The U.N.

As many people know, the United Nations was born out of the failure of the League of Nations and the Second World War, which came but twenty years after the Great War, which was supposed to be the war to end all wars.  One of the stated purposes of the League of Nations, besides the maintenance of world peace, was to protect the smaller countries against the larger, more industrialized countries.  Ask Ireland how well that worked.

In the euphoria and relief leading up to the end of World War II, the world leaders convened in San Francisco (of all places) in April of 1945.  I suppose they were hopeful, because although Nazi Germany was on its last legs, the Japanese were fighting as if the war was still in doubt.  The battle for Okinawa still raged, with kamikaze pilots doing their best to ring up a ten to one ratio of dead Americans to Japanese.  With all the death and devastation the world had experienced since 1933, it's not surprising that the United Nations was a beacon of hope that peace and tranquility might be restored and, more importantly, maintained.

That hope was shattered nearly five years later with communist North Korea invaded capitalist South Korea.  Although many countries came to the defense of the South under the auspices of the U.N., nothing was ever resolved; a state of war still exists between the North and South, with the North rattling its sabers recently.  It has intervened in several conflicts, remained on the sidelines in others, but basically been nothing more than a Greek chorus chiming in with ineffective platitudes.

In short, what FIFA is to sport, the UN is to world politics.

The UN makes ridiculous decisions, such as putting the likes of Saudi Arabia and Iran on the Human Rights committees, denouncing Israel and not Iran, and calling the United States on the carpet for various and sundry (imagined) human rights violations.  That the UN is headquartered in New York and the US pays roughly 22% of the annual operating budget is neither here nor there, but it is galling to have the United States put on the same level as Iran or North Korea. 

The UN really has outlived its purpose.  It isn't effective at maintaining the peace, it's corrupt and has biases that make it the subject of world-wide ridicule. 

For the U.S., there really isn't any reason to remain in the UN, or if it remains, to pay a disproportionate share of the organization's budget.  There are nearly two hundred countries in the UN, yet we pay nearly a quarter of its budget.  For this, we are maligned, burdened with unreasonable commitments and disrespected by despotic regimes that murder our citizens.  And for this we get what, exactly?

I'm all for living in peace and harmony with our neighbors, but there are good neighbors and there are bad neighbors.  The UN has proven to have too many of the latter, thereby proving the maxim about one bad apple.  The UN, like its predecessor the League of Nations, was a noble idea that has gone awry.

Enough is enough.

Defund the UN.

(c) 2017 The Truxton Spangler Chronicles