Castro and Chavez love the UN's UNESCO.

In 1994, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) acted on a suggestion given by Cuban dictator Fidel Castro that it confer an award in the name of Jose Marti, Cuba's national hero who died in 1895 during its war for independence from Spain. The award for 2005, presented by Castro on February 3 before 200,000 in Havana's Revolution Plaza, went to Marxist Hugo Chavez, the fiery anti-American leader of Venezuela. Chavez used the opportunity given him to solidify his alliance with Castro and to ratchet up his attack on the United States.

The lending of UNESCO's name to an annual pro-communist celebration says plenty about this division of the UN, and about the UN itself. It also says something about President George W. Bush, who put the U.S. back into this UN agency in 2002, ending our 18-year absence. America had withdrawn in 1984 when President Reagan cited UNESCO's blatant anti-Americanism and general hostility to freedom. But thanks to the current occupant of the White House, we are once again a UNESCO member, funding approximately 25 percent of its budget.

UNESCO was formed shortly after the birth of the United Nations in 1945. A U.S. Senate investigating panel reported in the early 1950s that its chief architects were communists Alger Hiss and Harry Dexter White. The organization's founding director general, Julian Huxley, hardly hid its overall purpose when he stated upon accepting the appointment: "The general philosophy of UNESCO should be a scientific world humanism, global in extent.... It can stress the transfer of full sovereignty from separate nations to a world political organization."

In 1955, Wisconsin Congressman Lawrence Smith described the organization as "a permanent international snake pit where Godless Communism is given a daily forum for hate, recrimination, psychological warfare against freedom, and unrelenting moral aggression against peace." His words were given new meaning when UNESCO and Castro partnered in the creation of an annual UNESCO award.

According to its spokesmen, UNESCO strives to make the world a better place by helping nations in the educational, scientific, and cultural spheres. Its advocacy of abortion and population control speaks volumes about its contribution to science. In 1981, UNESCO launched a proposal that would give it power to license the world's journalists--as clear an attack on press freedom as could be imagined.

The United States should never have joined UNESCO for the same reasons our nation should never have become entangled in its United Nations parent. America's independence has always been threatened by participation in the UN and its subdivisions. Perhaps no clearer admission of this fact can be found than in an editorial appearing in the July 19, 1952 issue of the internationalist-favoring Saturday Review. It stated: "If UNESCO is attacked on the grounds that it is helping to prepare the world's people for world government, then it is an error to burst forth with apologetic statements and denials.... When faced with such a charge, let us by all means affirm it from the housetops."

We can only thank Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez for exposing the real purpose of UNESCO. However, Americans ought to be asking themselves why George W. Bush put the United States back in this "international snake pit." Our nation should withdraw from it and from its sovereignty-targeting United Nations parent.