I hope you are somewhat familiar with Ralph Kinney Bennett, who
writes for TCSDaily? Yes?
Well, Bennett wrote a great longish piece on the decline of the
United Nations that you might have missed. He recounts a story I
hadn’t heard of: the discovery in Lebanon of a terrorist-training
complex run out of a U.N. backed school near Sidon that was
stocked with assault rifles, bazookas, crates of
grenade launchers, machine guns, explosives, and assorted other
weapons. U.N. officials admitted the school had been “misused,” but
did not explain how terrorist training had gone on for years while
escaping their notice.
The piece goes on to describe at great length espionage,
anti-Semitism, and incompetence running rampant at U.N.H.Q. Let me
quote some more highlights:
…the U.N. itself has become:
An organization that sanctions the violent overthrow of
sovereign governments;…
A political base, a source of funds, and a propaganda organ for
terrorist organizations;
The advocate of a new “world order” amounting to global
socialism;
A forum for anti-American, anti-Western, anti-free-enterprise
activity.
There’s also a sidebar written by our straight-talking U.N.
Ambassador from which I’ll pluck this paragraph:
We believe good relations among nations, as among
people, are based on mutual respect. We are ready to stand by our
friends and we expect the same from them. We have to let other
nations know they can no longer denounce us on Monday, vote against
us on an important issue of principle on Wednesday, and pick up
assurances of our assistance on Thursday. If we are attacked, we
defend ourselves.
Bennett concludes:
If the United States and the other nations that
sincerely believe in peace and freedom will not now join vigorously
in upholding those goals, then the organization that was meant to
be a beacon of hope and security will remain what it has tragically
become: an enemy of peace and a promoter of conflict.
Classic piece; let’s see if I can find a link…
Oh, wait a minute, I don’t think the Reader’s Digest
archives go back to October, 1983, when a spry young
Bennett penned that piece, and a no-nonsense U.N. Permanent
Representative named Jeane Kirkpatrick wrote the sidebar.
Twenty-three years ago and the problems with the U.N. were every
bit as bad as they are today, and oddly similar to boot. Granted,
the terrorists in those days were the PLO, who seem almost quaint
by today’s standards. And while there was no oil-for-food or
pederasty-for-peacekeepers scandal being ignored by the mainstream
press, much of the article deals with blatant Soviet espionage and
skullduggery within the institution being ignored by the mainstream
press.
This is the point at which I offer a conservative bromide about
how the more things change, the more they stay the same, or how
those who forget the past are doomed. But let’s just nod sagely and
skip that, because while the U.N. hasn’t changed at all, and never
will, another institution has.
I ran across this Reader’s Digest piece in the library
while doing a bit of research for my dissertation on narcotics
traffic. It was in a bound volume, one issue over from the November
1983 issue which contained a great investigative piece on Bulgarian
state-sponsored heroin and weapons trafficking, one of very few
reports written on that situation.
The discovery brought back memories of visits to my
grandparents’ house, where issues of RD accumulated on
bookshelves since the mid-fifties until my grandfather’s death in
2000. When I would visit them as a youngster for a week or two, I
would quickly tear through whatever books I brought along with me
and then, desperate for new reading material, pull down an old
Reader’s Digest or five to occupy my mind until my
granddad took me fishing.
I mainly went through looking for the corny jokes, but pretty
soon I started reading the articles as well — with more emphasis,
of course, on the Bulgarian-drug-trafficker stories than on the
“Five Quiche Recipes for a Healthy Prostate” pieces. Even back
then, I could tell I was not the target audience, but I still found
something to read in every issue — often, something exciting
hidden behind a ho-hum title like “Trapped at 8,000 Feet—On A
Blazing Blimp!”
Curious about how RD was holding up, I went over to
their site and glanced through a few issues. It hasn’t held up well
at all. Hollow celebrities have replaced those Bulgarian smugglers.
Oh, the “Blazing Blimp!” pieces are still there, along with some
reporting from Iraq, and there is even more of an emphasis on
Healthy Eating and Surviving Diseases. But there are a couple of
things missing. One is the tradition of dogged investigative
reporting. The other is a forthright pro-freedom, pro-Western,
pro-traditional-morality outlook. Those two qualities were at their
best in September 1982, when Reader’s Digest broke the
(recently confirmed) story of the KGB involvement in
Mehmet Ali Agca’s attempt to assassinate the Pope.
In an article introducing the Bulgarian story, RD
bragged about its scoop, and quoted William Safire asking in the
New York Times why, of all places, this story was broken
by Reader’s Digest. In part, their answer to Safire’s
question was that “we unashamedly stand for the traditional values
of self-reliance, dignity of the individual, an appreciation of
democratic government. This ethos helps us to probe where other
publications might not.”
In other words, Reader’s Digest was a conservative
magazine back in the days when the national media outside the
Wall Street Journal were not, and therefore they
overlooked the story of the decade. The author of the Agca piece,
Claire Sterling, said much of the key information was revealed in
public documents — she was just the first to try piecing it
together.
In trying to figure out what had happened to Reader’s
Digest, I ran across an account by National Review’s John J. Miller of
the magazine’s long slide into mediocrity. It was nice to see my
assessment confirmed by someone who is so knowledgeable about
publishing, but I wish he’d proven me wrong. We need the old
RD back.
It’s a real shame Reader’s Digest isn’t still doing its
old sort of world-changing journalism. I bet if they gave the
Pulitzer-worthy Claudia Rosett the same sort of budget and support
today that they did to Claire Sterling, we would soon be seeing
U.N. bureaucrats by the dozen led from the edifice in shackles.
