***
War is among Mankind's major enemies, but surely ignorance is at least as dire: ignorance of the nature of peace, of anarchy, of leagues of sovereign states such as the UN, of the nature of war itself. Anarchy brings war, government brings peace.
Ignorance is of two main kinds, ignorance about topics at present beyond human ken, and ignorance due to lack of access to or misunderstanding of facts already known. About the former there is little we can do until science makes more progress, but the very existence of civilization depends on our combating ignorance about e.g. national sovereignty, or the difference between a government and a debating society such as the misnamed "United" Nations.
The first step toward dispelling ignorance about the UN is to read its Charter. Not much intelligence is required for this, though rather more may be needed to understand it. The first lesson is that its founders took care to ensure that, as in the case of its predecessor and mirror image, the League of Nations, this new league would have difficulty in reaching decisions. In practice, of course, unanimous decisions can be secured if any State is sufficiently eager and rich to offer cash or other benefits as incitements to other States - especially those playing "hard to get" -to vote as it wishes. Secondly, that it would be denied the power to carry out any decision it manages to make, since it is allowed only to make recommendations.
Thirdly, the Charter expressly permits all Member States to ignore such recommendations - without violating the spirit of the Charter - since Article 2 expressly declares that a11 Members are sovereign, meaning that each has the right to act as judge and jury in its own case.
UN recommendations can be carried out only if one or more Member States obey the UN's request that they act on its behalf. Such Members, being sovereign, will of course do so only if they would have taken such action anyhow, even if the UN had never existed.
Those who are ignorant of the Charter imagine the UN to be a parliament, a legislature, a law giver, a source of law, an authority capable of maintaining peace, an institution that makes wise, fair and just decisions to which all true democrats in their right minds ought morally to swear unquestioning obedience.
As the former UN Secretary General Boutros Boutros Ghali
informed President Clinton:
"the UN is not and never could become a global government"
(San Francisco Examiner, 27 June 1995).
Solely by reason of their existence, the League of Nations and the UN have precluded and prevented the formation of a genuine peacekeeping authority based on. the principles of democratic government.
When a spokesman of the Norwegian government declared that the Cabinet would not decide whether or not to follow a UN recommendation until we know what it recommends, a presumably illiterate heckler denounced this as a "violation of the spirit of the Charter." Such ignorance is not bliss.
***