Ever since I was a teenager, I’ve been working intermittently on a theatrical project that’s so politically incorrect, and thus so unlikely to ever, ever be professionally produced, that for a long time now it’s never really been anything more than a way of amusing myself, a whimsical distraction from my real work. It’s a musical comedy about the United Nations. The premise is that the UN is a thoroughly preposterous institution, populated by self-righteous, self-dealing, and self-important mediocrities and founded on the absurd notion that if you combine 193 countries — all of them imperfect, and many (if not most) of them hopelessly backward, corrupt, and undemocratic — into a single international organization, it will somehow magically morph into a noble, civilized champion of the true, the good, and the beautiful.
READ MORE: The UN Is a Delusional and Dangerous Old Man
The latest version of my jeu d’esprit — which, like Sondheim’s Company, is a “concept musical,” meaning that it has a theme but not much of a plot — includes a vicious (but tuneful) catfight between the Norwegian and Swedish delegates (two sizzingly hot blondes, of course) over whose country is more ardently devoted to the cause of world peace; a triumphal soliloquy by the delegate from China (“No, we aren’t out to conquer the USA / We only want you Yanks to get out of the way / While our Navy takes control of the seven seas / And the yuan becomes the number one of currencies”); an aria, reminiscent of a certain show-stopper from Show Boat, in which the deep-voiced delegate from the Congo (who can never remember which of the two Congos he actually represents) celebrates the racial guilt of the First World nations whose massive financial aid to his own country, while never reaching the wretched refuse for whom it’s intended, has sure as hell improved his own lifestyle (“The white man giver / He keeps me rollin’ along!”); and a song by the Saudi delegate recalling the moments of romantic bliss beneath the desert moon with his favorite caprine courtesan (“There’s not a thing that’s wrong with any man here / That can’t be cured by putting him near / A lovely, womanly, female, feminine goat!”). Then there’s the French delegate, who, in a lyric set to a tune reminiscent of “Bonjour, Paris” from the 1957 Fred Astaire movie Funny Face (yes, I’m old), warns that the City of Lights ain’t what she used to be:
Try not to step out
On the Champs-Élysées!
It’s crammed with carpets
On which Algerians pray!
Oh, quel cri!
Adieu, Paree!
Moroccan muggers
Crowd the Saint-Honoré,
Tunisian rapists
Pack the Rue de la Paix
Where you’ll see
Piles of debris!
I don’t remember when the UN first captured my imagination, but I guess it goes back to a school trip that probably took place when I was in fourth grade or thereabouts. I don’t know what the deal is nowadays, but when I was growing up, every kid in New York City was, at some point, taken with his class on a tour of the UN Headquarters. I’d never yet set foot outside of the country, so it was exciting to be told, “We’re not in the United States now; we’re in the United Nations.” I collected stamps then, and the UN issued its own stamps, a bunch of which I bought in the gift shop. What made the UN’s extraterritorial status especially interesting was that my dad actually worked across the street — he was a doctor, and every weekday morning he put in a few hours at the employees’ clinic at Con Edison’s main plant, which was located on the East River just across 42nd Street from the UN compound. I recall being at Con Ed a couple of times as a kid and looking over from that gray, grungy structure to the great soaring buildings across the street and thinking: “Wow! That’s not the United States!” (READ MORE from Bruce Bawer: It’s Time to Take the Colleges Back)
Since I wasn’t an idiot, to be sure, my childlike awe soon gave way to a more clear-headed recognition of reality. My paternal grandmother was Polish and still had relatives over there. They lived under Communism. She hated Communism. Above her bed, when I was a kid, was a giant photograph of my father in his infancy, swathed in an American flag. On the dresser beside the bed was a framed 8-by-10 of an Eisenhower-era Richard Nixon, whom my grandmother revered as a devout anti-Communist. At least partly because my curiosity was spurred by all this, I spent much of my teens binging on books about the USSR and became increasingly fascinated by America’s evil twin; the more I read, moreover, the more I recognized the UN, supposedly dedicated to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, as a lie, a joke, a fraud. On Oct. 25, 1971, a week before my 15th birthday, I watched on live TV as the General Assembly voted, in effect, to take China’s seat away from Taipei and give it to Peking (as Beijing was then called), whereupon the members of the Taiwanese delegation rose from their seats, walked up the aisle, and exited the UN forever.
I still remember how appalled I was by that awful spectacle. I knew that Taiwan wasn’t the freest country on earth — in those days, in fact, it was pretty damn autocratic — but compared to the mainland, which was then experiencing Mao’s Cultural Revolution at its sanguinary height, Chiang Kai-shek’s island was paradise. It was the expulsion of the Republic of China from the UN and its replacement by Red China that fixed in my mind the dark image of the UN that nothing that’s happened since then has persuaded me to revise. It’s a place where some countries are represented by men and women who are appointed by the elected leaders of free peoples, and others are represented by the lackeys of totalitarian tyrants; and the grotesque pretense throughout the UN system is that these two groups can be considered in any way comparable. Yes, I’ve become less certain — especially in recent years — about the degree to which any country in the Free World really is free, but despite everything that the Democrats and the Deep State have done to destroy our constitutional republic, there’s still a dramatic difference between America, on the one hand, and China or Iran or Cuba, on the other.
Oh, I should mention the Iranian hostage crisis. In 1979, 50-some Americans were seized at the U.S. Embassy in Tehran and held for over a year; during that time, my father, whose afternoon job was as editor-in-chief of a medical monthly, often shared an elevator with Iran’s UN ambassador, whose mission split a floor in a midtown office building with my dad’s magazine. Whenever I dropped by my dad’s office, there were cops stationed near the elevators to protect the Iranians. Yes, the ayatollah’s followers were holding our diplomats hostage — a situation that caused international humiliation for President Jimmy Carter and for the country generally — but because they were assigned to the UN, Iran’s own diplomats could move freely around our country without fear of arrest or harassment. For me, 23 at the time, the situation underscored the UN’s sheer absurdity.
But enough. On to the present day. On Oct. 7, Hamas forces entered Israel and carried out some of the most horrific massacres in memory. At a press conference two days later, António Guterres, the secretary-general of the UN, briefly offered up the requisite condemnation of Hamas’ actions, then moved on quickly to his real business: bashing Israel for its airstrikes on Gaza, putting Hamas’ atrocities into bogus historical perspective (“This most recent violence does not come in a vacuum…. [I]t grows out of a long-standing conflict, with a 56-year long occupation”), and drawing the usual moral equivalence (“vicious circle of bloodshed, hatred and polarization”) between a democratic nation and terrorists.
Of course, smearing Israel is a longtime spécialité de la maison in Turtle Bay. Although Israel is surrounded by countries whose governments are masters of subhuman savagery, it’s this civilized little nation — which stands at the cutting edge of scientific and technological development — that’s always being singled out by the UN’s Human Rights Council for its purported violations of human rights. Meanwhile, the UN’s own United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), which postures as a humanitarian body, is in reality little more than a tool of Hamas, funding and operating the Gaza schools that notoriously stuff children’s heads with toxic Jew-hatred and love of terrorism.
Over the years, Israel has gotten used to it all. But Oct. 7 was a watershed. And in the ensuing weeks, at massive rallies in cities around the world, the unspoken Jew-hatred that has always lurked just under the surface of the UN’s routine abuse of Israel was fervently articulated by people whose rabidly genocidal slogans made it feel like 1940s Germany. Yet Guterres kept spouting the usual anti-Israeli bilge. And, this time, Israel wasn’t having any of it. On Oct. 25, Israel’s UN ambassador, Gilad Erdan, announced that his country would cease issuing visas to UN officials. “The time has come to teach them a lesson,” he pronounced, accusing Guterres of having “expressed an understanding for terrorism and murder.” On the same day, Russian and Chinese vetoes in the Security Council killed a U.S. resolution supporting Israel’s right to self-defense.
Then, on Oct. 28, in one of the most cheering bits of UN-related news in a long time, Czech Defense Minister Jana Černochová proposed on X (Twitter) that her country should quit the UN over its failure to condemn Hamas. Three cheers. Needless to say, there are plenty of reasons why a free, self-respecting country would contemplate leaving the UN; its odious mollycoddling of Hamas is as good a reason as any. Viewed from one perspective, indeed, the idea of walking away from the UN is a no-brainer. The place serves no honest purpose. It devours cash and produces hokum. Its so-called humanitarian agencies have been so plagued by scandal that the whole operation should’ve been closed down a long time ago. Still, it exists. Why? One reason, I guess, is that the only thing all UN member states have in common is a cohort of diplomats who covet UN jobs and UN perks. (RELATED from Bruce Bawer: Hollywood Can’t Do Funny Anymore, but It Turns Out Czechia Can)
It’s no surprise that the notion of leaving the UN would be floated by Czechia, of all countries. When I was a kid, the Free World consisted mainly of the Anglosphere and Western Europe. Today, when governments all over the West are nipping away at individual liberties while genuflecting to globalist overlords like Guterres and Klaus Schwab, many a devotee of freedom finds himself looking increasingly to the former vassal states of the Warsaw Pact — including my grandmother’s native Poland — for leaders who genuinely seem to love their countries, care about their people, and cherish the liberties that were denied them for so long and that they regained only so very recently. Little wonder that people like Černochová look at the UN and see an establishment that, drenched with hypocrisy and the lust for power — not so very much unlike the Kremlin of yore — professes obscenely to stand for public service and human welfare.
I began by mentioning my musical comedy about the UN, which has provided me with amusement and distraction over the years. Just as Mel Brooks decided a long time ago that mocking Hitler in song and story was the best way for him to address the horror of Nazism, so I found the whited sepulchers on First Avenue, with all their malignancy, ripe subjects for my own modest brand of parody. Yes, a whole lot of these UN paladins are perfectly foul customers; but they’re also absurd — absurd in their vomitous sanctimony, in their shameless pretensions to importance and to virtue, and in their claim to stand (as the UN’s website puts it) for “peace, dignity and equality on a healthy planet.” In my musical, a new U.S. attaché learns why the UN has it in for the Jewish state: The Israeli delegate, it turns out, never picks up a check. When I wrote that gag, it seemed amusing enough. Since Oct. 7, however — as its honchos, after hearing the details of some of the most chilling acts of barbarism in modern history, have stuck to the usual rhetoric — the UN hasn’t seemed terribly funny to me at all. And never has it been less funny than it was on Oct. 30, when Israel’s Erdan put on a yellow star in protest against the Security Council’s silence on Hamas. So I’m with Ms. Černochová. Let’s all get out (all the member states, at least, with any shred of decency and self-respect), stop paying its bills, and — once the rubbish nations have withdrawn — sell the whole kit and kaboodle off to anyone crazy enough to invest in Manhattan real estate in 2023.
