UN Takeover of the Child

Education
UN Takeover of the Child
Jane H. Ingraham
Source: The New American
August 8, 1994

When the United Nations sets out to protect, develop, educate, nourish, and speak for the children of the world -- watch out. The UN bureaucrats, the great majority of whom come from socialist or communist countries where children suffer enormous economic, health, educational, and cultural deprivations, have appointed themselves experts for telling the rest of us what is to be done or not done for, to, by, or with all children, in utter disregard of the vital responsibilities of parents.

This astounding international takeover of the control of children has been in the works since at least 1978 when the communist government of Poland launched a "new way of thinking about children, their needs and rights." A Working Group was set up by the UN General Assembly to prepare a draft of the "new thinking," which soon discovered that children have "inalienable civil, political, and economic rights" of their own, quite apart from, and primarily in opposition to, those of their parents. Developing and propagandizing this pernicious idea of child autonomy provided jobs worldwide for thousands of UN bureaucrats throughout the decade of the 1980s, when massive yearly reports on the state of the world's children set the trap with endless examples of the poverty, neglect, ill health, and lack of education of the world's children, with never a mention of the causal role of authoritarian governments in creating these conditions.

A "Simple Idea"

By late 1989 the UN General Assembly was ready to erase all this misery with a "simple idea"; it unanimously adopted a Convention on the Rights of the Child. Nine months later, in September 1990, the Convention "entered into force" after having been ratified by the necessary 20 nations. This meant that the Convention became part of international law, setting international legal standards binding upon all ratifying nations. Only a few months later, 62 U.S. senators approved a resolution asking President Bush to forward the Convention to the Senate for ratification. Although George Bush approved the Convention, he never took this fateful step for the simple reason that as an international treaty, the Convention required a two-thirds vote (67 members) of the Senate for passage; this was never forthcoming during Bush's term.

Once the Convention had "entered into force," a committee of "ten experts of high moral standing and recognized competence" was established with its own "secretariat" (UN-speak for bureaucracy) to monitor "the way the ratifying nations translate the principles of the Convention into national law and practice." Each nation is required to submit regular reports to the Committee of Ten, which holds them accountable for the "proper translation" of the Convention's principles into their own legislation and societal structure.

What are these "principles" that the UN rightly claims will have a "revolutionary impact on the lives of children"? The first "principle" that emerges from the fine rhetoric is the perversion of the definition of true rights into a meaningless smorgasbord of "rights" such as "dignity," "tolerance," "solidarity," "special safeguards," and "full participation in all social, cultural, educational and other endeavors necessary for the child's growth and well-being." To pretend for one moment that such an ideal state of being could, or should, be delivered by government edict is gross demagoguery and deception of peoples (including many Americans) who are sucked into a naive belief in the "goodness" and "noble intentions" of the UN.

Granted by Government

With the concept of rights thus distorted, the second "principle" that emerges is that all "rights" are granted by government under the caring direction and control of UN experts of "high moral standing." This framework is key to the real intent of the Convention: that is, to restructure societal arrangements according to Insider UN mandates. Gone is the extraordinary idea of God-given rights that made Americans the most blessed people in all of human history. Far from using the Bill of Rights' unequivocal negative wording (Congress shall make no law ...), the UN globalists "proclaim," "affirm," "state," "recognize," and "ensure" their phony "rights" that demolish parents' authority over their own children.

A third "principle" of this ominous document is that, like the Constitution of the former Soviet Union, it grants fine-sounding freedoms in one breath, only to nullify them in the next. For instance, "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." Freedom of expression, information, and association? Well, certainly -except for "certain restrictions as provided by law and are necessary for the protection of national security or of public order or of pubic health or morals."

Wrapping these "freedoms" in totalitarian controls is only one of the hooks in these carefully laid traps that preposterously put children on a par with adults. What the UN is really saying is that children (anyone under 18) have the "right" to refuse to attend the church of their parents' choice, or the "right" to refuse religious training of any kind, or the "right" to join any type of cult or occult group passing as a "religion," or the "right" to defy their parents' belief that associating with druggies or street gangs is bad for them, or the "right" to read or view debasing or pornographic material, etc.

Contrary to the kind of repulsive totalitarianism accompanying the above "freedoms" is the straightforward wording of certain other "rights," such as the "right" of the child to privacy. No fears here about "public health, morals or order." Instead, children have a "right to the protection of the law against arbitrary interference" with this "right" (privacy) which was the operative word used by the Court in Roe v. Wade to create the legal "right" to abortion. This UN-sanctioned privacy seemingly means to establish the child's "right" to obtain an abortion without parental knowledge, the "Right" to purchase and use contraceptives, and the "Right" to heterosexual or homosexual promiscuity.

Under the "children's rights" Convention, the only "right" that is assured is the "freedom" to rebel against parental authority. Although parental authority is sharply limited by the document, government power is absolute. Thus, the effect of the Convention is to entice children out of the protective shelter of the home and leave them exposed to the full force of the global state.

"Appropriate Assistance"

Although the Covenant states that "parents have the primary responsibility for the upbringing and development of the child," this is laughable window-dressing in the face of the thrust of the entire document as well as the very next paragraph: "For the purpose of guaranteeing and promoting the rights set forth in this Convention, [ratifying] governments shall render appropriate assistance to parents" (emphasis added). To make it perfectly clear that parents count for nothing, the UN masterminds inform us that children are to be "brought up in the spirit of the ideals enshrined in the Charter of the United Nations." That is, centralization of all power in a oneworld socialist government.

Why would the governments of the world agree to the loss of sovereignty implicit in the Convention? An answer is found in the World Summit for Children, held in 1990 under the auspices of the United Nations International Children's Emergency Fund (UNICEF). With tremendous media fanfare, 71 heads of state (including President Bush) and representatives from another 86 countries unanimously adopted a World Declaration on the Survival, Protection and Development of Children.

Called by the gushing media "a milestone in humanity's treatment of children," at first glance this declaration seems to be a curious repetition of the previous Convention. How many more "rights" to education, nutrition, or health can you have? But the declaration gets down to the nitty gritty in its discussion of "resources" -- that is, how much all these "rights" will cost and who will pay.

We soon discover that the game being hatched -- under the subterfuge of helping suffering children -- is that Western creditor nations should forgive the international debts owed by Third World governments. UNICEF practically wept in claiming that in order to meet debt-service payments, countries had to "harshly cut back" in social services, so that "the poorest and most vulnerable children paid the Third World's debt" with their lack of health and education. Since Third World countries will have to spend $20 billion per year to meet "basic goals for children," and since their debt-service outflows to the rich nations are about $40 billion per year, what could be more reasonable than that the debts of Africa should be written off and those of Latin America greatly reduced?

Fund-Raising Scam

This line of UNICEF that creditors in affluent countries are killing babies in the Third World is effective propaganda but paints an entirely false picture. The truth is that the net transfer of aid funds to the Third World from the West has been far higher than any outflow during the past decade; between 1983 and 1987, for example, the "developing" countries enjoyed a net transfer from abroad of more than $130 billion. In addition, far from cutting back harshly, figures show that these governments spent more during the past decade than previously.

In other words, what UNICEF's summit was all about was a deceptive fundraiser for the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child.

When George Bush signed this shameful document, he let us know that the Insiders' drive for a New International Economic Order (the global redistribution of our wealth in preparation for world merger) is alive and well and operating under the UN umbrella. Unless we stop them, these conspirators will destroy the greatest experiment in freedom the world has ever known, force us to finance the destruction out of our own pockets, take over the minds of our children, and absorb them into the new world order.