What is the UN?

What is the United Nations? Well, of course, at this moment in New York City it's a rather solid, not to say overwhelming, reality with the presence of 175 heads of state for the fiftieth anniversary -- a phenomenon, incidentally, that no city has experienced before. But the UN is also, to some extent, an abstraction, and much of the press reporting on it is more or less whimsical. This reporting sometimes reminds me of Lewis Carroll's descriptions of the Snark, a legendary monster which no one had ever seen. Among its characteristics Carroll noted,

The first is its fondness of bathing machines which it constantly carries about,
Believing they add to the beauty of scenes, a sentiment open to doubt.

Carroll also noted that,

At charity meetings it stands at the door and collects, though it does not subscribe.

Much of the reporting on the UN is no less fanciful than this, and certainly some of the comments on it in the United States Congress are a good deal more so. The UN is trapped in a cocoon of myth and fantasy, of misapprehension and negative reporting, along with much woolly idealism and a lot of wishful thinking.

To give you an example of the fantasy surrounding the UN: in 1983 one of the TV networks put together a fiction movie in which the UN, in black helicopters and in blue helmets, took over the United States. We asked the network at the time please not to air this movie, but they said, no, no, this is pure fiction and nobody's going to believe it. It's just a story. And they went ahead and did it, and guess what? After the Oklahoma bombing, it turns out that the Michigan Militia and other fringe groups actually believed the story about the UN in black helicopters, and how the UN has put coded messages on the signs on the Interstate, as a preliminary to taking over the United States. Now they are telling anyone who will listen that the UN is a tyrannical, power-mad world government.

pull-quote Like most political institutions, national and international, the UN has an almost limitless capacity for making an ass of itself in public, but we shouldn't underestimate the fact that it is also the world's most useful all-purpose fig leaf and scapegoat. These are some of the things that we have to bear in mind before we try to get to the reality.

The UN is primarily a blueprint for a better world. It was the second great United States creation in this century in the international field, the first being the League of Nations. It was essentially a plan for learning the lessons of World War II and never making such mistakes ever again. To do this the UN Charter formulated fundamentally American standards and an American view of life for the whole world with the world's enthusiastic cooperation. The Charter is very much an American document, and, greatly to the credit of the United States, it was welcomed and respected by all nations.

Next page: Birth of the UN