The hidden history of the United Nations

[Briar]

The hidden history of the United Nations
Dan Plesch
18 - 5 - 2005


Dan Plesch rediscovers a forgotten story of the 1940s: how the United Nations was forged, beat the Nazis and established a lasting peace.






The history told about the defeat of Nazism and the founding of the United Nations in the 1940s has become distorted. A false view of the past is being used today to shape how we think about our future. The military power of the victorious wartime allies is offered as a model for running the world, while the UN’s supposed utopianism is seen as ineffective and irrelevant.

This is a travesty of the facts. We are taught that the UN began with the signing of the Charter in 1945. In fact, that agreement was the culmination of a complex military and political effort that began in 1941. Understanding the UN’s wartime origins provides a powerful and much-needed reminder that the UN is not some liberal accessory but was created out of hard, realistic political necessity.

The historical records show how Winston Churchill and Franklin D Roosevelt created the United Nations to win the war both militarily and politically, and to create the foundations for a lasting peace. Their first expression of Anglo-American policy was in the Atlantic Charter of 1941; this included freedom from want, social security, labour rights and disarmament as well as self-determination, free trade and freedom of religion. Churchill himself remarked during the height of the fighting in 1944 that the “United Nations is the only hope of the world”.

....

In 2005, as the sixtieth anniversaries of the end of the second world war and the signing of the UN Charter are commemorated, rediscovering the role of the United Nations in war and peace is doubly crucial. It can reinforce the importance of the modern United Nations and strip away the spurious moral authority the present Anglo-American alliance tries to claim from the wartime experience.

The whole article is at:

http://www.opendemocracy.net/debates/article-6-28-2519.jsp