On every October 24 since he’s been President, George W. Bush has issued a proclamation recognizing “United Nations Day.” Typically, Bush calls upon the people of the United States “to observe this day with appropriate programs and activities.” The appropriate thing to do would be to acknowledge the basic truth that communist spy and State Department official Alger Hiss laid the groundwork for the U.N. and became its first acting secretary-general, causing it to be dubbed “the house that Hiss built.” Hiss also advised President Franklin Roosevelt at the Yalta conference, which defined post-World War II Europe and betrayed Eastern European nations to Soviet control.

As you can imagine, this is a sensitive subject for the State Department. On the 60th anniversary of the founding of the United Nations, 2005, the State Department published a report, “The United States and the Founding of the United Nations, August 1941 – October 1945,” about how it was established, carefully omitting any mention of Hiss’s pivotal role. “That was just a brief summary paper on the organization itself as I recall,” said State Department historian Marc J. Susser. He claimed that the document was a “bare-bones history” and “brief outline” of the world body. Susser said he didn’t write it but “went over it.” He explained, “Somebody in the office did it.” 

Susser is described on the website of the Organization of American Historians as historian of the U.S. Department of State and director of the Office of the Historian, which is part of the State Department’s Bureau of Public Affairs. This office is described as being “responsible for the publication of the Foreign Relations of the United States series, which is the official documentary record of U.S. foreign policy.”

The United Nations is not shy about acknowledging Hiss’s role in the founding of the U.N. and includes on its website interviews conducted with Hiss in 1990, in which he says he worked on “peace treaties” as well as the U.N. Hiss, who became director of the State Department Office of Special Political Affairs, explains that the founders of the U.N. believed in “the necessary powers that an international organization should have” and that “greater powers” and even a military staff committee were provided to the U.N. Security Council so that the world body would be able to “enforce” its will on the world.

Hiss’s dream has turned into a nightmare for the world. The U.S. Senate is preparing to vote on the U.N.’s Law of the Sea Treaty, giving the world body jurisdiction over the oceans of the world, as well as economic and industrial activities on land which affect the oceans. The pact creates the first independent source of revenue for the U.N., consisting of “fees” or taxes extracted from U.S. corporations wishing to exploit billions of dollars worth of oil, gas and minerals in “international waters” controlled by the corrupt International Seabed Authority. The unfolding scheme will make the U.N.’s oil-for-food scandal look like peanuts.

It’s fashionable to think that the U.N. does something worthwhile. In his 2005 U.N. Day proclamation, for example, Bush had declared, “In the aftermath of last year’s tsunami in the Indian Ocean region and this month’s earthquakes in South Asia, we have witnessed the great capacity of human compassion. The support from the United Nations demonstrated how nations of the world can unite in common purpose to address difficult challenges.” But now we’ve learned from a veteran U.N. investigator, Francis Montil, that as much as $500 million of U.N. aid for the victims of the tsunami was ripped off. “The oil-for-food scandal taught them nothing,” he says.

Meanwhile, the U.N. is being urged by the Bush Administration to preside over the deliberate destruction of a sovereign state, Serbia, a U.N. member, by making its province of Kosovo into an independent country. Kosovo represents the religious heritage of Serbia’s Christians and many Christian churches have already been destroyed by Muslim extremists there. Taking Kosovo from Serbia is comparable to taking Jerusalem from Israel. The U.N. special envoy who recommended this course of action has been accused of taking bribes from those seeking independence for Kosovo. A report (PDF) on the scandal includes numbers of secret bank accounts into which the money allegedly was deposited. The U.N. has been informed about the allegations but has done nothing.

It would be nice if President Bush, on the occasion of this year’s “United Nations Day,” would repudiate the organization, recognize its communist roots, and announce plans to withdraw the U.S. in protest over its corruption, incompetence and failures in world affairs. If this is not possible, then rather than saying things about the world body that are flatly untrue, perhaps he could decide to say nothing. Silence would be a small step forward.

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