Gun Grabbers’ Global Gestapo
Article audio sponsored by The John Birch Society

It undoubtedly will come as a shock to most Americans to learn that the latest Clinton administration and UN schemes for individual and national disarmament are part of an unfolding treasonous program that was formally launched by U.S. officials almost 40 years ago. The program was unveiled at the UN on September 25, 1961 by President John F. Kennedy. Entitled Freedom From War: The United States Program for General and Complete Disarmament in a Peaceful World, this document is one of the most revolutionary and subversive proposals ever put forward by any government official. Incredibly, the program originally introduced in this document became — and remains — official U.S. government policy.

In short, Freedom From War (also known as “Department of State Publication 7277”) is a proposal for the complete surrender of U.S. armed forces to the United Nations. It calls for a three-stage disarmament process leading to the transfer of all national military forces — including those of the United States — to the United Nations, and the establishment of a UN Peace Force as the unchallengeable global military power.

In its own words, Freedom From War states:

In Stage III progressive controlled disarmament … would proceed to a point where no state would have the military power to challenge the progressively strengthened U.N. Peace Force….

The manufacture of armaments would be prohibited except for those agreed types and quantities to be used by the U.N. Peace Force and those required to maintain internal order. All other armaments would be destroyed or converted to peaceful purposes.

Freedom From War lists these “specific objectives toward which nations should direct their efforts”:

• The disbanding of all national armed forces and the prohibition of their reestablishment in any form whatsoever other than those required to preserve internal order and for contributions to a United Nations Peace Force;

• The elimination from national arsenals of all armaments, including all weapons of mass destruction and the means for their delivery, other than those required for a United Nations Peace Force and for maintaining internal order….

Please note that this puts the U.S. government on record in support of a plan to make all nations subservient to the UN; and that “all armaments” not controlled by the UN would be destroyed, leaving the UN as the virtual global dictator. And since no provision is made for an exemption of arms owned by private citizens (and since the UN itself is hardly sympathetic to private gun ownership), it is reasonable to assume that private arms are intended for destruction under the term “all armaments.”

To initiate this program, President Kennedy signed Public Law 87-297 (H.R. 9118), creating the United States Arms Control and Disarmament Agency (ACDA). According to that legislation, “as defined in this Act, the terms ‘arms control’ and ‘disarmament’ mean ‘the identification, verification, inspection, limitation, control, reduction, or elimination, of armed forces and armaments of all kinds under international agreement to establish an effective system of international control….'” (Emphasis added.)

On April 18, 1962, the Kennedy administration reiterated its commitment to a UN monopoly on weaponry by submitting, to a UN disarmament committee in Geneva, a formal treaty proposal entitled Blueprint for the Peace Race: Outline of Basic Provisions of a Treaty on General and Complete Disarmament in a Peaceful World. This document, which comports with the earlier Freedom From War plan, remains to this day the acknowledged blueprint for U.S. arms control policy. It unequivocally states that the UN “Peace Force” would be progressively strengthened “until it had sufficient armed forces and armaments so that no state could challenge it.”

It cannot be stressed too strongly that just as domestic gun control does not mean the total elimination of all firearms, neither does international disarmament mean the total elimination of all armies, armaments, and nuclear weapons. It is no more possible to eliminate all guns than it is to put the nuclear genie back in the lamp. In both cases, what really is being proposed is the transfer of control over all weapons to a central government, resulting in the concentration of force and the creation of a monopoly of power. In the case of domestic gun control, that means an all-powerful police state. In the case of international disarmament, it means an all-powerful global police state.

In its Second Annual Report to Congress (February 1963), the ACDA presented a simple graphic depiction (see below) demonstrating its proposed three-stage disarmament process. Observe that in Stage III, as explained in Freedom From War and Blueprint for the Peace Race, the U.S. armed forces cease to exist and only “internal security forces” — i.e. those to be used against American citizens — are permitted. Of course, under this scheme, the UN “peacekeeping machinery” will be superior to the “internal security forces” and will be able to dictate the “laws” that will be enforced.

CFR Connection

How is it possible that such a patently treasonous and suicidal proposal could become official U.S. policy, embedded in U.S. laws and U.S.-ratified treaties? As with so many other treacherous acts, policies, and programs of the past several decades, the trail leads to the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), a group Harvard historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. (who was himself a CFR member and a special assistant to President Kennedy) has called the “front organization” for “the heart of the American Establishment.” Former CFR member Admiral Chester Ward charged the organization with “promoting disarmament and submergence of U.S. sovereignty and national independence into an all-powerful one-world government.”

Official responsibility for developing and initiating the disarmament program outlined in Freedom From War goes to President Kennedy and his Secretaries of State (Dean Rusk) and Defense (Robert S. McNamara), all three of whom were members of the CFR. The real authors of Freedom From War and Public Law 87-297, however, were John J. McCloy, the chairman of the CFR, and Arthur H. Dean, a CFR director.

McCloy, Kennedy’s chief disarmament adviser and negotiator with the Soviets, entered the Establishment through the Wall Street law firm of Cravath, Swaine and Moore, and later became a senior partner at Milbank, Tweed, Hadley, and McCloy, a firm closely tied to the Rockefeller family. He served as an Assistant Secretary of War under FDR and as U.S. High Commissioner to occupied Germany. He headed the World Bank, Chase Manhattan Bank, the Ford Foundation, and the Council on Foreign Relations. He was an adviser to nine Presidents and sat on the board of directors of many corporations. Few would dispute journalist Richard Rovere’s characterization of McCloy as “chairman of the American Establishment.”

McCloy’s blue-chip résumé, however, included a few red flags. While serving in the War Department, McCloy approved an order permitting Communist Party members to become officers in the U.S. Army. He defended identified Communist John Carter Vincent and supported pro-Communist atomic scientist J. Robert Oppenheimer. In 1946, FBI head J. Edgar Hoover warned President Truman of an “enormous Soviet espionage ring in Washington,” and expressed concern over the “pro-Soviet leanings” of McCloy, Dean Acheson, and Alger Hiss. Hiss, of course, was later exposed as a Soviet agent. He was also a member of the CFR and one of the main architects of the United Nations.

Assisting McCloy in drafting Freedom From War and the statute for the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency was Arthur H. Dean. Dean was also chairman of the U.S. delegation for two years to the UN disarmament conferences in Geneva. Following the death of John Foster Dulles (CFR), Dean became the senior partner in the Insider law firm of Sullivan & Cromwell. He was vice chairman of the Institute for Pacific Relations (IPR), the Communist-run outfit most responsible — together with our State Department — for turning China over to the Communists in 1949. When IPR member Alfred Kohlberg tried heroically to expose the treason within IPR, it was Dean who scuttled the investigation. In 1952 the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee issued a scathing report on the IPR, citing it as “an instrument of Communist policy, propaganda and military intelligence.” The Senate report also concluded:

Members of the small core of officials and staff members who controlled IPR were either Communist or pro-Communist….

The effective leadership of the IPR used IPR prestige to promote the interests of the Soviet Union in the United States….

The IPR was a vehicle used by the Communists to orientate American far eastern policy toward Communist objectives.

Yet Dean and McCloy, with the help of their CFR associates in the media, passed themselves off as Republicans, and conservative, anti-Communist Republicans at that.

“Shock Treatment”

Another important influence on the Kennedy-CFR disarmament plan was Establishment Wall Street lawyer Grenville Clark. McCloy had worked closely with Clark in the Military Training Camps Association. Clark was vice president of the globalist United World Federalists and co-author with Professor Louis B. Sohn (CFR) of World Peace Through World Law (1958). “It has been well said,” averred Clark, “that in our modern age the obdurate adherence to national sovereignty and national armed forces represents a form of insanity which may, however, be cured by a species of shock treatment.”

He spelled out that “shock treatment” in World Peace Through World Law, a detailed plan for socialist world government through a revised UN Charter. This text, venerated by all “world order” advocates, proposes a global superstate in which a “world police force” known as the United Nations Peace Force would be invested with “a coercive force of overwhelming power.” “This world police force,” wrote Clark and Sohn, “would be the only military force permitted anywhere in the world after the process of national disarmament has been completed.”

But, say the authors, “it must be recognized that even with the complete elimination of all military forces there would necessarily remain substantial, although strictly limited and lightly armed, internal police forces and that these police forces, supplemented by civilians armed with sporting rifles and fowling pieces, might conceivably constitute a serious threat to a neighboring country in the absence of a well-disciplined and heavily armed world police.” Accordingly, “the United Nations Peace Force shall be regularly provided with the most modern weapons and equipment,” with special provision being made “for the use of nuclear weapons in extreme circumstances.”

Moreover, Chapter 3, Article 14 of the Clark/Sohn UN scheme orders strict controls on the possession of arms and ammunition by police and private citizens:

No nation shall allow the possession by its internal police forces of any arms or equipment except of the types permitted by the regulations adopted by the General Assembly … and in no case shall the number of revolvers and rifles combined exceed one for each member of the internal police forces, the number of automatic rifles one for each hundred members of such forces, and the ammunition supplies 100 rounds per rifle or revolver and 1,000 rounds per automatic rifle. No nation shall allow the possession by any public or private organization or individual of any military equipment whatever or of any arms except such small arms as are reasonably needed by duly licensed hunters or by duly licensed individuals for personal protection.

The plan also would eliminate the “problem” of private citizens’ access to ammunition by providing that “no nation shall produce or allow the production of any explosives except inso far as the General Assembly may authorize….” Moreover, “every nation shall obtain a special license from the [UN] Inspector-General for: … The operation by it or by any public or private organization or individual … engaged in the production of any light arms, ammunition … or of tools for any such production.”

Then and Now

It is important to recognize that the current UN drive for civilian disarmament is unmistakably a continuation of both the Clark/Sohn scheme and the Freedom from War and Blueprint for the Peace Race proposals. In language very similar to that used by Clark and Sohn, the August 19, 1999 UN “Report of the Group of Governmental Experts on Small Arms” lists, as weapons to be banned and ultimately (if necessary) confiscated, “revolvers and self-loading pistols, rifles and carbines, submachine guns, assault rifles and light machine-guns.” Furthermore, the August 19th document is captioned as “Item 76 (f) of the provisional agenda” for “General and complete disarmament” — a phrase that figures prominently in the subtitles of Freedom from War and Blueprint for the Peace Race. Suffice it to say the UN has a very literal understanding of the phrase “general and complete disarmament.”

And what if you fail to turn in or register, say, your .22 rifle, your .38 pistol, or your gunpowder and reloading equipment, and you are charged with unlawful possession of “military equipment” under the UN General Assembly’s ever-changing regulations? A UN tribunal will be your judge and jury. Clark and Sohn say:

In order to provide means for the trial of individuals accused of violating the disarmament provisions of the revised Charter or of other offenses against the Charter or laws enacted by the General Assembly … provision is also made for regional United Nations courts, inferior to the International Court of Justice, and for the review by the International Court of decisions of these regional courts.

The diabolical plan for total national and individual disarmament spelled out by Clark and Sohn in 1958 was initiated by the Kennedy administration and has been carried forward by the globalist coterie in each successive U.S. administration and at the United Nations. In 1995, the UN’s 50th anniversary year, the UN-funded Commission on Global Governance (CGG) released Our Global Neighborhood, its much-heralded report for UN reform. But the CGG’s recipe for “reform” is in reality a watered-down regurgitation of Clark and Sohn’s deadly brew — with the notable exception that world peace through world law could now supposedly be achieved through global “governance” instead of global government. “[G]lobal governance is not global government,” the CGG report emphatically stated, ignoring the fact that the dictionary definition of governance is government. But no dictionary is needed to decipher the message in Our Global Neighborhood; the CGG’s own proposed reforms are clear enough.

Targeting America’s heritage of gun ownership, the CGG warned, “Widespread criminalization can threaten the very functioning of a state. In the United States, the easy availability of weapons goes with a startling level of daily killings.” “What is needed,” according to the CGG’s globo-savants, “is demilitarization of international society.” The report explained:

Militarization today not only involves governments spending more than necessary to build up their military arsenals. It has increasingly become a global societal phenomenon, as witnessed by the rampant acquisition and use of increasingly lethal weapons by civilians — whether individuals seeking a means of self-defense, street gangs, criminals, political opposition groups, or terrorist organizations.

In the view of these globalists, the man defending his family and his home against robbers and gangsters, or the woman defending her person and her virtue against a rapist, have no more right to a firearm than do the rapists, robbers, gang bangers, and other vicious predators causing the “widespread criminalization” the CGG is decrying. Accordingly, the CGG statists “strongly endorse community initiatives … to encourage the disarming of civilians.”

As was to be expected, the internationalist-minded establishment media and the entire liberal-left menagerie of pacifists, peaceniks, disarmament crusaders, Marxists, and professional cause-of-the-week activists applauded Our Global Neighborhood when it appeared on the scene. But even before that time the UN was making strides toward global “governance,” including on the domestic gun control front. And the Clinton administration, in contradiction of our constitutionally protected right to keep and bear arms, was cooperating with the planned global gun grab.

The Hour Is Late

On September 24th of this year, during its first-ever ministerial-level meeting to discuss the “problem” of privately owned small arms, Secretary-General Kofi Annan proudly announced that “the General Assembly decided to convene a conference on all aspects of illicit arms trafficking no later than 2001….” In the same meeting, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright expressed the Clinton administration’s commitment to “promoting disarmament in peacekeeping operations, and improving the enforcement of small arms embargoes.” Significantly, she also stated that UN member states — including the U.S. — “should all commit to finishing negotiations on a firearms protocol to the UN Transnational Organized Crime Convention by the end of 2000.”

The protocol to which Albright referred was originally proposed by Japan at the 1995 UN Congress on Crime Prevention in Cairo, Egypt. Its purpose, according to documents produced at that meeting, was to create “a common strategy for effective control of firearms at the global level.” According to the Japanese representative at the conference, “in democratic countries people’s lives and safety should be assured by the government,” and therefore “citizens should not need to possess handguns for self-protection.” Of course, from the American perspective, personal possession of firearms is intended not only to protect the law-abiding from private-sector predators, but also against the depredations of the predatory state — and, in the fashion of predatory statists throughout history, the UN’s commissariat is laying the groundwork for a total global state by seeking to disarm its potential victims worldwide.

The conspiracy for empowering the United Nations with unprecedented and unparalleled police-state powers, if allowed to succeed, would establish a global tyranny so monstrous that the murderous regimes of Hitler, Stalin, and Mao would pale by comparison. For too long good Americans have allowed a state of slumber to overtake them, until now “the night is far spent.” Fortunately, our Founding Fathers provided us with the constitutional means to fight this Godless drive. Though the hour is late, with diligent effort we can yet reclaim our heritage of freedom.

Photo: AP Images

Related article:

Global Gun Grab