The U.N. is a tool of Western imperialism
By V
Based on a report Sept. 9 in New York City explaining Jazz Against Genocide’s actions at the United Nations.
Today marks the end of the final, seventh week of daily pickets outside the United Nations headquarters, spanning over 200 hours of noise demonstrations, confronting complicit politicians attending the General Assembly and teach-ins.
Why were we there?
The UNHQ was built on land stolen twice; from the Indigenous peoples and again from the working class. By the 1940s, this land, called Turtle Bay, was 12 blocks of tenements housing thousands of people, plus those working on eight acres of slaughterhouses and breweries.
The property was “sold” to John D. Rockefeller for what would now be worth $127 million. It was donated to the United Nations for its HQ. Thousands of people were evicted and their homes destroyed; only 270 were documented as resettled.
Much of John D. Rockefeller’s money donations were used for funding Nazi eugenics; millions of dollars were sent to the Kaiser Wilhelm Eugenics Institute from the 1920s well into the 1950s. The institute’s employees included Josef Mengele, known for performing grotesque human experiments in Auschwitz, and Ernst Rudin, who legislated Nazi racial pseudoscience used to justify the holocaust.
The Rockefeller Foundation took until 2021 to admit to these activities. The U.N., however, never did.
The U.N. presents its own Epicurean paradox; it is both powerless and unwilling to intervene in global affairs. For example, the U.N. General Assembly has voted every single year since 1992 against the U.S. blockade of Cuba (now in its 67th year), with no consequences. The five nuclear powers in the U.N. Security Council — U.S., Britain, France, Russia and China — enjoy veto power. This effectively precludes the U.N. action, as these powers never all agree.
Among the Security Council’s first [and rare] decisions to act was rubber-stamping U.S. intervention in the 1950-53 Korean war, directly causing over 4 million deaths to prop up the nearly extinct Syngman Rhee regime.
[Editor’s note: Until 1971 the People’s Republic of China was not allowed to take China’s permanent seat in the UNSC; the Soviet Union was boycotting the vote related to Korea. So the U.S., Britain, France pushed through support for the U.N. invasion of Korea in 1950.]
When Patrice Lumumba moved left in his struggle against Belgian colonialism in the Congo in 1960, the U.N. instead sent spies and saboteurs, shutting down radio stations and airfields to prevent calls for aid, eventually permitting his murder. His U.N.-enabled Katangan assassins dissolved his body in acid. Their intervention began decades of genocide.
The U.N. colonially occupied Haiti from 2004 to 2014. U.N. troops terrorized the population under the pretense of controlling drug gangs. Soldiers recruited from Brazil confessed to “having to murder a Haitian civilian each day.”
U.N. troops from Nepal wound up infecting 90,000 Haitians with cholera, from which 20,000 Haitians died. It was after screenings were dropped for Nepalese occupation soldiers and toxic waste was dumped into rivers from which Haitians obtained their drinking water. Only a few Haitian people could afford treatment; Haitians were forced to work 12-hour workdays for only $120 a month.
The U.N. did nothing to prevent U.S. involvement in Vietnam, Iraq or Afghanistan. These interventions involved more than six million civilian casualties.
In its internal workings, the U.N. is a hive of nepotistic horse-trading. In 2015, Saudi Arabia hired eight executioners, but easily became a signatory to the Human Rights Council by buying votes from Britain. Imperial powers are unobstructed in flouting their own rules.
Which brings us to Palestine. Among the first of the U.N.’s atrocities was Resolution 181 in 1947, approving the illegal grant of Palestine to Zionists and effectively starting the Nakba, displacing a million people. The U.N.’s protective force facilitated this and admitted ‘Isr**l’ to the U.N. a mere two years later. The The U.N. has routinely let ‘Isr**l’ mock international law for 78 years, rubber stamping the 1993 Oslo Accords, further reducing Palestinian land from 47% to 22% and quadrupling Isr**li settlements since.
The International Court of Justice is an oppressor. It has been deployed exclusively to bully nations resisting western imperialism, while the imperial powers evade sanctions. It failed to act against the 2004 West Bank Wall, U.S. aggression in Nicaragua and the current genocide in Gaza with now hundreds of thousands of casualties.
Why do the imperial powers evade sanctions? It is an explicit tenet of the ICJ’s founding documents that the group can block jurisdiction over themselves.
Few are aware of the Committee to Protect Journalists, which is silent on the over 300 journalists killed in Gaza, a number exceeding that of journalists killed in World Wars I and II, the Korean and Vietnam wars combined. In 2015 the committee refused to protect employees of the Islamic, anti-imperialist Crescent Magazine and exists only to propagandize journalists ‘targeted’ by nations opposing U.S. imperialism.
UNHCR, UNICEF and UNESCO [allegedly material aid and cultural organizations] provide propaganda for the lie of U.N. benevolence, oppressing the world while carrying neoliberal “cultural enrichment.” The International Monetary Fund, closely tied to the U.N., coerces austerity on developing nations, forcing them into dependency.
Making appeals to the U.N., among which is the current push to enforce Legislation 377 [allowing the General Assembly to act if the Security Council won’t], is to legitimize an institution that has never acted against western interests. To rely on it as the agent of Palestinian liberation is to eat soup with a fork. The U.N. is an explicit agent of Zionist, settler-colonial imperialism.
Meaningful resistance to imperialism requires the mass action of revolution, not liberal attempts at reforming an institution explicitly designed to stifle dissent.
F**k the U.N.!
