Second Amendment rights in America. UN Secretary General Kofi Annan has called on members of the Security Council to address the easy availability of small arms and light weapons, by which he means all privately owned firearms. In response, the Security Council released a report calling for a comprehensive program of worldwide gun control, a report that admonishes the U.S. and praises the restrictive gun laws of Red China and France!

It’s no surprise that UN officials dislike what they view as our gun culture. After all, these are the people who placed a huge anti-gun statue on American soil at UN headquarters in New York. The statue depicts a pistol with the barrel tied into a knot, a not-too-subtle message aimed squarely at the U.S.

They believe in global government, and armed people could stand in the way of their goals. They certainly don’t care about our Constitution or the Second Amendment. But the conflict between the UN position on private ownership of firearms and our Second Amendment cannot be reconciled. How can we as a nation justify our membership in an organization that is actively hostile to one of our most fundamental constitutional rights? What if the UN decided that free speech was too inflammatory and should be restricted? Would we discard the First Amendment to comply with the UN agenda?

The UN claims to serve human freedom and dignity, but gun control often serves as a gateway to tyranny. Tyrants from Hitler to Mao to Stalin have sought to disarm their own citizens, for the simple reason that unarmed people are easier to control. Our Founders, having just expelled the British army, knew that the right to bear arms serves as the guardian of every other right. This is the principle so often ignored by both sides in the gun control debate. Only armed citizens can resist tyrannical government.