Wanted: A credible world body
LAST February 23, 2023, in a move geared more on propaganda against Russia than on promoting peace thru peace talks and engagement with Ukraine, the UN General Assembly, with a vote of 141 countries in favor, 7 against and 32 countries abstaining, approved a non-binding resolution to condemn Russia over its preemptive military operations in Ukraine last year.
Coming as it did on the eve of Russia’ ‘SMO’ (special military operation) in Ukraine on February 24 last year and on the eve of the UNGA meeting, clearly, the voting was meant to wrest away the conflict’s narrative towards the version much-preferred by the West, their equally puppet states in Asia and Africa and their US imperialist master—that Russia is the aggressor and Ukraine a poor victim of its aggression.
One year after the conflict begun, the global community has had time to reflect on the credibility of Russia’s motives for preempting the imperialist design of Ukraine, NATO, and the United States against it and seeing clearly for themselves that the Western version of the conflict was false on several levels and that the draconian measures– with the UN just meekly watching– imposed against Russia for fighting to uphold its territorial integrity and national security can be done against them too. This “conclusion” is what the UN voting last February 23 did not want to sink in.
At a period in time where the UN could have played the most critical role in stopping the conflict as soon as possible, it has again been exposed as inutile and is only actually noisy and effective if implementing the geo-political agenda of the West.
Of course, things would have been different, if from the start of its creation after World War 2 in 1945, the member countries of the UN were able to implement the lessons learned from its predecessor, the League of Nations, established at the end of the First World War in 1918, primarily, of acting jointly in defeating aggression—Italy against Ethiopia (Abyssinia) in 1935 and Japan against China in 1937, Nazi Germany against the rest of Europe by 1939.
At this point too, it is clear that just like the League of Nations, the UN has become a pawn primarily of Western aggression and propaganda—just look at what happened in Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan and in the former Yugoslavia.
Indeed, in the Korean War that started in 1950, US Imperialism intervened first in the conflict on behalf of its puppet state of what is now ‘South Korea’ and only went to the UN to approve of its intervention in an internal civil war afterwards.
There is too, the UN’s complicity in the oppression of lesser states, say, Cuba, where the UNGA’s vote repeatedly calling on US Imperialism to lift its sanctions since the 1970s remains for nothing up to now and yes, there is the plight of Yemen, Libya, Iraq and Syria.
In today’s world, the reality is that the UN is just like the neighborhood dog—all barks and no bite. And it would only bark on the say-so of its Western masters.
It is time for the world to seek for a more credible and more unifying global body.
