“Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall,
Humpty Dumpty had a great fall.
“All the king's horses and all the king's men,
Couldn't put Humpty together again.”
The creation of the United Nations after the second World War was to be a signal to the world that the people of this planet were going to begin to cooperate in friendship and across national and ethnic lines. While it may not happen quickly, it seemed assured that with diligent effort and good will peace in our world and in our time would happen. The United Nations, like 'Humpty Dumpty' seemed secure on top of a global “wall” and ready to oversee the new age of peace and enlightenment which would surely follow.
In the intervening seven decades, the reality of what the U.N. has done and become has revealed a 'great fall' from the high perch of liberal aspirations into a ditch of moral relativism, multiculturalism,corruption and incompetence. In fact, the fall has been so great that it may be impossible to put “Humpty” together again even with “all the king's men”!
In the first article we examined two prominent cases of corruption at the U.N. However, the organization has had serious problems even from the beginning. The inclusion in the Security Counsel of permanent members China and the former U.S.S.R. signaled the beginning of woes for the U.N. Those who fashioned the U.N. had a fatal flaw in their own philosophy. They suffered from the same viewpoint disease that those on the left suffer from to this day,moral relativism. This is the disease that tries to make the case for all belief systems to be viewed as “equally moral”, despite the wide ranging differences between them. Morality is thus “relative”. It is to be understood that no one's culture or religious belief (or lack of one) is more “moral” or good than any other. Naturally that means they believed that once every nation just got together to talk and understand one another, we would all realize the inherent goodness and “brotherhood” of all humanity and of course, we would all work for world peace. It wouldn't matter what our different faiths taught, they were all morally right. Thus a nation which has the belief that women are the 'property' of men and can be beaten at will or be subjected to genital mutilation was just as morally “right” as a nation which believed that women should have equal rights with a man. This liberal Utopian vision of everyone working together and singing round the campfire disdains the demonstrable presence of evil in the human heart, and that is a very large mistake. For the one thing we should have learned from terrorism in this century alone is that not only does evil exist, it can and does breed and grow in the human heart. In one way the Utopians were correct. Nations such as the U.S.S.R. and Communist China did indeed desire world “peace”. However, their picture of world peace was of a subjugation of all nations as a union of communists dictated to by the all-powerful Soviet state. Once these two totalitarian nations were put on equal footing in the most powerful council of the U.N., the stage was set to guarantee that the U.N. itself would prove a very ineffectual instrument for peace in our time.
In the final installment of this series, we will examine attempts by the U.N. in recent history to settle disputes both between and within various nations around the globe. There we will see the fruit that has come from the flawed foundations of the U.N. and why I believe the United States should withdraw both it's support and presence from the organization.