It is time to begin to confront the fact that the US government has completely destroyed the United Nations as being a true international governing body with any legitimate authority.
Instead, the US has turned the United Nations into a rubber stamp totally under its own control. The General Assembly has been turned into a speech club in a manner that is reminiscent of how the Bush Administration has defanged and turned the US Congress into the same. Authority in the UN flows completely from top to bottom, with the top being Washington D.C.
What to do about this? Should there be a World Movement to demand reform of the United Nations, or a Movement to just abolish it? I think the answer is that there should be a Movement to abolish the United Nations, but that the first step to doing so is to create a Movement to reform it. So what would a Movement to reform the United Nations look like? Where would the rebellion come from and in what form?
It is clear that the Movement to reform the UN must come from the Third World countries now totally marginalized by US control over the international body. Curtis Doebbler points the way forward in an opinion piece in Egypt’s leading English language news edition, Al-Ahram titled UN or US pawn. In this commentary he mentions the need to remove the United Nation’s world headquarters out of New York City as a symbolic step toward casting off US government control over the world body.
As symbolic as it would be alone, a World Movement to remove the United Nations to having its meetings and governing body located outside of the US would be an important campaign to reform the organization. Perhaps to move to relocate the United Nations HQ to another locale could galvanize support around the world to try to wrest control over the UN away from the US? It’s something for people to think about at the very least.
