The "Hidden History" of the United Nations
Interesting article from
openDemocracy.
Unfortunatly, they seem to miss one point.
From the website:
The hidden history of the United Nations
Dan Plesch rediscovers a forgotten story of the 1940s: how the United Nations was forged, beat the Nazis and established a lasting peace.
The history told about the defeat of Nazism and the founding of the United Nations in the 1940s has become distorted. A false view of the past is being used today to shape how we think about our future. The military power of the victorious wartime allies is offered as a model for running the world, while the UN’s supposed utopianism is seen as ineffective and irrelevant.
This is a travesty of the facts. We are taught that the UN began with the signing of the Charter in 1945. In fact, that agreement was the culmination of a complex military and political effort that began in 1941. Understanding the UN’s wartime origins provides a powerful and much-needed reminder that the UN is not some liberal accessory but was created out of hard, realistic political necessity.
The historical records show how Winston Churchill and Franklin D Roosevelt created the United Nations to win the war both militarily and politically, and to create the foundations for a lasting peace. Their first expression of Anglo-American policy was in the Atlantic Charter of 1941; this included freedom from want, social security, labour rights and disarmament as well as self-determination, free trade and freedom of religion. Churchill himself remarked during the height of the fighting in 1944 that the "United Nations is the only hope of the world".
The article starts to nose off in the right direction by talking about Coalitions but it also takes note of the first of the Marxist Idealogues who have made the United Nations what it is today:
A real coalition
The "United Nations" had been the official name for the coalition fighting the axis powers since January 1942, when Roosevelt and Churchill had led twenty-six nations, including the Soviet Union and China, in a "Declaration by United Nations".
The declaration committed the twenty-six not to cut separate peace deals with the Nazis and to subscribe to the principles of the Atlantic Charter for the post-war world. The Charter provided the political basis for countering Nazi ideology; it caught the imagination of people around the world, including the young Nelson Mandela and other anti-colonial activists.
The United Nations was a real entity, not a spin-doctored slogan offering a gullible public the promise of world peace at the end of the war. The allies fought the war as the United Nations and created organisations in its name and on its foundation. The British Library holds scores of wartime publications by or about the United Nations. It was celebrated in music, prayer and exhibitions. Anthologies were published of the exploits of "Heroes of the United Nations".
No problem there -- back then, the United Nations had stones.
They had their MOJO working.
Now?
They have taken a few wrong turns, tried to be everything for everybody, failed to prevent real human-rights abuses from happening on their watch and done fuck-all to try to stop the USA and 30 other nations from forming another coalition that might overtake it in terms of real world security.
Memo to Kofi:
I am reminded of Simon Keeper's Job Description(1):A job in the towers cooking the books for the shills that grease the skids.
And of the nameless writer of The Memo to Turner(2):You're the man who squats behind the man who works the soft machine.
(1) - Cowboy Junkies: Simon Keeper/Irony
(2) - Rolling Stones: Memo to Turner
Posted by DaveH at June 4, 2005 11:33 PM