Good riddance

Ex-Senator Percy was involved in energy mainly as founder and chairman of the Alliance to Conserve Energy, an energy-stifling, market-distorting, tax-dodging lobby by whose "merits" income is forcefully redistributed from honest producers to crafty consultants, while allowing the beneficiaries to strut about as paragons of civic virtue. Yet the Alliance, which regrettably survives him, was not his worst bequest. There are not many major weapons in the US arsenal that he did not vote against, and as chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee he went out of his way to support any Communist tyranny by credits via the Ex-Im Bank, by Most Favored Nation Status, and by lavish financial aid; as late as June of this year he claimed that "by pursuing measures to reduce tensions and expanding communications, the West can safely help Russia reemerge from its isolation." But, many will say, Charles Neville Percy has only been replaced by Paul Neville Simon; he will be as bad or worse, so what's the difference?

The difference is that Simon is a "liberal" Democrat who has the good grace not to masquerade as a Conservative Republican; a difference well worth sending Percy packing.

Something similar applies to another good riddance that, if all goes well, will come about by the end of the year: US withdrawal from UNESCO. Not all UN agencies are as useless, hypocritical and repugnant as their mother organization; the World Health Organization, for example, is doing a comparatively good job, and the educational work of the International Atomic Energy Agency is excellent, even if it is quite useless as a proliferation preventer.

But UNESCO (UN Educational, Scientific & Cultural Org.) is not among the exceptions. In one of his more encouraging acts, President Reagan instructed Shultz last December to withdraw from UNESCO by the end of 1984 if it does not mend its ways - "politicization of every issue, its attack upon a free flow of communications, and unrestrained budgetary expansion." The US taxpayer is forced to pay 25% of the annual budget (some $100 million, of which 80% is spent on its luxurious Paris headquarters). And he pays not just for the usual insults, lies and socialist propaganda, but also for very specific attempts to impose government control on the press in the "New World Information Order."

The US establishment of income redistributors stood up as one man against Reagan's barbarous decision. The New York Times, UNESCO's close kin in its lip service to press freedom while actively imposing censorship, called it "a shoddy trick." Robert Cowen, science editor of the Christian Science Monitor, wailed about "The Price of Leaving UNESCO" in an article by that name. The AAAS (Amer. Assn. for the Abolition of Science), rightly fearing for one of its troughs, staged a special symposium at its annual meeting in New York, where the US was accused of wanting "to stop the world because it wants to get off."

This attitude is typical of much of the professoriat (and of most of the State Department). If they want to go on trips to hear the "America stinks" message from semi-literate tyrants of the Third World, they are free to contribute to this inspired cause from their own pockets; but why should they when the funds are available from the US taxpayer by government force, that is, at the point of the sheriffs gun?

More surprising is the opposition of the usually refreshing Freedom House, whose director L.R. Sussman points out that the American people annually contribute $1.4 billion to the UN, of which less than 3% goes to UNESCO. [Logic: a leper, but quite small.] That if the US leaves UNESCO, it will no longer influence the flow of affairs there.

[Equally valid for one who has fallen into a sewer.] And that the New World Information Order was not really passed in its original, Soviet- inspired form. [It's OK to shoot at your mother if you miss.]