To thwart a large public movement by leading its few spokesmen to an empty UN and locking them in must have seemed to our governing forces a surprisingly easy task; and the facility with which it has been twice accomplished remains a major puzzle of contemporary affairs. On both occasions national interests succeeded in diverting the energies of internationalists to the maintenance of institutions where nationalism reigns supreme, short-circuiting an important articulation of public opinion and exposure.
In the UN, as in the league, a perfect paradox was created: an institution that would proclaim standards only to undermine them; that would profess beneficence while condoning—actively or by silence, or through inconclusive debate—every form of barbarism. These apostasies were enclosed in an aura of righteousness in total contrast to the realities dictating them; and the UN emerged as a temple of official good intentions, a place where governments go to church, safely removed—by agreed untruth, procedural complexity, and sheer boredom—from the high risk of public involvement.
It was essential that the world’s public be disengaged: the public, with its irreverent sharp questions, its appetite for exposure, its sporadic interest in justice, its vulgar curiosity regarding disbursement of its money. The UN enterprise was interpreted to populations through their governments. And between the institution and the public a buffer zone was laid out, of accredited well-wishers, whose role, on pain of treachery to world peace, was to put the organization’s views to the world rather than force the world’s emergencies on the organization. This protective screen was reinforced by theoreticians whose raison d’être derived from taking UN absurdities seriously; by those whose social strivings drew them to a place of luxury and incessant entertainments; and by accredited journalists as likely to reveal the organization’s essence as a White House press corps to uncover Watergate. The public had no role in, or information on, the selection of UN leaders and was usually unaware of their existence prior to appointment.
Assemblies, councils, and committees provided the illusion of concern, emitting resolutions rarely implemented and documents seldom read. (UN headquarters alone now produces well over half a billion pages of words annually.) Such concerted action as did take place was that sanctioned by, and inevitable to, power politics and intergovernmental negotiation. As planetary emergencies intensified, so the sterile conference bodies and chaotic agencies of the UN proliferated—lest the rational impetus of survival, deprived of even these unproductive outlets, should take itself elsewhere and acquire force and coherence.
The public has little way of knowing, even now, that the mammoth UN congresses—such as those, in 1974, on the Law of the Sea and on Population—are a complex means of actually deferring urgent international actions while temporarily assuaging rising world apprehensions. The fixed pattern of these wasteful exercises is to disband with the sole explicit agreement of reconvening. Nor can citizens be aware that each new UN agency, such as that now proposed on the world food crisis, will inevitably be an institutional shambles—strangled at birth by national wire-pulling and impenetrable bureaucracy, incapacitated by corrupt appointments and monumental maladministration—with any achievement in gross disproportion to opportunity, emergency and vast expenditures of public funds.
In their anxiety to lull public inquiry, UN leaders have persistently misrepresented the organization’s expenses by citing administrative costs only and suppressing operational ones. Thus the New York Times informed us recently that “the UN budget for the two-year period 1974–75 has been approved at $584,831,000.”4 This is like equating defense spending with Pentagon salaries. The actual UN budget for that period will be in the neighborhood of four billion dollars, exclusive of large national counterpart funds. (As to salaries, it may be mentioned that UN undersecretaries-general, who are thick on the ground, receive $65,000 per annum, exclusive of extensive allowances.)
Significantly, the public’s original hopes of the organization have been consistently derided by the UN itself. The theme of a “jejune” world citizenry, placing utopian aspirations in international agencies, curiously recurs throughout UN histories and proclamations. Conversely, any reasonable inquirer into the UN’s failures will find himself subjected to a barrage of statutory excuses bearing no relation whatever to humanity, logic, or survival.
Public expectations, which are standards in themselves and the very fuel of human progress, were annihilated in the scorched-earth policy by which world powers gained time for their own expedients. “Limited” wars, civil strife, and intranational subversion have multiplied, generally without UN comment. Vietnam and Cambodia have been torn to bloody shreds, virtually undiscussed at the United Nations. Repressive or unrepresentative regimes have on occasion been legitimized by the UN in the name of independence, while states such as Bangladesh have been refused nationhood until they claimed it by force. Every form of persecution and terrorism has proliferated while the UN Commission on Human Rights mired itself deeper in ludicrous procedures blatantly favoring governments, and deferred its agenda items for another year.
The invaluable lost ground of public expectation is not recoverable. Any future public call for global systems will not come as trust or aspiration but as an imperative, and to a violent accompaniment already being tuned.
The irresistible forces—social, political, economic, and Malthusian—that were denied rational expression at the United Nations went on, however, to manifest themselves in unprecedented levels of global crisis, in separate collective machinery, and in hugely powerful material forms remote from public knowledge or control. By creating, at the UN, a shrine of national sovereignty—“a United Governments Organization,” as Solzhenitsyn calls it—where nationalism would be venerated long after its political and economic supremacy had dissipated, world power was free to bypass national structures with multinational operations far beyond the public field of vision.5
In the 1920s, H. G. Wells foresaw that world government might derive its missing authority from the global nature of modern science and commerce; and that this phenomenon, if exposed and seized upon in its early stages, could be channeled to the service of the world order. Reviewing Wells’s The World of William Clissold in 1927, Keynes agreed that practical internationalism would absolutely require such an impetus, but pointed to the absence of any incentive to global outlook on the part of the captains of industry: “They lack altogether the kind of motive, the possession of which, if they had it, could be expressed by saying that they had a creed. They have no creed…[other than] money.”6
Then and later, Keynes was—as Barnet and Müller point out in their recent Global Reach—“assuming a market in which national banks and national corporations transacted their business within the context of national boundaries.”7 It was Wells who glimpsed a future need of commercial forces to preserve and extend their global power without the inconsequential irruptions of nationalism. This prescience and this chance were cast away. Multinational commerce burgeoned, unregulated, as a new world despotism while, in the name of supranationalism, the dead horse of the United Nations was assiduously flogged between the shafts.
Mercantile powers were certainly long aware of the immediate advantages to themselves of neutralizing any effort at public jurisdiction over multinational activities. And the relation of corporation interests to the impotence of the United Nations is a vast question yet to be explored.
Occasional whiffs of sulfur rise from this region. In a volume of memoirs not otherwise conspicuous for candor, Lord Gladwyn remarks of the first UN secretary-general, Trygve Lie, what was well known to his unhappy staff at the time: “The people he liked associating with for the most part were American tycoons.”8 Billionaires in kindly mood have ever been banked around United Nations dinner tables and associated with the organization in its most innocuous “motherhood” aspect—and it may be noted that, through the bounty of John D. Rockefeller Jr., and Arthur Houghton Jr., respectively, the secretary-general’s office premises and his residence ar
e both provided by American industrialists.
A peculiarly squalid item of Lie’s disastrous term was a collusion with IBM, through “one of Mr. Watson’s top ranking assistants,” to spy on and discredit the UN staff chairman—who, by no coincidence, was at the time exposing Lie’s illicit collaborations with the State Department, the FBI, and Joseph McCarthy; and who was soon to be dismissed without cause. (The disgusting 1950 secret report on this matter from UN Chief of Protocol Jehan de Noue to Assistant Secretary-General Byron Price gives a succinct picture of United Nations hierarchy; and indeed deserves framing—a process with which it is, in another sense, closely associated.)
At the behest of oil companies, Dag Hammarskjöld suppressed circulation of a UN report on oil pricing in the 1950s. In 1968 a crucial revision of international law by the UN’s Maritime Organization sanctioned deeper loading of tankers—an action immensely profitable to oil companies and calamitous to the ecology of oceans.9 (True to the UN paradox, such a development supplies the perfect pendant to the UN Environment Program, suffocating in procedural restraints and internal discord in its skyscraper in Nairobi.) Corporation heads have successfully intervened through UN leaders to shape, to their own advantage, the forms of UN assistance to developing countries—for example, in modifying UN advice to new nations on negotiations with foreign investors. The head of the UN Development Program is no ecologically minded futurist but, traditionally, an American from the business world. (The incumbent, seventy-year-old Rudolph Peterson, is a former president to the Bank of America.)
It need only be added that an organ of the UN hypertrophy has the multinationals under “scrutiny.”
This minefield will presumably be investigated eventually; along with such areas as the UN Secretariat’s long, secret, and profoundly scandalous relations with national surveillance agencies such as the FBI.10
To maintain negativism on a moral pedestal is a feat of balance requiring auxiliaries. And to this end there developed, from the early days of the League [of Nations], that paradox within the paradox, the international civil servant: an essential but disregarded element in the failure of our international institutions: “The fact is, we are all going mad here—some quickly, some slowly, but all going the same way…. We shall do our work just as well, possibly better, when we are quite mad, and none of the governments will need to sacrifice any of their sane civil servants to take their places, and we shall continue to draw the pay.”11
Thus, in 1928, League of Nations officials analyzed their functions in Alice Ritchie’s admirable novel The Peacemakers. Closing his eyes to “a peculiarly abominable situation in the Near East,” Miss Ritchie’s ineffectual secretary-general (a portrait of Sir Eric Drummond) vaguely wonders, “What was the good of the [league] if it placed self-preservation before its plain duty? He did not know; it was hardly his province. He was there to keep it in being.”12 And the league was of course defunct a dozen years later.
This moral lesson was lost on the persuaded apostles of negativism for whom the United Nations civil service has been such a magnet; but not, by any means, on the organization’s member states. The lengths to which governments have gone to preclude the hair-shirt Secretariat (nominally decreed by the UN Charter) make exquisite irony of the everlasting chant of UN leaders that they are necessarily the pawns of national pressures. Illicit recruitment clearances, dehumanization, retributions, rewards, and a flooding of the upper echelons with biased and incompetent national appointees guarantee that the United Nations will never acquire that incalculable power generated by the assumption of responsibility.
Rationalizations of UN inaction have grown ever more grotesque in the face of world events. In the past year there has been a marked effort by UN leaders to characterize the ancient principles of law and common humanity set forth in the UN Charter and Universal Declaration of Human Rights as cultural sophistries of the Western world—as narrow concepts, in fact, that the UN is too large-minded to apply indiscriminately. Over the title of “Spokesman for the Secretary-General,” the UN’s André Lewin qualified his sworn support for freedom of information (“by this I mean fair information”), as follows:
I do not feel, however, that belonging to the Western world and adhering to its ideology, I should impose my point of view on an organization where many countries have different conceptions, ideologies and interests…. I do not feel that an organization representing billions of people, for whom freedom of information has not the same meaning and importance as for westerners, should work according to western standards…. We should try to find and follow a way in the middle.13
This theory of the golden mean as a justification for abrogating basic standards of course originates with governments, who enthusiastically promote the view that populations unable to articulate their grievances are not desirous of redressing them. In the field of information, the “way in the middle” has recently led to UN censorship against Solzhenitsyn and Confucius.
United Nations archives are a repository of hundreds of thousands of unavailing petitions to the world custodians of human rights. Amnesty International has, over the years, submitted thousands of documented cases of persecution to the UN without receiving action on one of them. In 1973 UNESCO withdrew facilities from an Amnesty conference protesting torture lest offense be given to governments engaged in that activity.14 A few weeks later, the UN Human Rights Commission made a backstage agreement to play down torture in Chile in exchange for silence on Solzhenitsyn and the Soviet dissidents.15 In this area of human rights, above all, the organs have been mercilessly employed to thwart mankind’s natural expressions of pity, decency and civilization.
On the apparent assumption of “better too late than never,” the City University of New York has recently issued a study of the political strangulation of the United Nations Secretariat.16 As stated by its authors, it is limited in scope, although this would not account for fundamental omissions and errors. It is indicative that this report, which emanates from the UN buffer zone, does not even consider the relation of citizens to the United Nations: the public is mentioned only in passing, as the passive recipient of a UN “image.”17 The United Nations budget is given, yet again, only in administrative costs (as “$225 million”).18 And so on. What is present, and accurate, is doubtless well worth saying over again for the record. The illusion, however, that the deeply intended disorder of the UN Augean stables can be set to rights by the cosmetic measures, now thirty years overdue, enumerated in this report cannot be indulged. It is inherently impossible for the United Nations to embrace the administrative atonement prescribed in this and similar parochial studies, nor will events permit of any such improbable and time-consuming reversal.
Some years ago I wrote that “the present United Nations is a veritable haystack of last straws, without resilience for the unexpected.”19 Since then, world convulsions have brought the UN back into public view. Though confusedly related to recent shocks, the public’s current disillusionment with the United Nations arises also from a cumulative awareness of the organization’s unreality amid contemporary events. Governments, whatever their bluster, will not want the dissolution of an institution that must, in this global era, be in some manner reconstituted to their disadvantage; and the highly dubious billion-dollar UN refuge under construction at Vienna testifies to huge vested interests in the status quo. It is for the public to insist that the present travesty be superseded, at this eleventh hour, by responsive world systems.
“There is,” said Machiavelli quoting Dante, “no order without knowledge of the past.”20 It may be added that exposure sets in motion its own solutions.
THE LEAGUE OF FRIGHTENED MEN
Why the UN Is so Useless
To act with doubleness towards a man whose own conduct was double, was so near an approach to virtue that it deserved to be called by no meaner name than diplomacy.
—George Eliot, Felix Holt, the Radical
Something like this view of George Eliot’s may have influen
ced Iranian leaders in their contemptuous dismissal of Kurt Waldheim last week in Tehran.1 There was no reason for any of the prevailing factions in Iran to negotiate with an official who had ignored the atrocities of the previous regime, and had made himself an eager instrument of the shah’s policy of buying respectability through donations to overseas institutions. Year after year, as Amnesty International presented documented reports of gross violations in Iran, the United Nations Secretariat—supposed custodian of human rights—courted funds from the shah and, in return, helped him to furbish his image.
Returning from Tehran, an unnerved Waldheim appeared on ABC’s Issues and Answers. He indignantly denied that the United Nations had done nothing about the abuses of the shah and SAVAK [secret police]. “I received hundreds and thousands of complaints, and we always dealt with them. We sent them to the…[Waldheim pauses here]—and I even spoke to the Iranians. When I was in Iran two years ago, I did raise the question, but the then authorities said they wouldn’t discuss the matter with me.”2 This tragic charade—referring reports of atrocities back to the offending government for consideration—is indeed standard UN procedure. It is augmented by the UN Commission on Human Rights, a discredited body presided over for a time by Princess Ashraf, the sister of the shah.
Princess Ashraf recently placed a full-page ad in some American newspapers to remind Waldheim about his past appreciation of her brother’s favors.3 Her tactless aide-memoire included a photograph of a jubilant Waldheim clutching the princess with one hand and a large Pahlavi check with the other. It quoted rhapsodic tributes to the humanitarian ideas of the Pahlavis from Waldheim and his assistant, Mrs. Helvi Sipila. Princess Ashraf chaired a variety of UN rights bodies in the 1970s, and was given a leading role in the chaotic International Women’s Conference held at Mexico City in 1975 and made possible by Iranian munificence. Until events overtook them, there were plans for a UN training institute for women in Iran, with a proposed Iranian budget of one million dollars. Despite this seeming preoccupation with women’s rights, Kurt Waldheim demonstrated massive discrimination against women within his own staff. Princess Ashraf showed no support for the Iranian women who bravely marched in thousands last year in Tehran to protest repression by the ayatollah.
We Need Silence to Find Out What We Think Page 14
