Point-Counterpoint

Scott Sandersfeld

When seeking to eradicate crime, one ought not to negotiate with criminals. When preparing food, one ought not to add poison. When seeking to eradicate war, one ought not to include the cause of war: dictatorship.
Yet this is precisely what the U.N. does. Even at its inception, the U.N. included as one of its most powerful members the most brutal dictatorship the history of mankind has ever known: the Soviet Union. Since then, all the dictatorships and theocracies of the world have had a venue to proclaim at the very least their moral equivalence to any free nation.
The organization is praised precisely for the reason everyone ought to be condemning it; it includes everyone. War, oppression and murder are not caused by forces of nature, they are caused by corrupt men and corrupt governments. Such governments should not be allowed to gain the thing they so desperately seek: legitimacy and moral sanction, which the U.N. gives them, along with some power to determine the foreign policy of free nations.
Observe just one farce out of many, the “U.N. Commission on Human Rights.” Who would you think would chair such a committee? The United States? England? Germany? Japan? No. Just months after 9/11, Sudan, Syria, Cuba and Libya were all elected to chair the commission. All four countries are listed by our State Department as state sponsors of terrorism. All have an appalling record of protecting the individuals’ rights within their own country, but now the United States is subject to their whims in deciding who violates “human rights” – not surprisingly, the U.S. was voted out of the commission.
The U.N. is, and always has been, a pack of America-hating dictatorships. If America is to be in league with other nations, let it be with nations that actually share our values, not with those who seek to destroy them. World peace will be achieved not by compromising with theocracy and dictatorship, but by proclaiming loudly that liberty and individual rights, Western style, are the only way men can live without force.