Children of the State.
To create its world socialist dictatorship, the UN is working to undermine traditional family values and indoctrinate children with the values and ideology of global government. Apparent concern for the welfare of children has been UNICEF's stock in trade for over 50 years. As Carol Bellamy, UNICEF's executive director, recently said in a meeting in Beijing, "We now stand at the most opportune moment imaginable for ... mobilising a global alliance dedicated to achieving a breakthrough in human development based on specific actions for children.... What happens to children in the earliest years of their lives is absolutely crucial not only to their future, but to the future of all our societies.... We are at a moment in history when the world may finally be ready to alter the course of human development by decisively shifting national investments to favour child well-being." Rosy rhetoric notwithstanding, the real nature of UNICEF's professed interest in children might surprise many Americans. UNICEF and UNESCO, two of the UN's best-known and most-visible organs, have long and checkered histories of exploiting children for political gain. Behind the benign UN veil lurks a consistent and unmistakable premise: that children are ultimately the property of the State, which is then the ultimate arbiter of their well-being. As Bellamy insisted in Beijing, where the welfare of the children is concerned, "it is governments who remain the primary actors ... and it is they who must lead." International Socialism The architects of the UN intended the world body to grow, over time, into a full-fledged socialist world government. The world body and its backers have worked toward that goal ever since the UN's founding. Like all socialists, UN bureaucrats view the family as an institution competing with government for the loyalties of children. They therefore seek to undermine the family while working to enlist children, psychologically if not physically, in the service of the State. One of the UN's most important objectives is instilling in children an allegiance to the globalist cause, while sabotaging their natural affection for family, country, and the principles of liberty and traditional morality. As long ago as 1948, the United Nations had already made the world's children a major priority. In that year, a 10-part series of booklets published by UNESCO called Towards World Understanding spelled out the crucial role of the United Nations in nurturing and educating the world's children. In the very first booklet, emphasis was placed on "development in the pupils of an attitude favourable to international understanding, which will make them ... ready to accept the obligations which an interdependent world imposes." The "obligations" to be "imposed," the writers explained, will originate from the coming of world order under the United Nations: "One of the chief aims of education today should be to prepare boys and girls to take an active part in the creation of a world society based on peace and security.... As an essential part of this preparation, pupils should learn about the United Nations..., for it is the great contemporary effort, on an international, governmental scale, to move towards a world so ciety." To achieve this, the pamphlet recommended a broad program of information on "other lands and peoples; the contribution of all races, religions and nations to the world's culture" and so forth, deliberately avoiding any appearance of partiality to any particular culture. In practice, this means that attitudes clearly inimical to the interests of the one-world set, such as nationalism and patriotism, be roundly discouraged. "History in every country," groused philosopher and Fabian Socialist Bertrand Russell, as quoted approvingly in Towards World Understanding, "is so taught as to magnify that country; children learn to believe that their own country has always been right and almost always victorious, that it has produced almost all the great men, and that it is in all respects superior to other countries ... the false ideas ... which are taught in the various countries are of a kind which encourage strife and serve to keep alive a bigoted nationalism." "Bigoted nationalism" must, in the eyes of internationalists, be displaced by a vigorous multiculturalism that celebrates all cultures other than those produced by the West. This amounts to an attack on all those things in life which inculcate in children principles of patriotism and individual liberty. Thus, internationalists teach that the American Founders were slave-owning, philandering, petty-politicking hypocrites; that Western culture and religion in general are merely options among a wide array of possible and equally viable alternatives; that emphasizing European history and literature is deplorably biased; and that English-only curricula and laws are discriminatory. And of course, the internationalists teach that the only possible solution to all of these inequalities and injustices is "international cooperation" -- as embodied in the United Nations. The UN Child Grab But propagandizing on behalf of "global citizenship" is by no means the only way in which the UN-sponsored internationalist movement is seeking leverage over children. A more comprehensive, up-to-date agenda is spelled out in the 1989 Convention on the Rights of the Child. Couched in terms calculated to win over the most curdled cynic -- who, after all, can oppose charity for children? -- the document is in reality a blanket endorsement of government power over every conceivable facet of child-rearing. Article 3 of the convention lays the foundation by guaranteeing that the State ensure the child "such protection and care as is necessary for his or her well-being, taking into account the rights and duties of his or her parents." In Article 5, the States are empowered to permit parents to raise their children -- according to the dictates of the Convention: "States ... shall respect the responsibilities, rights and duties of parents ... to provide ... appropriate direction and guidance in the exercise by the ch ild of the rights recognized in the present Convention." (Emphasis added.) Article 7 requires states to register all children. Article 9 empowers the State to separate children from parents whenever the State deems fit: "States parties shall ensure that a child shall not be separated from his or her parents against their will, except when competent authorities ... determine ... that such separation is necessary for the best interests of the child.... States parties shall respect the right of the child who is separated from one or both parents to maintain personal relations and direct contact with both parents ... except if it is contrary to the child's best interests." Article 13 grants the child the "right to freedom of expression; this right shall include the freedom to seek, receive, and impart information and ideas of all kinds, regardless of frontiers;" left undefined is how broad these "frontiers" might be. Provision is made only for the State to curtail this right; presumably, parents who might oppose their child's choice of music or reading material are to be given no say. Article 14, after guaranteeing the "right of the child to freedom of thought, conscience, and religion," adds an Orwellian qualification: "Freedom to manifest one's religion or beliefs may be subject only to such limitations as are prescribed by law and are necessary to protect public safety, order, health, or morals, or the fundamental rights and freedoms of others." In the same spirit, Article 15 allows the child the right to freedom of association and peaceful assembly - subject to restrictions "imposed in conformity with the law" and which are necessary "in the interests of national security or public safety, public order, the protection of public health or morals or the protection of the rights of others." Article 16 protects the child from "arbitrary or unlawful interference" in the right of privacy. In other words, under the convention children, and by extension, adults, have rights like privacy, religious freedom, and peaceful assembly only to the degree that the State shall permit. The repugnant socialist philosophy that rights emanate from the State has animated utopians across history; it pervades totalitarian recipes like the French Revolutionary Declaration of the Rights of Man and the various constitutions drawn up during that period, not to mention the UN's own Universal Declaration of Human Rights. It is utterly incompatible with the idea, espoused by the framers of the Constitution, that men are naturally free and enjoy innumerable rights conferred by their Creator, rights which man-made 1 laws can only limit, not enhance. In its Article 17, the convention unabashedly lays out a program to brainwash children via control of the media: "States recognize the important function performed by the mass media and shall ensure that the child has access to information and material from a diversity of ... sources... States ... shall: encourage the mass media to disseminate information and material of social and cultural benefit to the child in accordance with the spirit of Article 29 [and] encourage international co-operation in the production, exchange and dissemination of such information." Driving the point home, Article 29 reaffirms the old agenda outlined in Towards World Understanding: "the education of the child shall be directed to.... the development of respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms, and for the principles enshrined in the Charter of the United Nations." Child Abuse The UN's interest in children, however, is not confined to political or ideological considerations. The fifth booklet in the Towards World Understanding series, entitled In the Classroom with Children under Thirteen Years of Age, attacks the supposedly pernicious influence of home and family on the child's development: "Before the child enters school his mind has already been profoundly marked, and often injuriously, by earlier influences.. These earlier years may be indispensable to the education of children for living in the world community." State schools should "correct many of the errors of home training;" after all, "it is most frequently in the family that the children are infected with nationalism by hearing what is national extolled and what is foreign disparaged.... The school can do little if parents infect the child with that sclerosis of the mind which makes so many men and women incapable of appreciating the worth of anyone not belonging to their class, confession, political party or country." Booklet 6 of Towards World Understanding (The Influence of Home and Community on Children under Thirteen Years of Age), authored in part by lesbian anthropologist Ruth Benedict, is nauseatingly obsessed with the sexual behavior of children. Under the heading "Physical contacts, masturbation, sex play," the authors, recommending areas for "investigation" into the child's well-being, write: "What restrictions are there on physical contacts?... When the child is bathed, is special attention given to the genitals, or are they specially avoided? Are there special children's words for genitals? Is masturbation in children recognized as being common or exceptional?... What are the presumed effects? What deterrents are employed?... Do children play sex games, such as "doctor," with each other?" Such perverse fascination with the sexuality of children has been the impetus behind now-universal "sex ed" curricula in public schools, curricula that are foisted on younger and younger children, using more and more explicit and even participatory methods of indoctrination. The UN has been a major sponsor in the campaign to inculcate in innocent schoolchildren the twisted values of the ongoing "sexual revolution." Worse still, UNICEF has been party to a revolting network of pedophiles and child pornographers who used their UN-sanctioned access to children to find victims for their twisted trade. In 1987, Joseph Verbeek, a Belgian who headed the Belgian office of UNICEF, and Michel Felu, a UNICEF volunteer, were arrested and charged with using the UNICEF facilities in Brussels for child prostitution and the production of child pornography. Their international ring of pederasts, which called itself the Centre for Research and Information on Children and Sexuality, apparently had taken UMCEF's motto, "Every Child Is Our Child" to its most obscene limits: Over 19,000 pornographic photographs and a 400-name mailing list in 15 countries -- compiled on a UNICEF office computer -- were confiscated by Belgian police. The UN and its subsidiary agencies, dedicated to secular civilization under a socialist world regime, both promote this kind of depravity and attract to their ranks those whose antipathy for morality keeps them on the fringes of Western society. The UN, it cannot be said often enough, is not benign but malevolent. Its goal is not peace but servitude. Its overarching agenda is not universal tolerance but the extinction of ideologies hostile to its agenda. And to achieve its goals, it has been participating in the vicious campaign to brainwash, corrupt, dumb down, and desensitize America's youth. It is not governments but families and individuals who must take the lead in improving the lot of our children; the home-schooling movement is one very prominent example of parents succeeding where government has not. We must deny the UN further custodianship of children by withdrawing our sovereign nation from the world body's corrosive influence. |