[Congressional Record Volume 153, Number 191 (Thursday, December 13, 2007)]
[House]
[Pages H15460-H15462]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




  THE LIBERTY ALLIANCE: CHAMPIONING LIBERTY AND DIGNITY IN OUR HUMAN 
                               COMMUNITY

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of 
January 18, 2007, the gentleman from Michigan (Mr. McCotter) is 
recognized for 60 minutes.
  Mr. McCOTTER. Mr. Speaker, in the immediate aftermath of World War 
II, at the commencement of our Cold War against the Soviet Union and 
international communism, in his blunt, son of the middle border manner, 
President Harry Truman enunciated the eponymous doctrine he would apply 
to this challenge during his March 12, 1947, address to a joint session 
of Congress.
  ``I believe that it must be the policy of the United States to 
support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed 
minorities or outside pressures. I believe that we must assist free 
peoples to work out their own destinies in their own way. I believe 
that our help should be primarily through economic and financial aid 
which is essential to economic stability and orderly political 
processes.
  ``One way of life is based upon the will of the majority, and is 
distinguished by free institutions, representative government, free 
elections, guarantees of individual liberty, freedom of speech and of 
religion, and freedom from political oppression. The second way of life 
is based upon the will of a minority forcibly opposed upon the 
majority. It relies upon terror and oppression, a controlled press and 
radio fixed elections, and the suppression of personal freedoms.
  ``The seeds of totalitarian regimes are nurtured by misery and want. 
They spread and grow in the evil soil of poverty and strife. They reach 
their full growth when the hope of a people for a better life has died. 
We must keep that hope alive.
  ``The free peoples of the world look to us for support in maintaining 
their freedoms. If we falter in our leadership, we may endanger the 
peace of the world and we shall surely endanger the welfare of our own 
nation.''
  Regarding the Soviet Union, in the face of experts' arguments, 
Stalin's imperialist dictatorship should be psychologically understood 
and indulged to purchase an illusory peace, Truman morally comprehended 
this evil empire's threat to the United States and the Free World. 
Through the United Nations, multilateral and bilateral treaties, his 
strategy to contain and defeat inhuman communism called for the United 
States to champion the cause of human liberty and dignity.
  We heeded his call, and, through American leadership and sacrifice, 
the Soviets' evil empire imploded and Eastern Europeans and the Russian 
people experienced a new birth of freedom. This victory of humanity 
over tyranny must not lull us into the conceit liberty is now without 
enemies or invincible in their face. For we must always remember our 
Founders' caution: ``We will give you a republic, if you can keep it.'' 
Today, as we confront a barbarous terrorist enemy and the rise of 
another Communist superstate, China, it is wise to reexamine President 
Truman's sound strategy, revise it as appropriate to our circumstances, 
and defeat the enemies of our free Republic and the free world.
  A revision I propose is this: We can no longer rely on any part on 
the United Nations for the preservation of American or human freedom. 
For global altruists afflicted with cognitive dissonance, in a likely 
futile effort, let us remind them of the U.N.'s recent, execrable acts 
against the human liberty and dignity it was founded to defend.
  The U.N. humanitarian aid program, Oil-for-Food, provided little 
bread for Iraqis but large bribes for Hussein, his regime, U.N. 
cronies, and likely terrorists. Estimates are Saddam's dictatorship 
siphoned $10 billion from the program through oil smuggling and 
systematic thievery, and illegal payments and kickbacks from 
international contractors, all beneath the nonjudgmental gaze of U.N. 
bureaucrats who were nevertheless judged culpable for gross 
incompetence, mismanagement and potential complicity with Saddam in 
perpetrating the biggest corruption scandal in human history.
  Secondly, widespread instances and allegations of the sexual 
exploitation of Congolese women, girls, and boys were leveled against 
the U.N. personnel sent to protect them. The particulars of this 
barbaric sexual abuse are unfit for this forum.
  Thirdly, the U.N.'s waste, fraud, and malfeasance has turned tawdry 
graft into a global art, an epic debacle of avarice less worthy of 
journalist than a satirist. As one U.N. peacekeeping staffer informed 
the Inter Press Service News Agency: ``Corruption and kickbacks were 
taken for granted in most overseas operations.'' Though not in a New 
York Federal Court where, on June 7, the former top U.N. procurement 
official, Sanjaya Bahel, was convicted of steering $100 million worth 
of U.N. peacekeeping contracts to the family of a personal friend. U.N. 
officials refuse to explain how Bahel was twice exonerated by its 
internal investigations, while a New York jury convicted him of fraud 
and corruption in half a day.
  These are not the acts of the U.N. envisioned by President Franklin 
Roosevelt in his March 1, 1945, address before the Congress on the 
Yalta Conference.
  ``A common ground for peace ought to spell the end of the system of 
unilateral action, the exclusive alliances, the spheres of influence, 
the balances of power, and all other expedients that have been tried 
for centuries and have always failed. We propose to substitute for all 
these a universal organization in which all peace-loving organizations 
will finally have a chance to join.''
  Weighed against Roosevelt's words, the U.N. is deemed wanting, and 
the reason is revealed. A universal organization will include peace-
loving nations and tyrannical regimes.
  Consequently, all of the exclusive alliances, spheres of influence, 
balances of power, and all other expedients which occurred and failed 
for centuries outside of a universal organization have now occurred and 
failed this century inside the United Nations.
  Unlike Roosevelt, Truman viewed the U.N. as a future hope, not an 
immediate panacea. Though personally honest, Truman was versed in Boss 
Tom Pendergast's political machine, and so understood the U.N.'s 
membership's math boded ill for free people. Today, according to 
Freedom House, of the 192 U.N. member states, 89 are fully free and 103 
are not. Thus, a solid majority of 54 percent of member states know

[[Page H15461]]

liberty directly threatens their survival, which requires the 
suppression of their own peoples and, through their U.N. membership, 
the entire human community.
  While it is said that words cannot hurt, the majority-ruled General 
Assembly's resolutions and speeches can and do hurt free peoples. As 
reporter Claudia Rosett poignantly observes:
  ``What may appear to an American audience as irrelevant and even 
tedious theater is anything but harmless. The speeches on that U.N. 
stage are not, as a rule, meant for Americans, nor even for the 
multilateral audience in the chamber. Especially amongst repressive 
regimes, they are beamed to home countries and regional neighbors as 
evidence of the dignity and respect enjoyed by these governments at the 
world's leading conclave of nations. They feature as one more blow to 
the courageous Burmese monks, the hungry North Koreans, the desperate 
opposition in Zimbabwe, and the democrats who risk prison when they 
raise their voices in places such as Syria and Iran.''
  This holds true at the U.N. Security Council and its Human Rights 
Councils, from which a few bitter vignettes painted an abhorrent 
portrait.
  The U.N.'s Permanent Security Council includes a nuclear armed 
communist China and an increasingly authoritarian Russia. Their 
unsettling synergy of interests and actions on this body ominously 
echoes the heights of their Cold War cooperation.
  Consider: Despite over a decade of U.S. protestations, communist 
China and Putin's Russia are the top exporters of nuclear technology, 
chemical weapons, precursors and guided missiles to Iran. In 2004, the 
U.S.-China Security and Review Commission declared, ``Chinese entities 
continue to assist Iran with dual-use missile-related items, raw 
materials, and chemical weapons-related technology''; and further noted 
that these transfers took place after the communist Chinese 
Government's 2003 pledge to withhold missile technology from the 
Iranian regime.
  Looking at the U.N. Human Rights Council, some members are more 
suited to a rogue's gallery than a roster of righteous nations. Soon, 
the U.N. will enthrone as arbiters of human rights regimes 
like communist China, communist Cuba, Putin's Russia, and Saudi Arabia. 
Only the U.N. would put oppressed people's hopes in such blood-stained 
hands.

  Our association with this insanity exacts a steep price. Since 1945, 
the United States has been the U.N.'s largest annual contributor. In 
2006, American taxpayers forked over $423.5 million in dues, or 22 
percent of the U.N.'s regular budget, and over $5.3 billion in total 
funds to the United Nations. Nevertheless, the U.S. and all other free 
nations remain the targets of the U.N.'s member regimes' internal 
intrigues and corrupt practices.
  Two statistics define this function. Only 46 percent of the U.N.'s 
members are free nations. All of the top 10 financial contributors to 
the U.N. are free nations.
  In a crystalline instant are the U.N.'s symptoms manifest, its 
disease diagnosed, and its prognosis shameful: The U.N. is a global 
Tammany Hall lethal to the liberty and dignity of our human family.
  In our time, we face challenges equivalent to those posed to 
President Truman. Once more, the United States and the entire free 
world face a global, generational war for freedom against vicious 
enemies bent upon our destruction. To win, our devotion to liberty must 
transcend their obsession with death. This cannot be accomplished by 
fecklessly continuing to rely upon a debauched U.N. for our collective 
security.
  Recall Truman: ``It must be the policy of the United States to 
support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed 
minorities or by outside pressures.''
  So, it remains in our global age, wherein a world convinced by an 
Internet cannot endure half slave and half free. Our survival at stake, 
all free nations must prudently diminish their participation in a 
debased U.N., and unite in the cause of human dignity and liberty. 
Encircled at the U.N., we have no more time to entreat with wolves in 
our midst. Best we hold them at bay in their lair, and forge a course 
for the world's new birth of freedom.
  Our new course is a Liberty Alliance. Similar to the Community of 
Democracies, which could be transformed into this more focused and 
potent international organization for freedom, the Liberty Alliance 
must be founded upon the self-evident truth, all human beings are 
endowed by their Creator with the unalienable rights to life, liberty, 
and the pursuit of happiness; and, it must be steeped in the wisdom 
that extending liberty to the the enslaved will ensure liberty for 
ourselves.
  The Liberty Alliance must be composed of free nations dedicated to 
expanding human liberty to peoples yet free. Member nations must meet a 
mutually agreed-upon criteria of human and civil rights. Observer 
nations must be domestically expanding their people's liberty and, upon 
attaining the agreed-upon criteria for membership, shall be admitted 
into the Alliance. Importantly, member nations which diminish their 
people's liberty beyond the agreed-upon criteria, must be demoted to 
observer status and, when necessary, expelled from the Alliance.
  The governing structure of the Liberty Alliance shall be determined 
by its member nations, with the objective being the maximization of 
transparency, equity, and democracy in accordance with the effective 
expansion of human liberty and dignity. In accordance with Truman's 
doctrine, the Alliance ``must assist free peoples to work out their own 
destinies in their own way.'' Ergo, the Alliance's emphasis must be 
upon liberty, wherein human beings individually and communally shape 
the nature, form, and functions of their representative institutions, 
not upon abstract notions of uniformity, like western democracy or 
democratic capitalism, presumptuous and too often destabilizing 
impositions upon peoples trying to seize their freedom and shape their 
destinies as they deem fit.
  Heeding Truman's assessment, ``The seeds of totalitarian strife are 
nurtured by misery and want, poverty and strife, and reach their growth 
when the hope of a people for a better life has died.'' In order to 
foster liberty, the Alliance must advance human liberty and dignity 
through diplomatic, political, economic, and cultural initiatives aimed 
at empowering and emancipating the individual, their communities, and 
their emerging democratic governments from dictatorial rule. The 
Alliance must not have a military component. But member and observer 
nations will retain their powers to continue or commence security 
agreements with other free countries through bilateral and multilateral 
treaties. Never must any member or observer nation's rights be 
infringed upon by the Alliance.
  Now, two sanguine hopes. The U.S. must lead the establishment of the 
Liberty Alliance; and, secondly, the Liberty Alliance's headquarters 
shall be sited on the free soil once scarred colonialism, communism, 
fascism, world wars, and the Holocaust. I speak of Eastern Europe, 
where, cradled in the intrepid human spirit, liberty's lamp 
triumphantly pierced these benighted recesses of evil.
  In heralding the Liberty Alliance, we do not invite the free world to 
exit the U.N. Especially by participating in a democracy caucus, the 
United States and all free nations should remain in the U.N. to advance 
or defend liberty by keeping her enemies close. But we must not be so 
mad as to continue paying through the nose to be kicked in our assets.
  So, a simple proposal. No free nation will pay more to the U.N. than 
does it lowest paying tyrants, like North Korea and Burma, who 
contribute only $170,660, or 1/100 percent of the U.N.'s regular 
budget. Free nations' monies and personnel spared from the U.N. shall 
be dedicated to the Liberty Alliance or returned to taxpayers.

                              {time}  1715

  Doubtless, discombobulated global sophisticates will decry the 
Liberty Alliance as undesirable and/or impossible. They are overwrought 
and best ignored. For as we know: ``The day is short; the task is 
great.'' But we will not withdraw from it. The United States and all 
free peoples are cemented and steeled by the harmonic bonds of liberty, 
comity, and duty. Like Harry Truman and the greatest generations of 
both our nations, to date, we will not bend, we will not

[[Page H15462]]

break in our reasoned faith in a future graced by free nations. ``We 
(will) keep that hope alive.''
  Toiling our way up to that day, may God grant all free peoples the 
strength to be as He in Marie Syrkin's verse, ``The Strongest'':
  ``I'll be the strongest amid you, not lightning, stream or mountain 
blue, but dew that falling to the Earth gives birth.
  ``I'll be the strongest in my hour, and lofty tree and quiet flower 
will both drink gratefully from me.
  ``I'll be the strongest in the land. I'll be the word that heals, the 
hand that unseen and still, as from above, gives love.''
  Mr. Speaker, may it be. And may God continue to grace, guard, guide 
and bless the people of the United States and our entire human family.

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