The American Spectator

I hope you are somewhat familiar with Ralph Kinney Bennett, who writes for TCSDaily? Yes? Well, Bennett wrote a great longish piece on the decline of the United Nations that you might have missed. He recounts a story I hadn’t heard of: the discovery in Lebanon of a terrorist-training complex run out of a U.N. backed school near Sidon that was

stocked with assault rifles, bazookas, crates of grenade launchers, machine guns, explosives, and assorted other weapons. U.N. officials admitted the school had been “misused,” but did not explain how terrorist training had gone on for years while escaping their notice.

br> The piece goes on to describe at great length espionage, anti-Semitism, and incompetence running rampant at U.N.H.Q. Let me quote some more highlights: br>

…the U.N. itself has become:

An organization that sanctions the violent overthrow of sovereign governments;…

A political base, a source of funds, and a propaganda organ for terrorist organizations;

The advocate of a new “world order” amounting to global socialism;

A forum for anti-American, anti-Western, anti-free-enterprise activity.

br> There’s also a sidebar written by our straight-talking U.N. Ambassador from which I’ll pluck this paragraph:

We believe good relations among nations, as among people, are based on mutual respect. We are ready to stand by our friends and we expect the same from them. We have to let other nations know they can no longer denounce us on Monday, vote against us on an important issue of principle on Wednesday, and pick up assurances of our assistance on Thursday. If we are attacked, we defend ourselves.

br> Bennett concludes: br>

If the United States and the other nations that sincerely believe in peace and freedom will not now join vigorously in upholding those goals, then the organization that was meant to be a beacon of hope and security will remain what it has tragically become: an enemy of peace and a promoter of conflict.

br> Classic piece; let’s see if I can find a link…

Oh, wait a minute, I don’t think the Reader’s Digest archives go back to October, 1983, when a spry young Bennett penned that piece, and a no-nonsense U.N. Permanent Representative named Jeane Kirkpatrick wrote the sidebar.

Twenty-three years ago and the problems with the U.N. were every bit as bad as they are today, and oddly similar to boot. Granted, the terrorists in those days were the PLO, who seem almost quaint by today’s standards. And while there was no oil-for-food or pederasty-for-peacekeepers scandal being ignored by the mainstream press, much of the article deals with blatant Soviet espionage and skullduggery within the institution being ignored by the mainstream press.

This is the point at which I offer a conservative bromide about how the more things change, the more they stay the same, or how those who forget the past are doomed. But let’s just nod sagely and skip that, because while the U.N. hasn’t changed at all, and never will, another institution has.

I ran across this Reader’s Digest piece in the library while doing a bit of research for my dissertation on narcotics traffic. It was in a bound volume, one issue over from the November 1983 issue which contained a great investigative piece on Bulgarian state-sponsored heroin and weapons trafficking, one of very few reports written on that situation.