World peace has been a goal of most of mankind for as long as civilization has existed. A world without war or violence perpetrated against the weak by the strong is an ideal as noble as it is impossible. Simply put, the nature of mankind is such that world peace will never be realized. It is in the nature of man for the strong to destroy the weak. The civilized amongst us suppress these urges and instead help and protect the weak, but there are plenty of uncivilized members of society to prevent Utopia from ever coming into being.

The United Nations is the result of the world’s first attempt to govern on a global basis, and as such is an abject failure. Its reliance on the good will of its members to keep order and prevent bloodshed is the very definition of insanity. Its insistence that every member, no matter their proven track record of violence and murder, be treated as equals when it comes to human rights is the very reason why no one on the planet takes anything it does seriously. The UN is the political equivalent of a collection agency; people will say or do anything they have to in public to make them happy, but will ignore them completely 5 seconds later.

In order to understand why the UN can not function as envisioned, you must consider how society on the planet Earth is constructed. Currently, society consists of several nation-states each sovereign over the people within its borders. In some of these nation-states democracy is the form of government, some use a monarchy, and yet others use theocracy or a dictatorship. This diversity in forms of government is the root cause of the failure of the UN to hold any sway in world affairs. Is it really a surprise that a dictator, used to running his country in any manner he sees fit, will ignore a UN Resolution which tells him to stop doing something? When a dictator can expect nothing more than a strongly worded condemnation for violating the terms of a UN Resolution, is it really any surprise when the resolution is ignored? Unless the UN was to be granted some sort of authority over the nations in its membership, it is totally powerless to enforce anything against anyone.

This brings us to the membership of the United States in the UN. For as long as I can remember, the U.S. has been the power behind the UN. When Saddam refused to allow UN inspectors into Iraq in 1990, the UN turned to the US and its armed forces to enforce compliance. When the US was finished and left, Saddam went back to ignoring the UN and its resolutions. In fact, when the U.S. decided that Saddam had ignored the UN Resolutions long enough, it had to act outside of the UN to enforce the conditions of the resolutions. Why? Because two members of the UN Security Council, France and Russia, were making so much money selling items prohibited by UN Resolutions to Iraq that they did not want that flow of cash to be interrupted. The members of the UN often act in their own self-interest, rather than the interest of the world in general. As Lincoln said, a nation divided against itself can not stand.

Often, other members of the UN act against the U.S. and its allies in order to appear more important or powerful than they are. The UN is also quite famous for doing things like appointing China and Cuba as members of the Human Rights Council, governments known for their complete deprivation of human rights. Recent revelations of corruption at the highest levels of the UN did not come as a surprise to anyone who was paying even the slightest attention to the UN.

So, what’s the bottom line? Simply put, the United Nations needs to be dissolved. Rendered inert, perhaps by its very nature, perhaps by the corruption within, there appears to be no logical reason for its continued existence, other than the financial enrichment of its administrative employees. Having no military power of its own, the UN is unable to enforce anything it passes unless it can convince countries with such diverse political agendas as the U.S. and China to agree on the need for action. Since China is one of the very few remaining communist countries in the world today, its interests are frequently incompatible with the rest of the free world, so consensus is almost impossible. Some countries within the UN could not even agree that the September 11, 2001 attacks on the U.S. were acts of terror.

What would replace the UN? This, to me, is the wrong question. The more relevant question is: Do we need to replace the UN? The answer is no. If the world were a human body, the UN would be the appendix. No one really knows why its there or what it does; they only know when something goes wrong with it, and then it may kill you. Removal of it gets rid of the dangers without preventing the rest of the body from functioning normally.

Somebody call a surgeon.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 8th, 2006 at 11:19 am by Nick, and is filed under History, Military, Political Correctness, Politics, War on Terror, World Opinion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.