We Can and Will Triumph Over the Subversion of Language and Thought | The American Spectator

A mere five days before Hitler’s suicide, the United Nations conference convened in San Francisco.

“United Nations” had been the term that Franklin Roosevelt had borrowed from Byron’s Childe Harold to describe the Allies in World War II. As the Allies withstood the onslaught of the Axis and Japan, turned the tide, and finally closed in on victory, Churchill and Roosevelt began talking of what both at first called the World Organization, how those United Nations would hold the world together in peace the way they had come together to defeat their opponents in war. With the victory all but assured, at least in Europe, the Allies joined together in California to forge a charter for an organization they hoped would prove more capable of settling issues between nations than the League of Nations, which could not save the world from a second great war.

On the conference’s opening day, President Harry Truman addressed the delegates via a live cable hook-up. Truman, who had succeeded to his high office only two weeks previously, was at his best: plain-spoken, direct, going straight to the central point. Here is a crucial section of his address:

All will concede that in order to have good neighbors, we must also be good neighbors. That applies in every field of human endeavor.

For lasting security, men of good-will must unite and organize. Moreover, if our friendly policies should ever be considered by belligerent leaders as merely evidence of weakness, the organization we establish must be adequately prepared to meet any challenge.

Differences between men, and between nations, will always remain. In fact, if held within reasonable limits, such disagreements are actually wholesome. All progress begins with differences of opinion and moves onward as the differences are adjusted through reason and mutual understanding.

In recent years, our enemies have clearly demonstrated the disaster which follows when freedom of thought is no longer tolerated. Honest minds cannot long be regimented without protest.

Truman saw that the success of peace and of this organization dedicated to preserving was dependent on its ability to embrace freed and unregimented thought. No doubt he was right. As Winston Churchill put it, “Meeting jaw to jaw is better than war.” (Biographer Martin Gilbert asserted that this is what he actually said, not the often-heard “Jaw-jaw is better than war-war.”)

Despite his own hate of Communism, Churchill had taken the lead in creating an effective, cooperative alliance with Stalin, and between the two of them, turned the tide at El Alamein and then at Stalingrad. Churchill had high hopes for the World Organization based on the success of the wartime alliance in saving the world from Nazism. He hoped that Stalin would be won over by the demonstrated value of their own relationship — even powerful people with profound differences of thought could work together harmoniously and achieve a great shared aim.

Only two months before the San Francisco conference, Churchill, Stalin, and Roosevelt had met at Yalta to hash out the shape of the postwar world. It was clear by then that Stalin would have complete control over the lands of eastern Europe. Even so, it seemed at Yalta that the Big Three were still working in close cooperation. Indeed, they reached an agreement that Poland would soon freely determine its government, friendly to Moscow, as it had not been before the war, but independent.

But as the Red Army consolidated its control, it became clear that Stalin was dishonoring the Yalta agreement. Non-Communist Polish political figures were being swiftly eliminated. Churchill protested to Stalin, invoking their cooperation and the good faith of their wartime alliance. FDR, deathly ill, also managed a protest of Stalin’s high-handed behavior.

Churchill grasped the implications of Stalin’s perfidy and telegraphed FDR about its implications at the end of March 1945:

As we have both understood them, the … proposals, which will form the basis of discussion at San Francisco, are based on the conception of Great Power unity. If no such unity exists on Poland, which is after all a major problem of the postwar settlement — to say nothing of the other matters just mentioned — what, it will legitimately be asked, are the prospects of success of the new World Organisation? And is it not indeed evident that, in the circumstances, we shall be building the whole structure of future world peace on foundations of sand?

And so it was to prove. Though the hope was long dying, and though there were moments, such as the UN fighting against Communist aggression in Korea, the UN has disappointed on every level. As Churchill surmised, if there is no convergence among the leading powers, no organization they constitute will be capable of establishing international peace. Instead, the organization itself become a victim of the conflict.

Why is that such a problem? Freedom of thought always allows conflicts to surface.

But the constitutional structure of civilization allows for conflict itself to become civilized. Constitutional boundaries allow maximal participation in an organized, life-enhancing conflict of ideas. Thus, Truman’s insistence on freedom of thought, for that is just what totalitarianism always tries to destroy. And clearly, Stalin and his successors would not embrace that freedom. They are what Ben Shapiro calls scavengers. They prey on civilization, taking advantage of how its adherents bind themselves to rules, rules the scavengers observe only until they find the best moment to pounce.

And so the UN has failed, built on the sand of the illusion that it could work despite the contempt of Stalin and his successors for freedom of thought and good faith.

Nowhere is the failure of the UN more evident than in the case of Israel. In its hopeful early days, the UN ruled for a partition of the old British mandate into a Jewish and an Arab state. But when the Jewish areas were attacked even before their independence took effect, the UN could not and did not even try to enforce the two-state solution that only the Jewish government-in-waiting had accepted. Neither could the UN enforce the armistice that ended the War of Independence, nor stop the terror raids from Egyptian-run Gaza during the early Fifties.

When Israel defeated Egypt in 1956, the UN brokered a peace by guaranteeing Israel’s right to use the Suez Canal and the Straits of Tiran and by placing peacekeepers on the Egyptian border. Looked promising, but the moment Egypt’s Nasser decided to scavenge, he closed the seas and demanded the UN peacekeepers depart. And the UN folded immediately and withdrew. Israel had to fight for its life by itself.

All the while, the UN’s commission to deal only with the Arab refugees from the 1948 war became a force actively hostile to Israel, in particular funding and helping to guide and implement an educational system that inculcated violent hatred of Jews and Israel. (The UN never bothered itself about the equal number of Jews driven then from their homes across the Middle East where they had lived for centuries.)

By 1967, the Soviet Union armed and argued for the anti-Israel front. Its long legacy of denying freedom of thought suited the various kinds of strongmen who dominated the new nations of the Middle East. Nor was there a fertile cultural ground for civilized debate on the issues of political life in a land ruled by Ottoman potentates for centuries. The Soviet version of “truth” began to take hold at the UN, reaching a peak in the appearance of pistol-packing Yassir Arafat at the podium and the adoption of a resolution identifying Zionism as racism. Israel was to be identified with South Africa and its viciously discriminatory apartheid laws.

That line has been introduced into the minds of generations of American students by academics fashionably contemptuous of the idea of any truth beyond the struggle for power. The UN continues with it apace, just this week proposing in a committee that Israel is guilty not just of apartheid but of genocide.

In the absence of freedom of thought, such cancerous ideas flow along to their intended aim — violent repression of any dissent. It follows internationally that any government that protects freedom of thought must be overthrown or destroyed. Even further — if a people cling to their liberty to think freely even about the deepest of things, then those people must be eliminated.

Thus, we reach the point Churchill feared: there was in the end very little difference between Stalin and the Nazi and Fascist dictators that the Allies destroyed. There could be no true peace, only a cold war, which has morphed now into an open war against the freedom of thought being fought throughout the West. And only now are the lovers of the liberties for which World War II was fought realizing how deadly the threat is to the civilization we cherish.

When the freedom to think is attacked, one cannot even be safe in espousing the simplest truths. Scientists observe how sexual differences mold the behavior of even the most primordial living things. But this fundament of consciousness is denied, leading to the mutilation and sterilization of children, rendering them infertile, and being consigned to a lifetime of dependence on high-powered pharmaceuticals and reparative surgeries for the rest of their lives, as well as psychological trauma.

If one is not even free to object to that, then it is not surprising that — even though Jordan, the PA, Lebanon, Syria, Libya, and Kuwait have no Jews living there — even though the Christian population in those and most every other place in the Middle East has plummeted — and even though in Israel the Muslim and Christian minorities have all civil rights and are thriving — nonetheless Israel is called racist and apartheid by the ignorant credentialed class of the postmodern West.

These powerful and highly educated fools ask you not to believe your lying eyes, which see: Hamas always deliberately targeting every and any Jew for murder, rape, and kidnapping; Israel sacrificing its own soldiers’ lives instead of using surprise bombing so that civilian Gazans can escape; Israel supplying food in gigantic quantity to a city still holding Israel’s citizens hostage and still carrying on war against it; Hamas locking its own citizens out of a tunnel system that could have saved lives the way the Underground did in the Blitz in London; Hamas deliberately using hospitals, schools, and mosques for military purposes to draw an Israeli response and then claim to an uncritical world that Israel is the war criminal; etc. etc. etc. ad nauseum.

Sadly, as Senator Ted Cruz pointed out this week, this subordination of truth to power is not confined to the Left, though, following Stalin’s lead, they have been its locomotive since after World War II. On the right, we have brilliant and formerly highly esteemed commentators chin-deep in evidence-free conspiracy theories and nodding gravely to a pseudo-historian proposing that Hitler was really a pretty fine guy and that Churchill was the real villain in World War II, and that everything can be explained by a giant conspiracy run by the — wink wink, nod nod. Right revisionist history has returned like a zombie from the morgue to walk the earth another day. Bill Buckley, may your memory inspire us to drive them out again.

In the face of the onslaught against truth, we have a weapon. It is our own ability to think the truth and honor it with our courageous commitment. We may only be able to silently resist the poison gas of lies; if so, that is silent resistance is still a blow for the cause. We may be able to speak, though, and then we must. We may be able to act, and then we must — a great tsunami of voters who register, research their candidates, discern which ones stand for truth, and to come out and vote for them.

The great hopes for the United Nations have died. Its ship struck the rock of Stalinism and its fear of freedom of thought and the dedication to truth that it allows. It’s up to us not to despair and to continue to stand up for truth and freedom in each action we take. We can and will triumph over the subversion of language and thought by those who fear your freedom to think and the truth they cannot control.

Realizing that, we already have them on the run. Persevere and that hidden truth will shine like the morning star and all the lies, naked and exposed, will shrivel away.

READ MORE from Shmuel Klatzkin:

Kirk Was Loathed by Those Who Hate Independent Thought

The Religious Roots of Separation of Church and State

Choosing Survival Over Politics