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THE UNITED NATIONS COMMISSION ON HUMAN WRONGS

By Bruce Herschensohn

In May of 1975 Daniel Moynihan became the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations. He resigned nine months later. Upon his leaving the U.N. he gave three definitions of that organization: "a theater of the absurd, a decomposing corpse, and an insane asylum."

Another former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, Jeane Kirkpatrick said, "The U.N. can’t, or doesn’t do much in the way of promoting international peace." In relation to its peacekeeping activities she said, "Rather frequently, what goes on in the U.N. actually exacerbates conflicts rather than tending to resolve them." Those were the days when the U.N. debated the threat of peace posed, not by Castro’s 40,000 troops on the African Continent, but by U.S. forces in the U.S. Virgin Islands because fourteen U.S. Coast Guardsmen were stationed there.

Now move the calendar to May of 2001. "Outrageous!" has been the most repeated word used in the U.S. Congress in reaction to the ejection of the United States from the United Nation’s Human Rights Commission.

I don’t find it to be outrageous at all. I think it’s good news. What the devil were we doing in a commission serving along side of slave-holders, kidnappers, rapists, hostage-takers and murderers? A nation is like a person and surely most Americans would walk out that door without being told, rather than sit in the same room with such company.

That ejection of the United States from the U.N. Human Rights Commission is causing many in the U.S. Congress to advocate holding back payments to the U.N. Since we pay 22% of the general budget of the U.N. and even more for what are called the U.N.’s peacekeeping activities, and considering we have recently voted to pay dues previously owed, the congress’ reaction of holding back funds is understandable.

But the holding back of funds should be a separate matter and not be linked to the commission’s ejection of the United States. There is a greater moral stand that we could take: as a start, we should resign from every U.N. commission in which our colleagues are representatives of terrorist governments as designated by our State Department (Sudan, Cuba, Libya, Syria, Iraq, Iran, and North Korea.)

In addition, our membership in the entire organization, including the Security Council and the General Assembly, should be dependent upon whether or not the participating nations allow their citizens to live under a framework of democracy.

The United Nations Organization is dependent on the support of the United States. If the U.N. doesn’t restrict its membership to democracies, then an international alliance should be built that does. Such an alliance could overtake the United Nations Organization through nothing more and nothing less than a lack of comparative prestige between the U.N. and the alliance. What prestige would there be to an organization that embraces totalitarians, as the U.N. does, in contrast to an organization whose membership is restricted to those nations whose citizens are free and, thus, choose their own governments? Such a Nations of Liberty Alliance would leave the disciples of the East River to continue their debate into eternity over a defunct U.N. Charter that would only have historical significance.

When the United Nations Organization was founded, (October 24, 1945) its first Secretary General, Trigvie Lie, praised that organization as a fire-station ready with a hose on the world-stage. At the time, he didn’t know that the fire station would be controlled by arsonists.

The prime purpose of the U.N. was itemized in Article One of the Charter which reads quite well: "To maintain international peace and security, and to that end: to take effective collective measures for the prevention and removal of threats to the peace, and for the suppression of acts of aggression or other breaches of the peace, and to bring about by peaceful means, and in conformity with the principles of justice and international law, adjustment or settlement of international disputes or situations which might lead to a breach of the peace."

Nice words. But little did we know how "peace" would be defined by many of its members. By changing the references to the word "peace" for the word "liberty," the organization might have had real worth: "to maintain international liberty and security, and to that end: to take effective collective measures for the prevention and removal of threats to the people’s liberties, and for the suppression of acts of aggression or other breaches of people’s liberties, and for the suppression of acts of aggression or other breaches of the people’s liberties, and to bring about, in conformity with the principles of justice and international law, adjustment or settlement of international disputes or situations which might lead to a breach of liberty, which is this organization’s highest aspiration."

If there is to be a world organization at all, it must be changed with the understanding that if the people of the world have liberty, they will also have peace. But peace without liberty is surrender.

The ejection of the United States from the United Nation’s Human Rights Commission does not mean that we have suffered a defeat. We received a singular honor, with that ejection serving as a guide for us in establishing criteria for our future membership in any international organization.


Bruce Herschensohn, a Distinguished Fellow with the Claremont Institute and a member of the Center for Individual Freedom’s Board of Directors


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