Calling All Researchers! Propaganda for the United Nations from the 1950s.
Nov. 18, 2010
Back in the mid-1950s, a lady named Edith Stafford was on the school board for Los Angeles County. She was what today would be called a Tea Party member. In those days, she was part of a movement called simply Americanism. This was a pre-Goldwater movement. It was mostly women who held study meetings. I was recruited into the conservative movement by one of them.
There is a 700-page book written by the last of these Los Angeles County activists, In the Presence of Our Enemies. The author, Ellen McClay, traces the history of this battle. It is still going on, but over a new issue: climate change, world ecology, multiculturalism. I read the Introduction on Google. It recounts the battle in the L.A. schools.
This was the preliminary phase of the battle over the public schools. This is where a careful study of Tea Party activism should begin -- not with Goldwater, a decade later. This was grass roots activism, 1951-55. There was no Washington Beltway conservative Establishment back then. There was no National Review. Human Events did exist as a newsletter, but almost no one read it. These women were the hard corps.
Mrs. Stafford was concerned about curriculum materials favoring the United Nations. She presented a UNESCO booklet that argued that the United Nations was trying to do what the Constitution did: bring hostile states together. The booklet pictured the states under the Articles of Confederation as competing, hostile entities. So, the Founders called the Constitutional convention to work out a compromise. The compromise was a transfer of sovereignty from the states to the national government.
The booklet then extended the argument to the United Stations. It said that the warring nations should transfer their sovereignty to the U.N.
My problem is this: I am trying to trace down teaching materials from that era. I would like anything even remotely like what I have just described.
If you have anything like this in your attic, which your grandmother collected, let me know the title and publisher.
If you spot anything like this on the Web, send me a link.
The call for the transfer of sovereignty today is much more subtle. Instead of transferring it to the U.N., we transfer it piecemeal to various international agencies, such as NAFTA and the WTO. There is no open call to create an overarching international political unit. Instead, the unelected trans-national bureaucracy is the means. This is a very different strategy. The older, more flagrant calls to surrender national sovereignty were more forthright.
I would like to assemble a collection of propaganda materials on the older strategy, with the U.N. as the agency of international deliverance.
The faces change. The issues change. The goal doesn't: the creation of a one-state world. The European Union is the model.
I don't think they will pull it off. But the public needs to know that the goal has little to do with climate change. It has to do with the centralization of power in a planned economy, with a world central bank at the center.
The model is not working. Ireland is the latest example. There will be others.