UN Communist Roots

There is a historical cause for concern about treaty making and good cause to invoke the duty of accountability:

“This Senate attitude hasn’t been overlooked by crafty men who would stoop to any device to get their thoughts and ideas inflicted on the Nation and made the supreme law of the land. When men like Alger Hiss and other Communist and Socialist sympathizers wormed their way into positions of great influence in the State Department and took over the job of drafting up our treaties and agreements with international organizations some rather strange and dangerous clauses began to crop up in these documents. These clauses for the most part went unnoticed by Senators who seldom have either the time or the inclination to wade through voluminous treaty agreements prior to voting on them.  But other people were perfectly aware of these clauses. They knew full well that treaties automatically become the supreme law of the land upon ratification and thus take precedence over the Federal Constitution and all our State laws.”  (Congressional Record, 1953, page A422) https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/GPO-CRECB-1953-pt9/pdf/GPO-CRECB-1953-pt9-1.pdf

U.N.’s documented history of unbroken communism raises concerns, especially in context of Agenda 2030, with the WEF’s threat of the abolition of privacy and property rights by 2030, a communist ideology inherent within U.N.

“Now let us look at the record. According to Trygve Lie, longtime Secretary General of the United Nations, he stated flatly that there was a secret agreement between Alger Hiss and Molotov to the effect that the head of the United Nations military staff should always be a Communist. That agreement has never been broken, and we have had a succession of Communists filling that post, the present one being Mr. Arkadov. As a first consequence of this treasonous agreement, this country lost its first military engagement in Korea at a cost to this country of more than $20 billion and 145,000 American casualties …This was the first war in which we engaged not as the United States military force, but as a United Nations force. …How convenient this was to the Communists to have one of their own men as head of the United Nations military staff, who reviewed all orders going from the Pentagon to General MacArthur and gave them to our enemy before General MacArthur received them.”(Congressional Record, 1962, page 215) https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/GPO-CRECB-1962-pt1/pdf/GPO-CRECB-1962-pt1-3-2.pdf

At the Roots of The World Health Organization’s Challenges: Politics and Regionalization

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5055806/

Believing, for good reason, that the Americans dominated the WHO and the UN, the Soviets simply decided to boycott the agencies.

Contributing to the boycott decision was a growing conviction on the part of the Soviets and their allies that there were 2 dramatically opposing views of public health: that of capitalism and that of communism. The Soviets argued that the United States did not recognize the inseparable connections between social, economic, and health problems. They denounced poor working conditions and exploitation under capitalism as the roots of disease and argued the need to nationalize medical services. In 1949, a communist delegate to the World Health Assembly declared that WHO was the battleground of

two opposing points of view . . . [that of the Soviet Union] standing for the interest of humanity, which demands that the attainment of medical science should serve the whole human race . . . while the capitalist camp represents the interest of a minority who consider science as a source of income and as a weapon of war.¹

The Polish Minister of Health said that the WHO had “surrendered to the imperialistic States and in particular to the United States.”²

Many others in WHO, including Brock Chisholm, the first director-general, hoped that it would still stand by the social medicine principles embodied in its constitution. A key founding member, Andrija Stampar, argued that the WHO should concentrate on 4 principles: “social and economic security, education, nutrition, and housing.”³ Taken seriously, however, the social medicine perspective required questioning the inequality of land ownership in rural areas and the striking inequities, poor housing, misery, and illness in urban areas. The United States was not particularly interested in this approach and instead promoted the concept of “technical assistance.” The framework of “technical assistance” conveyed the idea that assistance to developing countries was best provided through the transference of a knowledge of science and technology, thus avoiding any preoccupation with the economic interests and social realities that led to underdevelopment.⁴ The Second World Health Assembly voted to provide funds and design technical health programs for developing countries, making WHO one of the first UN agencies to offer specific assistance to these countries, and also reinforcing the impression and reality of powerful US influence.

On a practical level, the decision by the Soviet Union and its allies to leave WHO had an impact on WHO’s finances, as the absent countries (and several others) did not pay their assessed contributions. Director-General Brock Chisholm, from Canada, insisted that WHO was the international health organization of all nations and, knowing that there were Russian physicians and health officials who did not want the USSR to pull out of WHO, offered to visit the Soviet Union to dispel any “misunderstandings.” Chisholm pointed out that WHO’s constitution made no provision for withdrawal from membership. He therefore asserted that the 9 communist countries were “inactive” rather than “withdrawn” and announced that he would wait for their return (a decision that later created a path for their smooth reentry). C. E. A. Winslow, in an American Journal of Public Health article, endorsed Chisholm’s conciliatory stance: “The erring brothers have their seats waiting for them when they desire to mend their ways.”⁵ Several WHO leaders also tried to help. For example, Rajkumari Amrit Kaur, a Minister of Health from India and President of the World Health Assembly, privately tried to persuade Molotov, the Soviet foreign minister, that the United States was “not running WHO.”⁶

In 1950, US Senator Joseph McCarthy accused the US federal government and the UN of being infiltrated by communists. One result was that the US State Department and the Federal Bureau of Investigation strengthened their already rigorous “clearance” regulations for Americans working at the UN and its agencies. One notable early WHO staff member who had a difficult time with these regulations was left-leaning physician and sociologist Milton I. Roemer who worked as an officer in social and occupational health between 1950 and 1951, admired Soviet public health, and believed that the United States needed a national health insurance system. In Geneva, the US Consulate seized his passport and informed him that it could only be used to return to the United States.⁷ Reinforcing Soviet perceptions, the UN and WHO were perceived as essentially supporting the US side in the Korean War (1950–1953). Some WHO officers tried to distance their agency from this perception, but others tolerated or embraced it.

For its part, the US State Department in a May 1953 memorandum to the White House bluntly stated that “In the Cold War the UN has become a major means for diplomacy and propaganda in combating the political warfare of the Soviet Union and in rallying the strength of the free world through a wide variety of measures.”⁸ Willard L. Thorp, Assistant Secretary of State for Economic Affairs, at the 1950 annual meeting of the American Public Health Association said that a clear relationship existed between national security and the worldwide struggle against disease and poverty. Disease and poverty must be fought, he suggested, because they “feed communism” and thus threaten the “very survival of our democracy.”⁹ As Congressman Frances P. Bolton explained the US government support for WHO,

In our global struggle against communism, one of our principal endeavors is to keep the free world strong. Disease breeds poverty and poverty breeds further disease. International communism thrives on both.¹⁰

International health could help keep the world safe from communism.

The tension between the superpowers and the relationship of the Soviet Union with the UN and WHO changed in 1953 with the death of Joseph Stalin. An incipient de-Stalinization came with the rise of Nikita Khrushchev, who emphasized “peaceful coexistence” and “friendly” competition with the United States, both within and outside the UN system. In July 1955, the Soviet Union formally stated its intention to rejoin WHO and fully participate in the UN. WHO welcomed the reentry of the USSR and Soviet allied countries, and asked for payment of only a small percentage of their back dues. All the communist countries—with the exception of China—returned to the WHO in 1956.¹¹

Initially, Europeans, many of them experienced in colonial medicine, were the majority of WHO’s staff. The recruitment of a few medical experts from developing countries to WHO’s staff was criticized for depleting precarious health systems of valuable individuals. In response, WHO decided to hire international public health workers for no more than 3 years. However, this regulation was hard to enforce: many WHO officers enjoyed much higher salaries than they had received in their home countries and were reluctant to return home.

By the early 1950s, the WHO had developed and approved a 4-year plan for fellowships, and by 1956 had provided more than 5000 of them to health professionals from 149 countries, thus helping to build or reconstruct public health systems.¹² It had also completed important work in standardization, such as in the Sixth Revised List of Diseases, Injuries and Causes of Death, the International Pharmacopoeia, the list of biological standards for drugs, and International Sanitary Regulations (1952). These new regulations standardized quarantine and, thus, the control of smallpox, plague, cholera, yellow fever, louse-borne typhus, and louse-borne relapsing fever, all defined as subject to quarantine.