"Broadcast kits went out to every radio and television station in the country."
A recent accomplishment of the Advertising Council was its saturation bombing (1961) of the American public with propaganda in support of Kennedy"s Youth Peace Corps.
Chapter 7
UNITED NATIONS AND WORLD GOVERNMENT PROPAGANDA
All American advocates of _supra_-national government, or world government, claim their princ.i.p.al motive is to achieve world peace. Yet, these are generally the same Americans whose eager interventionism helped push America into the two world wars of this century.
The propaganda for involving America in the bloodshed and hatreds of Europe--in World War I and World War II--was the same as that now being used to push us into world government. In World War I, we rushed our soldiers across the wide seas to die in the cause of making the world safe for democracy--of eliminating evil in the world so that there would not be any more war! This was precisely what the world-government interventionists wanted us to do. The so-called American isolationists were _not_ pacifists who recommended refusal to take up arms in defense of their own country: most of them were patriots who would have been among the foremost to fight in defense of America. Being intelligent citizens of a peaceful and civilized nation, they wanted to keep it that way.
The world-government interventionists used the extraordinary arguments of a man who, though living in an orderly and law-abiding neighborhood, says that he must go carousing around in adjoining communities and get involved in every street fight and barroom brawl he can find in order to avoid violence! Such a man not only becomes a party to lawless violence which he claims to deplore, but also creates hatreds and resentments which will ultimately bring to the sane citizens of his own peaceful neighborhood the evils which they had managed to keep out.
This is what Woodrow Wilson"s intervention in World War I did to the United States. It sacrificed the lives of 250,000 American men--not to mention the hundreds of thousands crippled and otherwise wrecked by war.
But this sacrifice of American youth did not make the world safe for anything. It helped make the world a breeding place for communism, fascism, n.a.z.iism, and other varieties of socialism; and it planted the seeds for a second world war more destructive than the first.
But the world-government interventionists--when their b.l.o.o.d.y crusade proved worse than a tragic failure--did not admit error. They tried to place all the blame on the isolationists who had tried to keep us from making the ghastly mistake.
If we had stayed out of World War I, the European powers would have arrived, as they have been doing for thousands of years, at some kind of negotiated peace which would have saved not only hundreds of thousands of American lives, but millions of European lives as well. By entering World War I, we merely converted it into total war, prolonged it, and made it more savage.
The destruction and slaughter of World War I created power vacuums and imbalances and economic chaos, which inevitably led to World War II.
Again, the world-government advocates, who claimed to want peace, insisted that we go to war. They also intensified their efforts to entangle America, irretrievably, in political and economic union with European nations so that there would never again be any _possibility_ of the United States staying out of the endless wars and turmoil of the old world.
It is, perhaps, fruitless to question the motives of people leading the campaign to push America into world government. All organizations which have been active in this movement--World Fellowship, Inc., Federal Union, Inc., Atlantic Union Committee, United World Federalists, and so on--have had a sprinkling of communist-fronters among their directors and members. But they have also had the official support of many prominent and respected Americans: Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, John Kennedy, Richard Nixon, Estes Kefauver, John Sparkman, Adlai Stevenson, Dean Acheson, John Foster Dulles, Christian Herter, cabinet officers; senators and congressmen; Supreme Court justices; prominent churchmen, businessmen, financiers, entertainers, judges, union officials; newspaper and magazine editors; famous columnists and radio-television commentators.
Although the cry of "peace" is the perennial clarion call of all world-government advocates, many of them have, in recent years, added the claim that their recommendations (for converting America into a province of world government) are means of "fighting communism." Indeed, some of the most vigorous advocates of one-worldism have wide reputations as anti-communists--Walter Judd, a Republican Congressman from Minnesota, for example. Even Clarence Streit (leader of the now-defunct Federal Union, Inc., and father of that organization"s very active and influential tax-exempt successor, Atlantic Union Committee) has ugly things to say about communism.
The fact is that every step the United States takes toward political and economic entanglements with the rest of the world is a step toward realization of _the_ end objective of communism: creating a one-world socialist political and economic system in which we will be one of the subjugated provinces.
Because of the wealth we have created as a free and independent nation, we would be the most heavily taxed province in any conceivable supra-national government--whether in a "limited, federal union of the western democracies," which is what the Atlantic Union Committee people say they want; or in a total one-world system, which is what _all_ advocates of international union really have as their final goal.
Because of our population, however, we would have minority representation in any supra-national government now being planned.
Americans would be subjected to laws enacted by an international parliament in which we would have little influence; taxing us, regulating our economic activities, controlling our schools, and dictating our social and cultural relations with each other and with the rest of the world.
America was founded, populated, and developed by people seeking escape from oppressive governments in Europe. Now our own leaders ask us to give up the freedom and independence which our forebears won for us with blood and toil and valorous devotion to high ideals, to become subjects in a governmental system that would inevitably be more tyrannical than any which our forefathers rebelled against or any that presently exist.
If the world government included the despotic and oligarchic and militaristic, and feudalistic and primitive systems of Asia, the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America, it would necessarily become the bloodiest and most oppressive tyranny the world has ever known.
Nowadays, when two or more nations amalgamate their economic, political, and social systems they necessarily take the lowest common denominator of freedom rather than the highest. In fact, they must take something lower than the lowest: the union government will be more restrictive than the government of any of the nations which formed the union.
This will be true of _any_ _supra_-national government that the United States might get into: the union will not extend American freedom to other nations; it will extend to all nations in the union the most restrictive controls of the most oppressive government which enters the union, and make even those controls worse than they were before the union was formed--because the American principle of federalism has been discarded by the "liberals" who manage our national affairs; and American federalism is the only political principle ever to exist in the history of the world that can make individual human freedom possible in a federation of states.
Hard core American communists know (and some admit) that any move toward American membership in any kind of supra-national government is a move toward the Soviet objective of a one-world socialist dictatorship; but all other American advocates of international union claim their schemes are intended to repeat and extend the marvelous achievement of 13 American states which, by forming a political union, created a free and powerful nation.
All United States advocates of any kind of world government point to the founding of America: 13 sovereign states, each one proud and nationalistic, all with special interests that were divergent from or in conflict with the interests of the others; yet, they managed to surrender enough sovereignty to join a federal union which gave the united strength of all, while retaining the individuality and freedom of each.
The 13 American states, in forming a federal union, did not take the lowest common denominator of freedom; they took the highest, and elevated that.
The American principle of federalism (indeed, the whole American const.i.tutional system) grew out of the philosophical doctrine (or, rather, statement of faith) which Jefferson wrote into the Declaration of Independence:
"_...all men are ... endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights..._"
Men get their rights from G.o.d, not from government. Government, a man-made creature, has nothing except what it takes from G.o.d-created men. Government can give the people nothing that it has not first taken away from them. Hence, if man is to remain free, he must have a government which will play a very limited and negative role in his private affairs.
The United States is the only nation, ever, whose inst.i.tutions and organic law were founded on this principle. The United Nations"
Declaration of Human Rights; the Const.i.tution of the Soviet Union; and the written and unwritten const.i.tutions of every other nation in the world are all built on a political principle exactly opposite in meaning to the basic principle of Americanism. That is, the Const.i.tution of the Soviet Union, and of every UN agency, and of all other nations, specify a large number of rights and privileges which citizens should have, if possible, and which _government_ will grant them _if_ government can, and _if_ government thinks proper.
Contrast this with the American Const.i.tution and Bill of Rights which do not contain one statement or inference that the federal government has any responsibility, or power, to grant the people rights, privileges, or benefits of any kind. The total emphasis in these American doc.u.ments is on telling the federal government _what it cannot do_ to and for the people--on ordering the federal government to stay out of the private affairs of citizens and to leave their G.o.d-given rights alone.
This negative, restricted role of the federal government, and this a.s.sumption that G.o.d and not government is the source of man"s rights and privileges, are clearly stated in the Preamble to our Const.i.tution.
The Preamble says that this Const.i.tution is being _ordained_ and established, not to _grant_ liberties to the people, but to _secure_ the liberties which the people already had (before the government was ever formed) as _blessings_.
The essence of the American const.i.tutional system, which made freedom in a federal union possible, is clearly stated in the first sentence of the first Article of our Const.i.tution and in the last Article (the Tenth Amendment) of our Bill of Rights.
The first Article of our Const.i.tution begins with the phrase, "All legislative Powers _herein_ granted...." That obviously meant the federal government had no powers which were not granted to it by the Const.i.tution. The Tenth Amendment restates the same thing with emphasis:
"The powers not delegated to the United States by the Const.i.tution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."
Clearly and emphatically, our Const.i.tution says that the federal government cannot legally do anything which is not authorized by a specific grant of power in the Const.i.tution.
This is the one const.i.tutional concept that made the American governmental system different from all others; it is the one which left our people so free and unmolested by their own government that they converted the backward, American continent into the land of freedom, the most fruitful and powerful nation in history.
And this was the const.i.tutional proviso which created the American principle of federalism. The Const.i.tution made no grant, or even inferred a grant, of power to the federal government for meddling, to any extent, or for any purpose whatever, in the private cultural, economic, social, educational, religious, or political affairs of individual citizens--or in the legitimate governmental activities of the individual states which became members of the federal union. Hence, states could join the federal union without sacrificing the freedom of their citizens.
Modern "liberalism" which has been continuously in control of the federal government (and of most opinion-forming inst.i.tutions and media throughout our society) since Franklin D. Roosevelt"s first inauguration, March 4, 1933, has, by ignoring const.i.tutional restraints, changed our _Federal_ government with _limited_ powers into a _Central_ government with _limitless_ power over the individual states and their people.
Modern "liberalism" has abandoned American const.i.tutional government and replaced it with democratic centralism, which, in _fundamental theory, is identical_ with the democratic centralism of the Soviet Union, and of every other major nation existing today.
It was possible to enlarge the size of the old American federal union without diminishing freedom for the people. When you enlarge the land area and population controlled by democratic centralism you must necessarily diminish freedom for the people, because the problems of centralized government increase with the size of population and area which it controls.