Democracy Stillborn: A Look Back As The United Nations Turns 80

The formation of the United Nations in 1945 was introduced to the world as international cooperation to end the scourge of war, but it was dominated by the Western imperial countries and a massive military power - the USSR, which were given veto power over decisions of the General Assembly, made up of the overwhelming majority of the nations of the world, but nevertheless a merely advisory body. To this day, the Security Council nations have exclusive control over questions of war and peace, though their members are the leading international weapons manufacturers, the United States far and away in the lead among them.

Other glaring features of the fledgling "parliament of man" included the fact that it accepted coolie labor and cheap raw materials as the basis of the world economy, redefined colonies as "dependent territories," placing them under Great Power trusteeship until they demonstrated they could govern themselves to the satisfaction of their colonizers, and denied representation to blacks, Puerto Ricans, and indigenous peoples. India had representation, but its delegation was entirely British.  

The great international body began by discarding the guarantees of the Atlantic Charter - freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want, and freedom from fear. At the same time, Washington announced that it would neither propose nor support a declaration of universal human rights. When the General Assembly went ahead and passed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights anyway (1948), including economic security as a basic entitlement, the State Department quickly dismissed it as socialist heresy, successfully lobbying to establish a divided covenant with civil and political rights split off from economic rights. Washington never ratified the Covenant guaranteeing economic security and has relegated it to inferior status ever since.

Attending the U.N.'s opening session as a spokesman for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, W. E. B. DuBois protested the continued abuse of 750 million oppressed people around the world, complaining that there was no provision "even to consider the aggression of a nation against its own colonial peoples," which meant that "at least one-fourth of the inhabitants of the world have no part in it, no democratic rights."

Soviet Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov declared it essential that "dependent countries are enabled as soon as possible to take the path of national independence." The West regarded this as a subversive sentiment. 

When Latin American delegations showed eagerness to resist continued Great Power rule, a U.S. delegate urged Nelson Rockefeller, Assistant Secretary of State For Latin American Affairs, to reign them in: "Your goddamn peanut nations aren't voting right. Go line them up."  

 

Sources: 

Lawrence Wittner, Cold War America, (Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1978) p. 24; David Levering Lewis W. E. B. DuBois: - The Fight For Equality and the American Century, 1919-1963 (Henry Holt and Co. , 2000) pps. 503-10, Diane Shaver Clemens, Yalta (Oxford, 1970) pps. 217, 240-3, Noam Chomsky Towards A New Cold War, (Pantheon,1982) p. 373n. Edward Herman, "Immiseration and Human Rights," Z Magazine, April 1995