It is disappointing that the recent outrageous criticism of Quebec by the United Nations Human Rights Council has not led to a serious debate in Canada about the country’s almost slavish veneration of the United Nations. The basic problem with the UN is that almost no one has used it for what it was ostensibly intended for: To produce equitable co-operation, or at least civilized exchanges, between all the countries of the world. It was devised by Franklin D. Roosevelt to help convince his previously isolationist countrymen that the world was less dangerous than they feared, and to disguise through international organizations and U.S.-directed collegiality the blunt fact that the United States effectively ruled the world except for what was under direct occupation by Stalin’s Red Army.
The permanent members of the Security Council were the five principal allies in the Second World War, (though Canada made a greater contribution to victory than France or China); all were countries that were heavily indebted to the United States for war-time — and, it was assumed, correctly in most cases — post-war assistance. Roosevelt reckoned that the docile Latin American republics, the traditional Commonwealth dominions, and the European countries liberated by the Western Allied armies would provide a durable pro-American majority in the General Assembly, and that Britain, France and China would be reliable Security Council allies. Even after the communist victory in China in 1949, this calculation was correct through the 1950s (and the People’s Republic of China did not occupy China’s place on the Security Council, in place of the Nationalist government of Chiang Kai-shek that fled to Taiwan, until 1971). The American isolationists were routed, and the U.S. had no real difficulty consistently outvoting the Soviet Union at the UN.
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Black: The end of Canada’s love affair with the UN (1),Notes:
This is a “keeper”. Read it all.
