Will the U.N. Become the League of Nations? by Austin Bay February 12, 2003 The 1930s were a tough time for Winston Churchill. Exiled to Parliament's backbench, Churchill used elegant pen and eloquent tongue to make the case for British rearmament. He warned the world about Adolf Hitler -- and suffered personal attack from press and peaceniks for his visionary understanding of evil men, their aims and the consequences of appeasing them. The contrast between Churchill and Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain -- the man who gave Czechoslovakia to Hitler -- couldn't be clearer. "Peace in our time," Chamberlain promised Britain as he waved a useless Munich agreement in front of news cameras. Oh, he had the rhetoric of peace, the spin. The "feel good" posturing bought a few months of fake bliss. Chamberlain judged himself by his "good intentions," but his peace march and mantra were lies. Terrible events proved Chamberlain morally, intellectually and spiritually bankrupt. Now, his name's a synonym for sellout to the vicious and genocidal. Churchill spoke the truth when the truth was treated with disdain by self-described morally superior intellectuals. Churchill was also prepared to act. Defending lands where one can tell the truth ultimately requires blood, sweat, toil and tears. They are the price of real peace. History never repeats itself -- time moves on, inexorably. Some themes, however, like terrifying musical phrases, reoccur, often in a horrifying crescendo. We call those crescendos the times that try men's souls, and in these moments we learn a great deal about our leaders and ourselves. The challenge of confronting evil men, the challenge of backing noble words with courageous actions, the challenge of creating peace by blood, sweat, toil and tears instead of appeasing vicious dictators -- these challenges face each generation. The Chamberlains of today -- they call themselves the "antiwar movement" -- are as deeply in denial of the stakes and consequences of failing to defeat Iraq's Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda's global terror machine as Neville and the neutralists were in the 1930s when they kowtowed to Hitler. Our nouveau Nevilles ooze with the same self-absorbed "peace cant," a monolog of conspiracy theories utterly detached from reality. Many so-called peace rallies are so barmy they exist beyond parody. After the gray-beard prof-type delivers an epithet-laden rant asserting President Bush and America are more dangerous than Saddam and bin Laden, several hundred 50-ish women disrobe and spell "No War" with their naked bodies. Peace in our time? It's dumbfounding that many on the "peace left" claim to promote international, multilateral action, particularly in the United Nations, for they oppose the very policies that would strengthen the UN's ability to promote peace. In the 1930s, when Fascist Italy smashed Ethiopia and Japan savaged China, the League of Nations complained and did nothing. The League became a laughing stock. Failure to act when challenged by murderous tyrants killed it. Failure to confront the tyrants of today will kill the United Nations. Finishing Saddam is about enforcing multilateral resolutions. In the wake of Desert Storm, U.N. Security Council resolutions mandated that Saddam give up his weapons of mass destruction (WMD). The United Nations made a commitment to force Saddam's regime to abide by the rules of a civilized world and eliminate his WMD and delivery systems. But Saddam has made a mockery of disarmament and the resolutions. Anyone who claims to believe in multilateral action has to support Saddam's removal or conclude that the U.N. resolutions which shaped Desert Storm were a charade. And if they were a charade, then prepare for a world where the power of evil men is magnified. Secretary of State Colin Powell provided evidence that Iraq helped Al Qaeda murder the US ambassador to Jordan. So the master of the terror state and Al Qaeda's terrorists do consult and connive. That deadly connection must be severed before we face a nuclear 9-11. Thus, U.N. words must be supported by forceful deeds. Who's going to join the United States in finally fulfilling that commitment? The answer is, those with the spine and courage to defend democracy, to extend liberty to Iraq's oppressed and to create the conditions that promote peace in this imperfect world. It's the swath of this generation inspired by Churchill, not the angry, crank offspring of Neville Chamberlain. ---- To find out more about Austin Bay and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.
Good Post!!! I have been comparing the UN to the League of Nations for weeks now. Doesn't matter who stands behind us or who doesn't. I say bring on the Iraqis, Al Queda, North Korea, and hell the French and Germans too while were at it.
it won't become the league of nations because the US is around to enforce things even though pretty much everyone else content with talking and passing useless resolutions. the US is also committed to multilateralism now even though some media and pro-peace people would have you believe otherwise.
The UN is a great idea, but it doesn't have the power it needs. Nobody can ever agree on anything... The UN is worthless to me unfortunately.
That's rather unfair. There are many who want a millitary wing of the UN, but this no political support for it because of sovereign interests. A "peace left" would rather have millitary power vested in the UN than a country like China or the US for example. The entire irony of the article is that I've seen both sides use half assed WW2 allegories that doesn't entirely fit the picture. The peacenik liberals have been painting Bush as Hitler for a while now, and now the UN is the "League of Nations" with Neville Chamberlain as its goat. The media has become an outlet for pop history bull**** for a public whose majority can't read English above an 8th grade level. ****in hillarious... And that's probably why we're leaning towards another UN resolution. Both the left and right are ripping this out of proportion...
I agree with IFan and I really like Churchill. However, history is complicated and one of the themes that definitely reoccurs is the desire to appropriate the past to make a point about the present (see my sig ). This usually relies on a simplistic idea of the past, such as the commonly used Chamberlin/appeasement argument. Here's some info from the BBC that discusses the complexities a bit more succinctly than I could on my own: _________ "History will judge us kindly", Churchill told Roosevelt and Stalin at the Tehran Conference in 1943; when asked how he could be so sure, he responded: "because I shall write the history". And so he did, in the six massive volumes of The Second World War. The first volume, The Gathering Storm, describes his opposition to the appeasement of Hitler during the 1930s... Its central theme - the futility of appeasement and the need to stand up to dictators - is one that has been taken for granted as a self-evident truth in Western society, both during the period of the Cold War and subsequently. The evidence for this supposed truth is Churchill's view of the 1930s as ´the years that the locust hath eaten´, during which the Western powers, by their own folly, allowed Germany to re-arm; never again, the message went, must this be allowed to happen. It is a good tale, told by a master story-teller, who did, after all, win the Nobel prize for literature; but would the Booker prize for fiction have been more appropriate? It is not just that Churchill was inconsistent in his criticisms of Hitler (whom he once hoped to see ´a kinder figure in a gentler age´); his whole reading of events leading up to World War Two was badly flawed, and looks good only with the advantage of hindsight. Because the war was won by a ´Grand Alliance´ of Britain, America and the Soviet Union, it is easy to argue that Churchill's advocacy of such an alignment in 1938 should have been listened to at the time. As the pressure on Czechoslovakia from Hitler mounted in early 1938, Churchill did indeed call for a ´Grand Alliance´; but far from this being an example of his far-sightedness, it actually showed the myopia and want of judgement that kept sensible men away from him during the 1930s. As Neville Chamberlain commented at the time, ´there is everything to be said for Winston's plan, until you examine it.´ If Churchill was crying in the wilderness, it was the wildness of his own ideas that had taken him there. Contrary to the view promoted by Churchill, Prime Minister Chamberlain did not reject his plans without taking official advice, but as far as the Foreign Office was concerned, Churchill's ideas were the equivalent of amateur night at the karaoke bar, and the arguments against them were very strong. First, America, the first part of the ´Grand Alliance´, was still an isolationist power. It had no army capable of intervening in Europe and no politician arguing for such a policy. Next, the second part of the alliance, the Soviet Union, which (as Stalin had not forgotten) Churchill had tried to strangle at birth, was actually part of the problem, not of the solution; only a mentality as Anglocentric as Churchill's could have imagined otherwise. This was because most of the countries of Central and Eastern Europe only survived, diplomatically, by balancing between Russia and Germany. Few liked Germany, but even fewer favoured Stalin's communist alternative. A few rulers, like the wily King Boris of Bulgaria, suspected that Communism was just the latest excuse for Russian imperialism; no one thought that Stalin was a solution to their problems. Furthermore, on the military front there were very real doubts about whether the recently purged Red Army would be a match for the Germans. In relation to Russia there was also a very obvious geographical problem, which Churchill overlooked. Russia could not help Czechoslovakia directly because she had no common border - and neither of the two countries with direct access to Czechoslovakia was likely to offer Russia any help. The Poles, who had suffered under Russian misrule for more than a century and whose independence had been won at Russian expense, would be unlikely, understandably, to want Soviet troops on Polish soil. That left only Rumania, where King Carol, facing a challenge from a strong local fascist movement, was not going to risk alienating it by co-operating with Communist Russia. Thirdly, the Foreign Office analysis also ruled out help from France. Ever since Britain had refused to back the French in a hard-line anti-German policy in 1923, the French had relied upon a defensive strategy against Berlin; they were not going to change in the late 1930s at Churchill's behest. France was a badly divided country, where many right-wing politicians preferred Hitler to the socialist premier, Leon Blum. That left only Britain herself to make up the proposed ´Alliance´. The reasons why Britain was not going to challenge Germany by herself were so numerous that they went on for pages of Foreign Office analysis. Disillusioned by the experience and results of the Great War, British public opinion opposed the idea of another war. Rearmament was a far more problematic concept than Churchill allowed. As a global power, Britain already had to defend its interests in the Far and Middle East against Japan and Italy respectively; but to rearm against Germany as well would bankrupt the country - which would hardly deter Hitler. In addition to these arguments, rearmament was controversial politically; the Labour party opposed too much of it, and the trades unions wanted guarantees about employment for their members before they would agree to it. Then, of course, it took time to build factories, and even more time to find skilled labour. In 1931 Britain had faced the biggest financial crisis in its history, but by the late 1930s, thanks to Chamberlain's time as Chancellor, the economy was recovering, and to mount a massive rearmament programme would have placed that achievement in jeopardy. In the face of these facts, the government had to proceed slowly. It is also worth noting that Chamberlain could hardly have been that bad a choice as prime minister, or Churchill would hardly have seconded his nomination - a fact he somehow omitted from his memoirs. Churchill's line in The Gathering Storm has carried conviction for two reasons: after 1940 no-one wanted to be associated with appeasement because it had failed; after 1945 everyone wanted to have been prescient about the virtues of ´The Grand Alliance´. And the very march of events after 1945 seemed, in Churchill's own eyes, to point up the morality of his stand in the 1930s. The West began to oppose Stalin and Communism in a way that it had never opposed Hitler - it was seen to be standing up to the bully, not to be negotiating with him - and Churchill's general view seemed to be vindicated, at least in his own eyes. From 1945 onwards, few cared to question whether this Churchillian refusal to negotiate with Stalin, or any other dictator, actually makes things worse - that would have sounded as though excuses were being made for misrule. And so we have come to our current Rogue's Gallery: Hitler, Stalin, Nasser, Castro, Ghaddafi, Saddam and Bin Laden, all cut from the same cloth, all of whom must be ´stopped´ because ´appeasement´ is always wrong. How do we know that? Churchill told us so. Churchill was certainly right about one thing - history would indeed treat him kindly. In place of the multi-faceted, complicated flawed genius, there would be a cardboard cut-out hero who was always right. On reflection, perhaps that is not so very kind, after all.
When has GW been multilateral? Kyoto? Steel? Farm subsidy? Land mines? Iraq? One example would be fine.
