NEW YORK – The tourist visiting New York was startled as his cab rode past the giant glass tower on First Avenue just north of 42nd Street. “What’s that?” he asked the cab driver.
“That’s the United Nations,” replied the cabbie. “And what do they do there?” asked the visitor.
“I don’t have a clue,” said the cabbie, “but they sure do enjoy their work!”
And I remember how much I enjoyed what I thought their work would be. I was too young to participate in World War II, a biological condition that infuriated me as much as it delighted my parents. Then the war ended, with democracy and decency having defeated Nazism, fascism and plain old evil. Then came the United Nations. And, democracy and decency took one hell of a beating!
I remember as clearly as if it were a rejection by a woman I loved and thought I’d won yesterday! There I stood, an idealistic 15-year-old who had assiduously followed every jot-and-tittle of world affairs since Hitler’s Germany annexed Austria, looking skyward as if to thank God for what was going on here on Earth. “Can this really be going on in my lifetime?” I asked myself. “At last we have a United Nations. At last we have a veritable ‘Parliament of Man’ making further wars impossible.”
If you’d been there and had interrupted my dream by pointing out that people like me were dreaming and saying identical things about the League of Nations after World War I, “And look what a catastrophe that was!”, I would have rudely interrupted you, and in my squeaky, changing voice I’d have “straightened you out” by reminding you that the lessons of that League of Nations failure were sure-fire vaccinations against any such failure ever again. “This time,” my lecture to you would have concluded, “we’ll get it right!”
But then, look how quickly my beloved “Parliament of Man” turned into a VIP lounge for dictators and their soul-cohorts, murderers, thugs, thieves, torturers, blackmailers and bigots!
Who needs a “United Nations”? Surely not this particular planet at this particular time. If you happened to patronize a bad pizzeria, you wouldn’t go back the next day. You would avoid bad pizza. And yet we’ve been going back to the U.N. for what’s far more disastrous than just bad pizza every day since 1945.
Don’t mistake this rant for the outcry of a wounded Jew. I’ve been on this rampart since long before the present stench from First Avenue.
This United Nations has failed. A kind of pseudo-religious anchor, a moral full-nelson, has kept some of the most decent people on Earth coming back for more and more United Nations injustice. It’s like a terminal case of moral masochism that preaches, “We must stay and use the machinery of the U.N. to correct injustice. Walking out, like the Japanese walked out of the League of Nations when their inhuman outrages against the Chinese were exposed and protested, would portray us as soreheads and losers.” That reasoning is diseased. It’s time to admit the United Nations from the outset suffered a terminal birth defect that renders it a miracle that the U.N. has lasted this long. “Birth defect?” you say? Exactly! Nothing less. The inconvenient truth many still hate to recognize is that a founding member of the U.N., a member of the Security Council and therefore the wielder of veto power, was every bit as dictatorial and only slightly less evil (if that!) than the Nazis and Japanese. I refer, of course, to the Soviet Union. That “birth defect” metastasized with the ouster of the democratic Chinese Nationalists from the U.N. and their replacement by the Chinese Communists.
I’ve long savored the remedy of America leaving the United Nations and on the same day announcing the founding of a new organization called “The U.F.N.” (“The United Free Nations”). There’d be no Stalins and Molotovs vetoing democracies! Neither would it be necessary for America to veto the designs of terrorists.
Meanwhile, the United States should exit the U.N. and give the delegates a reasonable time period to get out of New York. That plucky cabbie was right. The U.N. delegates greatly “enjoy their work.” And if forced to leave New York and America their outcries would make the loudest Irish banshees sound like mere butterflies belching. Those hearty delegates can trash freedom and back-stab Israel easily enough, but they can never leave New York. Their children are in school here. Their leases and lovers are here, their mortgages and mistresses are here, and so are their friends, their theater, concerts, upscale restaurants, health clubs, world-class medical treatment. Oh, No! They can tell Israel to get out of Jewish land, but they could never get themselves out of New York!
If the U.S. delegation, perhaps as an early Trump initiative, were to serve the U.N. with the choice of rescinding that dreadful resolution on “settlements” or leaving New York, it’d be a pro-remain-in-New-York landslide!
In the late 1940s, the iconic New York columnist Arthur “Bugs” Baer addressed the members of the U.N. in print and, alluding to a former occupier of the land on which the U.N. stood, begged, “Please, Fellows! Do something quick, or put the brewery back!”
Media wishing to interview Barry Farber, please contact [email protected].
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