Posted on 05/11/2006 5:26:43 PM PDT by Tailgunner Joe
The concept of the United Nations springs from the utopian doctrine of socialism, and was first manifested in the efforts of socialists to create and sustain Socialist Internationals.
Socialism, from its beginnings, presumed to be a universal religion based on atheistic materialism. Henri de Saint-Simon, its first codifier, wrote "The New Christianity" acknowledging that socialism had to be more than a mechanical economic doctrine, that it had to become the cultural supplanter of Christianity, which was the unifying principle of Western civilization. His colleague and successor, Auguste Comte, created The Religion of Humanity, something akin to ethical humanism. Comte confidently expected that his religion would be so compellingly rational that everyone in the world would come to France to study under him and implement his promulgations of right conduct.
The universal religious pretension of socialism rests upon the assumptions that only physical labor produces value, that the workers of the world are the source of all the world's valuable output, and that the capitalists, labor's class-war enemy, have stolen what rightfully belongs to labor, calling it profit.
This accounts, of course, for liberalism's cohabitation with labor unions and for the identification of labor unions historically with socialism and anarchism.
From this comes the doctrinal tenet that the only truly unifying world-principle is the socialistic brotherhood of the workers, which transcends national borders. Socialism postulates that spiritual matters such as patriotism, family and clan loyalty, and principles of morality are fictions created by the capitalist masters to subjugate the workers.
These beliefs were the impetus for organizing the Socialist Internationals, which were organizations for mutual support among socialist parties in different nations in order to promote the political triumph of socialism. The first of them was organized by Karl Marx in 1864, near the end of of the American Civil War. The Second International was formed after Marx's death in 1889, and the Third International (the Comintern) by Lenin in 1919.
A common feature of the three major Socialist Internationals was their belief that wars are entirely the product of capitalist maneuvering for monopolistic control of markets. Therefore, by abstaining from work and from military service, socialists around the world could prevent wars and bring about an era of unending world peace.
This accounts for American socialists' resistance to our entry into World War I, and for the creation of the ACLU to defend them. We see its echoes in today's liberal tactic of mass street demonstrations, riots, and general strikes, here and abroad, against the Vietnam war and now against our military response to Islamic jihad.
In the vein of Socialist Internationalism, liberals today presume that all rational people everywhere in the world (except for ignorant Christians and religious Jews) think as they do and that, therefore, foreign-policy disagreements can be worked out and wars prevented simply by getting everybody together for nice-y-nice discussions in the mass-meeting hall of the UN General Assembly.
In their view, military action to protect our national interests can only be a continuation of monopolistic tactics by "the rich" to seize control of Iraq's oil and to benefit Halliburton. In their view, the Islamic "freedom fighters" are analogs of the oppressed workers of the world whose work product has been stolen by the capitalists. Settling Al Queda's grievances is therefore merely a matter of giving them a bigger share of our materialistic wealth.
Reviewing the unbroken record of failure to sustain effective voluntary cooperation in the Socialist Internationals and in the League of Nations and the UN suggests, however, that these fundamental liberal tenets are delusions.
Attempting to get world unanimity on specific diplomatic action is a fool's errand. Even the socialists in their Internationals, supposedly united by their brotherhood in labor, were continually at each other's throats.
The First International broke up in a fight between Marx's doctrines and the anarchism of Mikhail Bakunin. The Second International disintegrated in 1914 at the start of World War I, when national socialist parties mostly ignored the call to abandon their national patriotism and boycott or sabotage the war effort. The Third International (Comintern) was held together only by the iron hands of Lenin and Stalin and the Soviet army.
Experience in the UN has been of a similar kind. Only at the end of World War II, before the Cold War, was there any degree of apparent unity. With the explosion of UN membership in the 1950s, as newly-minted, small and economically dependent African and other nations became members, the UN degenerated into a propaganda organ and an undercover dispenser of graft for the Soviet Union and its socialist allies. Under-the-table bribes to these nations to secure their votes in the General Assembly became the order of the day.
Ultimately, as we saw in the Iraqi food-for-oil scandal, the corruption of the UN reached greater financial proportions than ever before in history.
The UN acts like Russia does......
UN please come and save us from ourselves. /heavy sarcasm
>>A common feature of the three major Socialist Internationals was their belief that wars are entirely the product of capitalist maneuvering for monopolistic control of markets. Therefore, by abstaining from work and from military service, socialists around the world could prevent wars and bring about an era of unending world peace<<
Boy that didn't work out for them....
On the Other hand the U.N. seems to have no trouble getting involved in armed conflict -it's just maddening to watch them and see which conflicts they think are important.
Alger Hiss was one of the driving forces behind the UN as we know it, wasn't he? That should tell us a thing or two.
...so it would follow, then, by the premises of the left, that religious subjugation of the masses by enslaving capitalistic interests implicates the Pope as a tool of "the Jews." (and they call us "conspiracy theorists"!)
***
The bottom line is really this: everyone else against God's people (Jew and Christian). And it always has been.
"Alger Hiss was one of the driving forces behind the UN as we know it, wasn't he?"
And sold out the western world to the Russians at Potsdam - er I mean Yalta.
No, not exactly, but through the entire history of the UN numerous attempts have been made to turn it into a Third International. One reason the UN is so crashingly ineffective is that it contains certain elements that were designed deliberately to keep it from being used this way. One of these is that members of the Security Council were permanent. This has been attacked as unfair at various points and even now one aspect of UN "reform" includes a rotating membership with powers of veto similar to the permanent members. The real push, so far defeated, was replacement of certain of the permanent members with ones more sympathetic to international socialism. One can imagine what wild stuff would eventuate were the U.S. and Great Britain replaced, say, by Cuba and Zimbabwe or Venezuela.
In one respect the UN does resemble the Third International that Lenin hoped for after the "fall" of the Second - it contains members who are largely unaccountable to the people they ostensibly represent, incorrigibly elitist, and impossibly corrupt. That is precisely what would have happened after 1924 had Lenin survived to create it.
Is there really an dif between the Comintern (Communist International) and the Socintern?
Concieved in wickedness, born in sin . . . ;^)
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