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on the long march of USrael...

I was born nineteen months after the official formation of the United Nations (UN). The UN replaced the League of Nations, established by the Paris Peace Conference in 1920, that had proved itself ineffective in maintaining world peace. The UN was founded by 50 states with the aim of preventing further world conflicts. Five states (USA, USSR, Great Britain, France and China) had the right of veto on the Security Council. For a few years when I was a child we celebrated United Nations day. The UN now has 193 members with two non-voting observer states - Palestine and The Vatican. The founding document of the UN is its Charter to which all member states are bound. The Charter was intended to function as an instrument of international law.

The UN, like its predecessor has failed in its primary task. It is moribund and there appears to be no enthusiasm to revive it…

As children on United Nations Day we listened to our teacher explaining how our lives would be peaceful because the bad people in the world would be brought to task by the decisions of the General Assembly and the rightful might of the Blue Helmets. UN peacekeepers did their best - but they have not stopped the bad people from doing what bad people do.

Why?

As a child, my parents told me to trust my teachers just as I trusted them. And I did. I remember cinema newsreels of the Korean War and believed that it was all about stopping the bad people from doing nasty things to good people. When we couldn’t sail home through the Suez canal because it was blocked by sunken ships and the collapsed El Ferdan railway bridge, I didn’t question the propaganda about why that had happened. My conditioning had been effective: I believed the propaganda presented to me as news via the mass media all the way through the Sixties, Seventies, Eighties, Nineties and right up to 2003…

Tony Blair had such a warm smile, even if his eyes were cold, and one wanted to believe him. And the junior Bush seemed a rather nice, if a bit stupid, American. But I knew enough from open sources that however bad a man Saddam might have been (heavens! Thatcher liked him, so he had to be really bad) he did not have the capabilities to threaten the territorial integrity of the United States. His eight year war with Iran had ended in stalemate in 1988 with over one million dead and his defeat by the USA three years later created further carnage.

It has taken twenty years to claw the scales from my eyes. I was brought up to believe that horrible people, like the Kaiser and Hitler and Mussolini, had to be stopped and if it took world wars and fifty or a hundred million dead, then that was a price worth paying. If the League of Nations had been ineffective then, of course, we needed something better - the United Nations. Why did no-one act against Franco? Why did it take the Vietnamese to stop Pol Pot? Why will those United Nations not act to stop Russia’s naked aggression? Why are democratically elected politicians like Mohammad Mosaddegh or Salvador Allende replaced in coups by violent autocrats? Why will no-one act to stop the destruction of the Sudanese people? Why cannot the United Nations stop genocide in Palestine? Why cannot the International Criminal Court exercise the warrants of arrest for the well-documented alleged war criminals? Why is the United States allowed to abduct the leader of a sovereign country and murder the head of another?

Why? Why? Why?

Today I have come to a point where I refuse to accept the pronouncements of others unless they are substantiated with acceptable proofs. That is a sad position to hold. It means I trust no-one unless they have proven their loyalty to me. Maybe I am alone, an untrusting sheep in a world of wolves. Or maybe this is how more and more and more of the eight billion of us are beginning to feel…

Civilisation is built on trust. Trust is the necessary glue that holds families and communities together. Without trust there is only conflict, dissolution and chaos…

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