Finally, someone had to say it, and our U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, Jeane Kirkpatrick, is the courageous one who spoke the truth out loud. American influence in the United Nations is trivial and we are generally labeled as the world’s “main villain.”
That’s the thanks we get for donating the land, building the UN headquarters, and subsidizing the UN’s extravagance to the tune of a billion dollars a year. Why do we allow our nation to be kicked around by the ungrateful, year after year after year?
Mrs. Kirkpatrick put her finger on the source of the problem. The Soviet Union has consistently framed the issues in anti-Western ways. More precisely, “the Soviet Union has succeeded in depicting the world as a great class struggle — the poor many against the rich few. Since we’re the richest of all, we come out as the main villain.”
It isn’t any accident that the Soviet Union is dominant in the United Nations. It was all planned that way. The second UN Secretary General, Trygve Lie, let the secret out of the closet when he wrote his book called “In the Cause of Peace.”
Lie wrote in this book that the Soviets were given a monopoly and perpetual control over the second most important position in the UN Secretariat, the post called Under Secretary General for Political and Security Council Affairs. This throttle-hold on the UN was arranged in a secret agreement made in London in 1945 between Molotov and the U.S. Secretary of State Edward Stettinius (when Alger Hiss was one of his advisers).
The proof of the agreement is the fact that it has been kept throughout all 36 years of the UN’s existence. Here is the list of the thirteen consecutive Communists to hold the position of Under Secretary General for Political and Security Council Affairs starting in 1945: Arkady Sobolev, Constantin E. Zinchenko, Ilya S. Tchernychev, Dragos]aQ Protitch, Anatoly Dobrynin, Georgy Petrovitch Arkadev, Eugeny Kiselev, Vladimir P. Suslov, Alexi Efremovitch Nesternko, Leonid N. Kutakov, Arkady N. Shevchenko, Mikhail D. Sytenko, and Viacheslav Ustinov. All were Russian Communists except the one Yugoslav Communist, Dragoslav Protitch, who was permitted to hold the position for a brief time during the period of Tito’s total subservience to Moscow.
The Department of Political and Security Council Affairs has control over all UN military, political, nuclear, and disarmament questions. When Shevchenko defected to the United States in 1978, leaving his prestigious $76,000-a-year UN job, he became a most valuable source of intelligence information on Soviet espionage.
The United Nations was founded in 1945 on a Charter which states that its first objective is “to maintain international peace and security.” Since then, we fought a three-year UN war in Korea costing 33,000 American lives, and another ten-year war in Vietnam costing 50,000 American lives.
The second purpose spelled out in the UN Charter is “to develop friendly relations among nations based on respect for the principle of equal rights and self-determination of peoples.” Yet the UN did nothing at all about the Soviet invasions of Hungary and Czechoslovakia, the Red Chinese invasion of Tibet, India’s invasion of Goa, Turkey’s invasion of Cyprus, or the recent Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.
Whole nations have died while the diplomats in the UN talked and continued their social round of an estimated 2,000 alcoholic parties per year (with tax-free liquor). Nearly half of every UN dollar is spent on high salaries, new buildings, office furniture, and travel, all under the heading “administrative overhead.”
Any remaining claim for the UN as a moral force was abandoned when it expelled the Republic of China on Taiwan and gave its seat to the Mao-Zedong regime of Red China, which murdered at least 50 million people. The 156 members certainly aren’t “united,” and many are so small they can hardly be called “nations.”
From the founding of the UN, the United States has been handicapped by illusions about peace and concord which precluded rational diplomacy. At the same time, the Soviet Union used the United Nations as an instrument to serve its ambitions. So the United Nations has been a cow fed by the United States and milked by the Russians.
It’s too late for reform. If America has too much pride to admit that the Soviets got the better of us in the UN, or too much sentiment to bury old illusions, then at least we should insist that another nation host the UN headquarters for the next generation. Let some other country become the espionage capital of the world.
