Podcast: Play in new window | Download ()
Subscribe: Android | RSS | More
Today, October 24, is the anniversary of the ratification of the United Nations Charter and the founding of the United Nations organization. While some celebrate it as UN Day, many others see it as a threat to the independence of the United States and the liberty of its people.
For several years, The John Birch Society (JBS) has referred to October 24 as “the Day of Shame.” Since its founding in late 1958, the John Birch Society (parent organization of The New American magazine) has advocated that the United States withdraw from the United Nations.
According to the JBS, “The United Nations aims to have complete control and absolute power over the individual by stripping them of their freedoms.” This viewpoint is line with the thinking of the 19th-century English political philosopher Lord Acton, who famously said, “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” And a world government, which the UN seeks to become, would be the very definition of absolute power.
{modulepos inner_text_ad}
Because of this, the JBS has adopted the slogan, “Get the US Out! Of the UN.”
Recently, Birch literature offered 10 reasons that it would be wise for the United States to get out of the United Nations.
1. The UN grants rights that it can cancel; U.S. recognizes God-given rights that are unalienable and cannot be canceled;
2. UN seeks to disarm American citizens;
3. UN is a lawless body that violates its own Charter’s Article 2 that forbids interfering in domestic affairs of member states;
4. Each of the 10 men who have served as UN Secretary-General has been a Communist or a Socialist;
5. Several portions of the UN Charter, such as Article 25, override the U.S. Constitution;
6. UN “Regional Alliances,” such as NATO and SEATO, plus the UN itself, rule our nation’s military;
7. UN leaders oppose national sovereignty and favor a UN-led world government;
8. State Department officials bow to UN instead of upholding the U.S. Constitution;
9. Dozens of UN agencies headquartered around the world are building UN power over all nations;
10. The UN seeks disarmament of all nations leading to it alone having a military arm.
The UN has always sought to ban private ownership of weapons — this would revoke our Second Amendment. In 1995, the UN published “Our Global Neighborhood,” which specifically called for “the disarming of civilians.” A UN Arms Trade Treaty, adopted by the UN in 2013, would ultimately disarm Americans, but despite being signed by the Obama administration, the Senate has not acted on it.
Despite a specific prohibition against the UN interfering in member nation’s domestic affairs, the UN has nevertheless targeted U.S. law that allows for capital punishment; it has condemned the U.S. Border Patrol for attempting to prevent the entry into the United States of illegal immigrants; and it has urged the independence of Puerto Rico (which is an internal U.S. matter).
Beginning with Soviet spy Alger Hiss, an American citizen, every UN Secretary-General has been either a communist or a socialist. One, Kurt Waldheim of Austria, had even been a member of the National Socialist (Nazi) Party during World War II.
American political leaders, both Democrat and Republican, have tended to accept the idea of UN dictates overriding America’s national sovereignty, and many have acknowledged it is as an eventual world government. For example, Republican President Dwight Eisenhower’s secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, said in 1957, “I have never seen any proposal made for … world government or for world federation which could not be carried out either by the United Nations or under the United Nations Charter.”
Presently, the military might of the United Nations rests largely on the military forces of member nations, principally the U.S. military and a few others. But as early as 1961, the State Department under Democrat John F. Kennedy issued a 19-page booklet entitled “Freedom From War: The U.S. Program For General and Complete Disarmament in a Peaceful World.” This booklet presented the plan — which has never been withdrawn — for “progressive steps” that would lead to the disarmament of nations, including the United States, leaving the UN as the only political power in the world with any significant military force. The booklet declared, “The manufacture of armaments would be prohibited except for those of agreed types and quantities to be used by the UN Peace Force.… All other armaments would be destroyed or converted to peaceful purposes.”
Because of the seriousness of the continuing threat of the United Nations becoming a world government, and thus ending our own national sovereignty and the liberties of our people, The John Birch Society has urged Americans to contact their members of Congress, and urge them to take our country out of the UN.
Following is a link that the JBS has suggested concerned readers could use in contacting their members of Congress:
JBS online Get US Out! Of the UN legislative alert.
Image:Hesti Pranowo / iStock / Getty Images Plus
Steve Byas is a university history and government instructor. He can be contacted at [email protected].
