Is It Time To Get Out Of The United Nations?

"Those who hammer their guns into plows will plow for those who do not." — Thomas Jefferson

You never know who’s going to be on the other end of a toll-free robo call with a political message. Two days ago, it was former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee. Well, a robo version of him, anyway. He was calling me to join him and Citizens United in–”once and for all–getting the United Nations out of our country.” According to Huckabee and his Citizens United friends, “defunding of the United Nations is long overdue. We should take a jackhammer to U.N. Headquarters, kick the UN out of the US and save American taxpayers $3 billion annually.” Huckabee says that the UN is “an absolute disgrace, and it’s time to cut them off.” Also, if I stay on the line and sign the petition, along with thousands of other patriotic Americans, I’ll receive a complimentary copy of Huckabee’s book, ironically titled “Do the Right Thing.”

Huckabee continued:

“It’s time to say enough of the American taxpayer’s dollar being spent on something that may have been a noble idea, but has become a disgrace!” said Huckabee. “It has become the international equivalent of ACORN and it’s time to say enough!”

Let’s end the diplomatic excesses that these people enjoy,” he said. “Let any country that is willing to spend the money that the United States is hosting–let them have it. Give it to the Saudis and let these diplomats suck the sand out of the Saudi desert for a few summers and see if that’s where they’d like to go, and make their ridiculous speeches.”

On the grounds of the U.N Headquarters in New York City stands a statue with the Biblical quotation from Isaiah 2:4; “They shall beat their swords into plowshares and their shields into pruning hooks.” The actual quotation from Isaiah reads:

“And He will judge between the nations,

And will render decisions for many peoples;

And they will hammer their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks.

Nation will not lift up sword against nation,

And never again will they learn war”

People have been using this quote from Isaiah for centuries and we still have war and strife in the world. You can hammer your swords into plowshares but if the other fellow does not you will be conquered and subjected to tyranny or as Thomas Jefferson so aptly stated; “Those who hammer their guns into plows will plow for those who do not.”

Jefferson, although considered an intellectual, understood human nature and the way of the world. Jefferson was enamored with the French Revolution, even to the extent of its violence and tyrannical nature. He eventually became disenchanted with the violence and the fact that it was becoming a revolution of men, not law. He saw that men were attempting to replace God in that they could solve all of man’s problems if only the right men were in charge.

Frederick Bastiat wrote in his famous essay, The Law, of the fallacy of Rousseau’s thinking:

“Be that as it may, Rousseau invests the creators, organizers, directors, legislators, and controllers of society with a terrible responsibility. He is, therefore, most exacting with them:

He who would dare to undertake the political creation of a people ought to believe that he can, in a manner of speaking, transform human nature; transform each individual—who, by himself, is a solitary and perfect whole—into a mere part of a greater whole from which the individual will henceforth receive his life and being. Thus the person who would undertake the political creation of a people should believe in his ability to alter man’s constitution; to strengthen it; to substitute for the physical and independent existence received from nature, an existence which is partial and moral. In short, the would-be creator of political man must remove man’s own forces and endow him with others that are naturally alien to him.

Poor human nature! What would become of a person’s dignity if it were entrusted to the followers of Rousseau?”

After the First World War the victors, mainly France, England, and the United States formed the League of Nations. While the League of Nations could celebrate its successes, the League had every reason to examine its failures and where it went wrong. These failures, especially in the 1930’s, cruelly exposed the weaknesses of the League of Nations and played a part in the outbreak of World War Two in 1939. During the 1920’s the failures of the League of Nations were essentially small-scale and did not threaten world peace. However they did set a marker — that the League of Nations could not solve problems if the protagonists did not ‘play the game’.

The League was an example of men attempting to alter human nature and national interests. Henry Cabot Lodge saw this very clearly when he led the fight in the United States Senate to oppose Wilson’s grand plan to have the United States join the League and place our sovereignty under a body not in line with our Constitution or our national interest.

Germany, Italy, Japan, and the Soviet Union simply ignored the League and refused to play the game. While England and France were hammering their swords into plowshares Germany, Italy and Japan were rearming and building the greatest land and naval forces the world had ever seen. Even to the eve of World War Two very few politicians and intellectuals could see approaching apocalypse. In England only Winston Churchill had the foresight to see what would happen, but he was like John the Baptist — a voice crying in the wilderness.

He knew the League was a feckless debating organization whose members were more concerned with their own self-interest than in “making the world safe for democracy” — whose democracy. In Italy there was the corporatist fascism of Mussolini and Italy’s invasion of Abyssinia. In Germany there was the tyranny of the Hitler’s National Socialist Workers Party (Nazis) and his reoccupation of the Rhineland, the annexation of Austria and the Sudetenland. In Japan there was the imperialistic expansion of the Japanese empire into to China, Manchuria, and Southeast Asia (Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere). And in the Soviet Union there was Stalin with his constant purges and invasion of Finland in 1939. All of these parties joined in the Spanish Civil War were they played their game while the impotent League stood on the sideline rooting for one side or the other.

After World War II the victorious nations decided to try once again to from an organization that would hammer the world’s swords into plowshares. They met at a place called Dumbarton Oaks, near Washington, D.C. in 1944 to lay the groundwork for another global organization that would be called the United Nations. Since that day the U.N. has grown to an over-bloated bureaucracy consisting of 192 member states and a plethora of alphabet agencies and directorates. The last nation to join the U.N. was Switzerland in 2002, some 57 years after the final adoption of its charter.

According to Professor R.J. Rummel, of the University of Hawaii, who writes extensively of democide and genocide:

“From 1945 and up to 1987, about 76,000,000 people have been murdered in cold blood by one regime or another, around thirteen times the number of Jews murdered in the Holocaust. Most of this democide has been done for political reasons (reasons of state or power), but also much of it has been outright genocide (the killing of people by virtue of their ethnicity, race, religion, or nationality — for the difference between democide and genocide, click here). From 1900 to 1987, about 39,000,000 people, including Jews in the Holocaust, were killed in genocide throughout the world. I do not have a breakdown of this total for the post-WWII years, but it seems that the proportion of genocide to overall democide has remained roughly the same. If so, genocide since the war possibly accounted for near 20,000,000 of those murdered.

What has happened since 1987, the cutoff year for my statistics? Democide has continued, of course, as any newspapers reader can attest. Possibly 500,000 to 1,000,000 Rwandans have been slaughtered and around 2,000,000 have been starved to death in North Korea in its continuing famine (which for practical purposes is intentional). Possibly in each of the countries of Iraq, Sudan, Somalia, and Burundi, hundreds of thousands have been murdered; and lesser numbers have been so killed in Kosovo, Bosnia, Algeria, Angola, Ethiopia, Uganda, Congo (Kinshasa), Zaire, China, Indonesia, Cambodia, Afghanistan, Indonesia, and North Korea (aside from the political famine). Then there are Azerbaijan, Liberia, Nigeria, Myanmar, Turkey, Russia, Syria, Sri Lanka, and Iran in which may be a few hundreds or thousands have been killed since 1987. And no doubt there are other governments that deserve to be mentioned for their democides, but have so far escaped attention by the media.”

In all of these years with its bloated bureaucracy and extravagant expenditure the U.N. has been ineffective in preventing any of these murders, mostly committed by a tyrannical government. Their record on human rights is deplorable, yet they constantly criticize the United States and Israel for factitious violations as in their condemnation of Arizona’s passage of a bill to identify illegal immigrants. They make no such criticisms Mexico, whose immigration policies are much more draconian, and they allow dictatorial nations like Libya and Nigeria, and Pakistan to sit on the Human Rights Council. What a fraud!

Today the United States contributes about $3 billion dollars annually for the United Nations’ general operating costs and an untold amount for its peacekeeping efforts ($6.35 billion in 2009) — 22% of its general budget and 27% of its peacekeeping operations. The next closest contributor to the United States is Japan at 16.6% with the United Kingdom and Germany coming in at 6.6% and 8.6% respectively.

According to a Fox News report:

“The United States, by far the leading contributor to the United Nations, overpaid its share of the U.N. peacekeeping budget for 2010-2011, but budget-cutters in Congress did not learn about the full extent of the credits in the U.S.’s favor until February 2011, during the battle with the Obama administration over 2011 budget cuts, Fox News has learned.

“We didn’t know we had a lot of these credits until we asked about them,” said one congressional source, describing the budget cutting process. “At least we’ve taken away the ability of the administration and the U.N. to accumulate them.”

Peacekeeping savings, including the overpayments, amount to $286.7 million—more than three-quarters of $377 million in cuts to various U.N. payments that are included in the controversial $38 billion in 2011 budget reductions that Congress approved on Thursday.

The $377 million in U.N. cuts is a comparative drop in the bucket compared to the roughly $6.35 billion that the U.S. sent to the U.N. in 2009, according to the last comprehensive set of figures compiled by the Obama Administration.”

What peacekeeping efforts? Would they be the failed efforts at peacekeeping between the Arabs and Israel or the great job they did in Rwanda? How about the former Yugoslavia where they did nothing to prevent ethnic cleansing? Or in Sierra Leone where some 500 peacekeepers were taken hostage by the RUF forces and a private mercenary, Executive Outcomes, was called in to put down the ongoing genocide. EO did what the UN could not and then after a hail of criticism by the one-worlder intellectuals EO was dismissed and the genocide began anew.

In another recently reported instance U.N. peacekeepers have been ejected from the Ivory Coast for trading sex for food. A Fox News report states:

“United Nations peacekeepers in Ivory Coast enticed underage girls in a poor part of the West African nation to exchange sex for food, according to a United States Embassy cable released by WikiLeaks.

The cable written in January 2010 focuses on the behavior of Beninese peacekeepers stationed in the western town of Toulepleu, an area that has been at the crosshairs of the nation's 10-year-long conflict.

A random poll of 10 underage girls in Toulepleu by aid group Save The Children U.K. in 2009 found that eight performed sexual acts for Benin peacekeepers on a regular basis in order to secure their most basic needs. "Eight of the 10 said they had ongoing sexual relationships with Beninese soldiers in exchange for food or lodging," the diplomat wrote in the cable, citing information shared with the embassy by a protection officer.

On Tuesday, United Nations spokesman Michel Bonnardeaux confirmed that in April, 16 Beninese peacekeepers were repatriated to Benin and are barred from serving in the U.N. following a yearlong investigation.

"We see it as a command and control problem," said Bonnardeaux who spoke by telephone from New York. Of the 16, 10 were commanders and the rest were soldiers.

The commanders, he said, "failed to maintain an environment that prevents sexual exploitation and abuse."

Sexual misconduct by U.N. troops has been reported in a number of countries including Congo, Cambodia and Haiti -- as well as in an earlier incident involving Moroccan peacekeepers in Ivory Coast.

In 2007, a 730-strong battalion of peacekeepers from Morocco was asked to suspend its activities in the northern Ivorian city of Bouake after the U.N. received allegations of sexual misconduct involving local girls.”

From these reports the U.N. peacekeepers while inept at keeping the peace are very proficient in getting a piece. This has been going on for a number of years while the U.N. goes on its merry way pointing fingers at the United States and Israel.

While the American taxpayer is stressed out over the state of our economy the U.N. in its unbridled arrogance has put forth a plan to raise the pay of the overpaid its bureaucrats. According to a Fox News report:

“The United States has issued a strong protest to the United Nations about a cost of living increase for U.N. employees in New York City, and demanded that the U.N. roll back the pay hike.

The protest came just a few days after Fox News revealed the hike in U.N. paychecks, just five months after Secretary General Ban Ki-moon ordered his top officials to cut their budgets by 3 percent in the face of a financial “emergency situation” facing the world body.

The U.S. State Department said it was particularly aggrieved at the “inappropriate” pay hike, which an official said amounted to 3 per cent annually, in that salaries for equivalent levels of U.N. government civil servants- were frozen for two years by President Barack Obama in 2010, as an austerity measure. (The U.S. federal paychecks which are taxable, are also about 20% lower than take-home paychecks of similar U.N. staffers in New York, which additionally are tax free.)

The U.S. protest was delivered in the form of a letter from Joseph Torsella, the State Department’s U.N. Ambassador for management and reform, to the head of the U.N.’s International Civil Service Commission, which sets pay scales and cost of living allowances. Click here to read the letter.

Torsella decried the cost of living hike “at this time of global fiscal austerity, when Member State governments everywhere are implementing drastic austerity measures such as layoffs, service reductions, revenue increases, and reductions in pay and benefits for civil servants.”

In the process, Torsella noted that the pay hike covered about 4,800 U.N. staffers—more than 50 percent more than the U.N. itself told Fox News were affected in response to questions for the original story.

Torsella also noted that the Commission is supposed to take into account the pay and living allowance scales of a benchmark civil service when deciding on its increases—and in the case of the U.N.’s staff, the benchmark pay scale is that of the U.S. civil service. He then “respectfully requested” the cost of living be rolled back.”

In my final example I refer to a report that the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), the world body's front-line humanitarian agency, has increased its planned spending to a little over $3 billion for next year — a 36 percent hike.

A report by Fox News states:

“The spending increase for 2010 comes atop another whopping increase of 38.4 percent this year, a total jump of 88.2 percent. The combined hikes mean that UNHCR has virtually doubled its budget since 2008 — and intends to keep spending at roughly similar levels in 2011, unless additional refugee emergencies drive the price tag still higher. Click here to see the projected budget totals.

Along the way, the agency hopes to add an additional 3,000 people to its payroll, raising the total number of staff from 4,824 in 2009 to 7,782 in 2010. Virtually all of these new positions, the agency says, will be located in the field, where UNHCR does its relief work, rather than in its administrative headquarters. UNHCR will be a lot more expensive, but it claims it will also be a lot more efficient.

The spending spiral for UNHCR, which is funded by voluntary pledges, is bound to mean that the U.S., by far the refugee agency's biggest funder, will be writing even bigger checks — as it's already doing. So far this year, the U.S. had contributed about $639.8 million to UNHCR — up by about $129.6 million over 2008.”

What makes the huge growth in the UNHCR budget particularly noteworthy, however, is the fact that it does not represent an expansion in its refugee clientele but a major re-engineering of the way that the agency thinks about doing business. In effect, UNHCR is building out a major new social welfare element to an agency that the public thinks of primarily as a front-line relief group that doles out emergency food and shelter to populations displaced across national borders by drought, famine or war.

I doubt if any of these reported incidents and failures of the United Nations were part of the vision of the globalists at Dumbarton Oaks. These are just a few examples of unseen consequences when believe they can change the world if they just try a little harder. What was once an organization where nations could come together and debate global issues the United Nations has turned into a welfare agency more concerned with redistribution wealth and imposing its imbecilic and hair-brained ideas on climate change, social justice, and meddling into the internal laws of its member states.

I will not dispute that the United Nations may have a few worthwhile agencies within its bureaucratic halls. Perhaps these one or two agencies like the World Health Organization could be supported by governments as stand-alone agencies serving the health needs of poorer nations. However, they would have no policing powers and could consult with and provide information to other health departments like our CDC.

As for the remaining and majority of the directorates within the United Nations it’s time for the United States to bail out. Like the League of Nations the time and usefulness of the United Nations is long past, if it ever had one to begin with.