The UN And The War
retrieved from The Libertarian Forum VOLUME III, NO. 11 December, 1971

As we write, the UN has sat down to thrash over the new war between India and Pakistan, and anguished cries are being raised about the unfortunate "ineffectuality" of the United Nations. The anguish is sadly misplaced. For the real points about the UN is that it is only tolerable so long as it remains ineffectual.

For the whole concept of the United Nations is mischievous. First, because underneath the UN lurks the possible danger of a genuine world government, that world government that used to be the rallying cry for all manner of well-meaning liberals. Give us a world government, give us, "One World", and there will be nowhere on the planet to escape its tyranny. At least nowadays, we can shop around from one government to the next, and excape from a site of greater tyranny to a lesser - and our retreatists can at least dream of setting up their own private and stateless islands. But come a world government, and these options will be rudely taken from us.

Happily, the dream of world government remains a misty and far-off ideal, smashed on the rock of Great Power hostility. But a grave danger remains, the highly dangerous principle that lies at the heart of the UN philosophy. This principle is the New Deal-Wilsonian concept of "collective security against aggression," the siren song under which two World Wars and a Cold War have been fought in our century. The "collective security" principle postulates that in every war there is a clear-cut, easily discernible, "aggressor." Usually the "aggressor" is simple-mindedly branded as the first State that crosses another State's borders with troops. The "collective security'" principle holds that all the nations of the world are then duty-bound to get together to use force majeure against the "aggressor", and to defeat his evil designs. In practice, in our century, the United States has taken upon itself the "collective security" role, the White Knight in shining armor that sets out to defend the entire world against the Bad Dragon of aggression.

The fallacies and dangers in this doctrine abound at every hand. The first problem is the simplistic definition of "aggression." The analogy, usually implicit but sometimes expressly held, is always taken from aggression by one individual upon another. If Smith is seen to be jumping on and stealing a watch from Jones, then Smith can easily be labelled the "aggressor", and police may be called upon to defend Jones and apprehend the criminal for return of the loot. But while we might be able to say easily that Jones deserved to have the watch and that therefore Smith was an aggressor, the same can scarcely be said for State X which has been invaded by State Y. For to call State Y an "aggressor" per se must mean that the present territorial boundaries of State X are somehow morally and rightfully its own, in the same way that Jones' watch is rightfully his own. But since national territories have invariably been acquired by previous aggression rather than by voluntary social contract, to leap automatically to the defense of the invaded State is an absurdity. On what moral grounds are we to cry "Halt" and thereby ratify every aggression previous to, say, December 1971 as legitimate and moral?

To turn the analogy around, suppose that on deeper investigation we find that Smith was not stealing Jones' watch, but simply catching Jones who had previously stolen Smith's watch, and that therefore Smith's seeming act of "aggression" was really an act of self-defense? This is certainly possible among individuals, and indeed often happens. But how then can we justify an automatic ganging up on State Y which might be retrieving territory previously grabbed by State X? Furthermore, since all States are aggressors anyway against their own population, even the most aggrieved State can never, for libertarians, aspire to the simple status of innocent victim, as say Jones may have been when set upon by Smith. No State, in fact, is worth the extra State aggression upon their subjects that will be involved in every State's ganging up on the "aggressor" in the collective-security mystique.

In the collective security myth, then, all States are supposed to join against the aggressor in the same spirit as a policeman against an individual criminal. Hence, the absurd American use of the term "police action" rather than "war" to characterize our imbroglio in Korea in the early 1950's.

Furthermore, there is no way to prevent the ganging up of collective security from being a league of States dedicated to defending the status quo, no matter how pernicious, by coercion. The League of Nations or United Nations then necessarily becomes a gang of States trying to preserve their territories and privileges by force against the newer nations that are trying to win their place in the sun or against aggrieved States trying to recover some of their national territory. Moreover, the ganging up insures that any war, anywhere in the globe, no matter how trivial, will be maximized into a world-wide conflict. Collective security then becomes a method for the global aggrandizement of dispute and conflict, so that all peoples everywhere get drawn into the net of warfare and killing. In these days of brutal weapons of mass destruction, in our age when warfare rests on the mass murder of innocent civilians, the globalizing of conflict via collective security is a monstrous death trap for the peoples of the world. The sooner the United Nations, or any other scheme of collective security, disappears, the safer shall all of us be.

As for the United States government, ever since the beknighted Woodrow Wilson (the self-righteous prig whom H.L. Mencken dubbed "The Archangel Woodrow"), we have been the world's number one champion of the status quo. Therefore, in the complex world of foreign affairs, there is a good rule of thumb for the libertarian: find out the stand of the United States, and it will be the wrong one. The American genius for taking the wrong side is unfailing.

Such has been the case in the current war on the Indian subcontinent. To speak of the "territorial integrity" of Pakistan - or India, too, for that matter - is a grisly joke. Neither country is a "nation" in any sense; both are disparate congeries of clashing ethnic, cultural, racial, and linguistic groups. Both "nations" are creatures carved out by British imperialism, Britain's last bitter legacy to the conquered nations of the subcontinent. But of these injustices, the worst and most glaring is the situation in East Pakistan (East Bengal). As we pointed out in our May, 1971 issue ("For Bengal"), the Punjabis of West Pakistan have, since the inception of this absurdly divided State, been exploiting and ruling over the far more productive Bengalis of the East. Last Spring, the Bengali crisis came to a head when the ruling oligarchy of Punjab, defeated in an election, suspended Parliament and arrested the Bengali leadership. This was the final straw that provoked the Bengali drive for autonomy and home rule into a determined movement for independence, for "Bangla Desh" (Bengal Nation). The Punjabis of the West responded by wielding the Pakistani army (totally Western) as an instrument of repression, mass torture, and literal genocide against the Bengali population, especially against the hated Hindu minority. As in all forms of counter-revolution, and counter-guerrilla warfare, genocide against the mass of the population was made necessary by the fact that the entue population of Bengal are opposed to the Punjabi oppressors.

Here, in Bengal, there is no clique of generals, no Communist question, to cloud the issue, as there is in Indochina; here is simply a nation of Bengalis trying to throw off an imperial Punjabi yoke. And yet, once more, the United States takes the Pakistani side; the U.S.'s deep yearnings for stability and order - for the status quo - and its military alliances with Pakistan, clearly come before any considerations of justice for the Bengali people.

India could have continued to serve as a base for Bengali guerrilla war and as a haven for the mass of Bengali refugees - already the staggering total of over 9 million. But India was forced to move quickly - not only from overwhelming sympathy for its Bengali brethren (West Bengal is part of India), but also because the flood of refugees has created an enormous economic problem in West Bengal, a state already impoverished and over-populated. For the inflow of refugees has already greatly lowered the West Bengali wage rate and driven up the price of food and other necessities; to return the refugees to their homes without delay, India felt forced to strike quickly. Naturally, the United States defending the status quo and true to the fetish of collective security and "aggression", leaped in to try to use the UN as a club for forcing India to suspend hostilities. (With China and Russia bitterly on opposing sides, our knee-jerk anti-Communists must feel puzzled about what side to take.) Fortunately, it looks as if the Russian veto will bar UN coercion; but if not for this happenstance, the nations of the world would have been mobilized to fasten the chains upon the people of Bengal. But this was a fortuitous accident. It is high time that we cease to rely on some Great Power veto, and that we ditch the collective security myth altogether; it is high time to revive the grand old "isolationist'' slogan: that we withdraw from the United Nations.