(Ahlul Bayt News Agency) - The United Nations was created at the San Francisco Conference of 1945, 50 nations attending with the UN Charter being signed only weeks after the end of World War II.
The triumphant powers dictated the structure, a general assembly as a body for discussion and advisement but the Security Council, the United States, Britain, France, China (Nationalist) and the then Soviet Union to be permanent members, each with full veto power.
Five rotating member states would serve on the Security Council, chairs empty or full, without veto power, they might as well have been there as tourists.
Today, the UN has 193 member states but the same 5, with new governments in what is now Russia and China, representing change. 120 attended the Tehran conference for Non-Aligned Movement states.
Yet while even one veto exists with no possibility of redress, no possibility to override, even a vote of 192 to 1 would be meaningless.
“Yes, I am a UN delegate, representing one of the 188 nations that powerlessly observe the depravity and capriciousness of the Security Council, privileged to sit in my seat, perhaps move from place to place but otherwise, powerless, perhaps even invisible. Do you have a mirror so I can check?
At least I am still alive as I am still invited to attend conferences where lunch is served.”
The veto still rules, almost continual, Russia and the United States, making the UN worse than a joke, much worse. The UN is a useless anachronism that prevents any real international organization from promoting peace and progress.
As long as the UN continues as it does, usurping authority, stealing the very “oxygen of freedom” from the air we breathe, this though, extreme though it may sound, that participation is a form of treason, must be considered.
This last week, 120 of the 193 member nations met to address this issue, met in Tehran under great controversy with UN Secretary Ban Ki Moon in attendance. Many of those nations not in attendance stayed away due to threats and intimidation but no one had imagined 120 would stand firm against threats of cuts in development aid, unfavorable trade restrictions, interference with their national currencies and banking institutions.
Attending the NAM conference, for many, wasn’t without risk and, in the end, this in itself made substantive participation and resolve mandatory.
Few in the west understand the significance of the Non-Aligned Conference that ended today in Tehran. That Iran hosted and was voted to lead the movement is only an incidental issue, one seen by Israel and her surrogates, depending on the issue or her leverage, often several members of the UN Security Council. The real issue was unanimity, many nations, unrelated in so many ways as was brought out in the inaugural speech by Ayatollah Sayyed Ali Khamenei. That unanimity points one direct in particular, the independent nations of the world, the non-colonial nations, are at an end of being dictated to by the UN Security Council.
This was the 16th such meeting but never before had there been so much world conflict, so much financial malfeasance on a global scale and such a gulf between the “haves” and “have nots,” a gulf reaching now into the heart of the United States and Western Europe.
The location, Tehran, brought two conflicts to the table, the continual threats tied to Israel’s desire for nuclear hegemony and the desire of the Plutarch’s that run “roughshod” over the UN through the Security Council, to use the organization, the United Nations, as a framework for, not just thinly veiled colonialism but a rubber stamp for what has long been recognized as carefully engineered totalitarianism “wrapped in shiny paper.”
The oldest and most obvious problem has and will continue to be Palestine. Definition of the issues depends on which narrative you choose to believe and how morally flexible you are, how willing to believe what you know is a lie.
The issue of Palestine is an issue of lying. Stolen land, apartheid, genocide all politely unseen as though noticing a race of people wiped from the earth might, in effect, prove some incurable social flaw.
The truth is simple. The Middle East, as it exists, Israel as a nuclear state at the periphery of the world community, hanging on by a thread, that thread the continual American vetoes of sanctions against Israel voted by the UN general assembly, sanctions for acts of barbarism and inhumanity, was designed to be as it has been.
The brutal dictatorships, the fairly land oil sheikdoms, the corrupt and farcical democracies, were all a grand design, on the East, India split in half guaranteeing a century of South Asian instability, Afghanistan carved up as early as 1903, Iran crushed by western terrorism in 1953, a seemingly endless tale of peoples and nations derailed, manipulated, divided, engineered for strife and exploitation.
The UN sat by as half the world steeped in slavery. It sat by when the colonial powers seemingly moved aside, old methods brought to bear, peoples divided by senseless borders, lifelong enemies purposefully placed under a single flag to guarantee a century of genocide and strife.
Where does one find minds such as these, capable of such deep though, to malevolent, so malignant? How many basked in Nobel Prizes, served on esteemed boards and committees, applying the lessons of Versailles, engineering collapse, building enmity, exploiting centuries old hatreds, this too is the task of the United Nations and the world 60 million fought and died to create, the greatest sacrifice in human history to ensure generations of want and rampant disorder.
So many of us were fooled, we failed to see the subtlety of it. We believed that Israel was threatened by nations we later learned she had dictated to for decades.
We believed in the Cold War, the imaginary struggle between what we were told was the “rights of workers” against the “power of oppressive capital.”
Theatre, all just theatre, that is the lesson for those with courage to learn.
For so many of these years, the Non-Aligned Nations, those capable to escaping the crushing boot of inclusion in one of the circles of power and enslavement, walked a tightrope, being “Non-Aligned” has also been like wearing a target on your back at a shooting range, as it was then, be it 1919 or 1945, it is today.
20 years after the end of the Cold War, 5 years after the first signs of total collapse of the western economies, 3 years into the “Arab Spring, where the promise of democracy is tempered with Saudi tanks and American bombers, the cynical can sit back and look at the efforts to create a new paradigm for world affairs.
They can note the hopelessness, see the faces of tomorrow’s despots among the attendees, smell the fear of too many, the fear of retribution. Did we learn anything? Was meeting, risking so much worth it? Most of all, one message rang out loud and clear. The UN has to reform or go. Even a three year old can recognize that the Security Council seldom moves unless the economic interests of one of the world’s great economic cartels is threatened.
Cartels?
The good works of the UN, fighting money laundering, human trafficking, aggressive war and yet such activities have never been as pervasive, so profitable and widespread as under the UN’s watchful eye.
As many as 400 million people exist in sweat shops, whore houses, clean the floors and shoes of the wealthy and powerful, build machines they will never own, are subjected to diminished rights, economic and physical enslavement, corporal punishment and exploitation.
Like oil, like drugs, human flesh is a commodity to be traded, to be controlled, a trade invisible to the UN Security Council unless a phone rings from a drug lord or oil czar.
What have we learned? One issue is certain, we stand together of live and die as feudal serfs.
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