This week the seventy-seventh session of the General Assembly of the United Nations Organization opens in the most conflictive international environment since the Second World War. In fact, NATO is attacking the Russian Federation in Ukraine and the United States is provoking China around Taiwan. Many fear a possible nuclear conflict. The main cause of the high levels of insecurity and conflict is the refusal which is part of the United States and its allies to accommodate to the new reality of a multipolar world.
In fact, the ruling elites of these countries reject the fundamental principles of the UN and have never respected them. Unlike, they have undermined and abused international law under the guise of promoting democracy and freedom. They have committed repeated aggression against legitimately elected governments through the use of illegal coercive measures and outright terrorism. The UN only interests them to the extent that it allows them to lend a spurious layer of legitimacy to their crimes.
Interventions in this week at the UN General Assembly will surely be focused on this situation, with the United States and its allies increasingly isolated from the opinion of the majority world. For example, in his speech at the Shanghai Cooperation Organization Summit, President Xi Jinping of the People’s Republic of China commented, «We must remain firm in upholding the international system centered on the United Nations and the international order based on international law, practice the common values of humanity and reject the zero-sum game and bloc politics.”
At the same Summit, President Vladimir Putin of the Russian Federation has stated, “The increasing role of new centers of power is coming into clearer focus and the interaction between these centers is not based on some spurious rules, which no one has been able to see and that are imposed by external forces, but are based on universally recognized principles and the regulations of international law and the Charter of the United Nations, that is, equal and indivisible security and respect for the sovereignty of each, of their national values and interests.”
The Foreign Ministry of the Russian Federation has been more explicit, stating these days that «Russia is determined to emphasize the fight against attempts to undermine the reputation of the UN and submit it to the will of the collective West… We are fighting for a multipolar world, for the right of sovereign states to live and develop, without being subjected to permanent pressure and threats from the US and its Western allies.”
These statements by the two powers, perhaps the most important in the world, which, for the time being, the United States has not dared to confront directly militarily, are forceful. However, the process of co-opting the United Nations by the United States and its Western allies is well advanced and possibly irreversible. In such a way that, at least at this moment, it is very difficult to see how Russia and China can reverse the current situation without being able to promote, together with the majority world, a genuinely democratic refounding of the UN.
The UN’s mandate is to maintain international peace and security, protect human rights, facilitate the provision of humanitarian aid, promote economic development and guarantee international law. But the United States and its allies have dominated the UN since its founding in 1945. Two years later, in 1947, the United States established the Central Intelligence Agency, the CIA, precisely to actively intervene, globally, in the internal affairs of the countries of the world against the goals of the Charter of the United Nations. From the beginning, it has been a fundamental task of the United States to undermine international law and UN principles and use the organization to whitewash the crimes of the United States and its allies.
For example, a few years after its founding, the UN was busy legitimizing the destruction of Korea between 1950 and 1953. General Curtis Le May, head of the Yankee military aviation, boasted of having completely destroyed all the cities and towns of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. In another example, from 1946 to 1954, the CIA and its allied European agencies financed and armed the genocidal forces of former Ukrainian collaborators with Nazi Germany to unleash a terrorist war in Ukraine, then part of the Soviet Union, that cost the lives of more than of 400,000 people.
From those origins to the present, the United States and its allies have routinely used military and economic terrorism to destabilize legitimate governments that oppose their will. State terror and terrorism have been and continue to be the main features of US foreign policy, from Vietnam to Chile, from Indonesia to Iraq. Examples abound. In Latin America and the Caribbean, Cuba has been a victim of US terrorism for more than sixty years.
In 1986, the highest judicial instance of the United Nations system, the International Court of Justice, condemned the United States for its terrorism against Nicaragua. However, the United Nations system was unable to properly enforce the sentence. On the contrary, with the advance of time since the end of the Cold War, the different offices of the United Nations have been increasingly co-opted to whitewash the terrorist policies of the United States. And this process has intensified with the emergence of China and Russia and what the United States sees as the threat of a more equitable and genuinely democratic world.
There are many abuses of the UN system by Western powers that do not want to accept that their world domination is over. The missions of the so-called blue helmets, the United Nations peacekeepers, have been a very clear example of this. In Haiti they have served as an occupying army to repress the population and impose completely anti-democratic electoral results, to the liking of the United States and its allies.
The same thing happened in Côte d’Ivoire in 2010 when a UN representative, backed by a blue helmet mission made up of French military forces, threw out a ruling by that country’s Supreme Court on an electoral dispute and imposed France’s preferred presidential candidate. The role of the UN military mission in the Congo has also been widely questioned for failing to protect the population from repeated massacres by aggressive forces from Rwanda and Uganda. Similarly, the UN has been unable to stop the suffering of the Palestinian people and their slow-motion genocide by Israel with the support of the United States and the European Union.
But bad faith and lies in favor of the United States characterize not only missions abroad, but also several other important UN organizations. Among other countries, Nicaragua and Venezuela have been victims of bad faith reports from UN offices such as the United Nations High Commission for Refugees, or the High Commissioner for Human Rights. On the other hand, it has been shown that the leadership of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons altered the reports of its technicians on incidents in Syria to falsely blame the government of President Assad for the use of chemical weapons. Another more recent example is the report by the International Atomic Energy Agency on the Zaparozhje nuclear power plant in Ukraine, which completely omitted that all attacks on the nuclear power plant originated from the Ukrainian armed forces and thus blamed the situation on the Russian Federation.
In fact, these UN organizations are extensions of the US Department of State, in much the same way as the Organization of American States. So, the United States and its allies manipulate, corrupt and distort the UN and its structures to achieve their foreign policy goals and hide the truth of their extensive, multiple crimes. They have done so since the founding of this organization. It remains to be seen if it will be possible to rescue the UN and ensure that it fulfills its original objectives, instead of being merely one more instrument that facilitates the dispossession and global error of the Western countries against the majority world.
