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[Order Michael Finch’s new book, A Time to Stand: HERE. Prof. Jason Hill calls it “an aesthetic and political tour de force.”]
Donald Trump’s address to the United Nations once again has challenged the failing, bloated institution, especially considering its damage to our country and its Constitutional order by allowing globalist elites to chip away at our sovereignty in order to serve the “international community” of the “new world order.” Much of our foreign policy errors and crises spring from a near century of the UN’s bad ideas and feckless idealism.
Wielding his signature straight talk, Trump delivered a much-needed home truth: “What is the purpose of the United Nations?” he asked, and quickly answered, “For the most part, at least for now, all they seem to do is write a really strongly worded letter and then never follow that letter up. It’s empty words, and empty words don’t solve wars.”
In other words, a typical hypertrophied bureaucracy riddled with professional deformation––the chronic abuse that served the institution and its treasonous clerks rather than the alleged purpose for which it was created and financed–– mostly by U.S. taxpayers.
Greed and ambition we’ll have with us always, but the bad ideas that spawned the UN are deeply entrenched in the West. The seed idealistic globalism began with Immanuel Kant’s “Perpetual Peace” in 1795. In it, Kant imagined innovations like a “federation of free states” that could form a “pacific alliance” that would “forever terminate all wars.” Kant understood that the world of his times was not yet ready for such a dream, but he believed that “the uniformity of the progress of the human mind” would reach such a goal.
During the following century the growth of new technologies and global trade seemingly promised a global “harmony of interests,” yet also more lethal and destructive wars too devastating and costly for business, giving impetus to Kant’s ambitious vision. By the outbreak of World War I, numerous downpayments on Kant’s dream had produced multilateral agreements, conventions, and treaties aimed at “establishing and securing international peace by placing it upon a foundation of international understanding, international appreciation, and international cooperation,” as Nicholas Murray Butler said in 1932.
Before then, agreements like the three Geneva Conventions (1864, 1906, 1929) had established collective laws for the humane treatment of the sick and wounded in battle, and later for prisoners. The Hague Conventions had similar ambitions. The first (1899) called for an international Court of Arbitration, and restrictions on aerial bombardment and the use of poison gas. The second (1907) convention expanded restrictions to naval warfare practice and armaments, as well as other changes to slowing down what host Tsar Nicholas II called the “accelerating arms race” that was “transforming armed peace into crushing burdens that weighs on all nations and, if prolonged, will lead to the very cataclysm it seeks to avert.”
And what did the West get for this feckless idealism and parchment barriers? The Great War with its eight and a half million dead, millions more civilians killed, extensive destruction of infrastructure, and a whole generation “lost” to the gruesome horrors of trench warfare, high explosives, and poison gas. As Winston Churchill wrote later, “When all was over, Torture and Cannibalism were the only two expedients the civilized, scientific, Christian States had been able to deny themselves: and these were of doubtful utility.”
Also terminally maligned was the Versailles Treaty’s doubling-down on the globalist proliferation of new multilateral agreements that actually made the war the “war to end all wars,” as H.G. Wells erroneously put it in 1914. In fact––as French Marshal Ferdinand Foch predicted correctly when the treaty was signed in1919––“This is not Peace. It is an Armistice for twenty years.”
During those 20 years appeared fever-dreams like the Kellog-Briand pact of 1928 that set naïve Kantian goals of ending war and creating an international “harmony of interests.” Forty-nine nations, including the future Axis powers Germany, Japan, and Italy, agreed to “condemn recourse to war for the solution of international controversies, and renounce it as an instrument of national policy in their relations with one another,” and “agree that the settlement or solution of all disputes or conflicts. . . shall never be sought except by pacific means.” This pledge––in three years, with Japan’s invasion of Manchuria––would prove the truth of Thomas Hobbes’s wisdom that “covenants, without the sword, are but mere words, and of no strength to secure a man at all.”
Most consequential and dangerous of the Versailles Treaty’s Kantian settlement, was the League of Nations. Like its idiot child the UN, the League was weakened by a fatal flaw––the lack of a “sword,” a sufficient military force to deter and punish violators of its rules and resolutions. Moreover, the League’s policy of international peace through collective security was vitiated by the remaining primacy of national interests, and by the vast diversity in beliefs, principles, interests, governments, and morals among the soverign nation members.
The first failed test of the League came in 1923, when Mussolini, using the pretext of some Italian diplomats murdered in Epirus, engineered the takeover of the Greek island of Corfu bombarding its main harbor and a fortress housing Greek and Armenian refugees, killing 15.
Greece appealed to the League of Nations, but the League’s response that could have determined the bona fides of its authority and viability of its institutions, was missing. As Harold Nicolson of the British Foreign Office recognized, the crisis was precisely what the League promised to solve peacefully: “[S]hould the [League] Assembly fail,” he wrote, “in such flagrant circumstances, to enforce obedience to the Covenant, it was realized that the authority of the League would be forever impaired.”
In the end, that’s exactly what happened. National interests–– of France, who needed Mussolini’s support for occupation of the Ruhr; and of the British, who refused to deploy their fleet unilaterally––bypassed the League for the Council of Ambassadors where such interests and realpolitik horse-trading among big countries took precedence. While Italy was left unpunished, Greece was made to pay it reparations as the price of Italy’s withdrawal, creating the moral risk of further member aggression.
The Secretary-General of the League pointed out the damage: “[T]his challenge has brought into question the fundamental principles which lie at the root of the public law of the new world order established by the League.” This recognition could easily be applied to the UN, where big and powerful nations pursue their national and ideological interests, and prioritize them over the UN’s lofty principle, justice, and rules.
This century-long history of the West repeating the naïve idealism of Kant’s dreams by trying over and over to ignore or refashion the permanent reality of human nature’s destructive passions, reached its acme with the creation of the dysfunctional, dangerous United Nations.
Trump’s admonitions have been a necessary start for leaving the UN and repossessing Turtle Bay, but it will take the help of Congress and voters to end our entanglement with the interests and follies of foreign countries that damage our own, and to stop the waste of taxpayer money spent on the UN. And we still have rivals––both veto-bearing UN Security Council Members–– gunning for us.
As Gordon Chang recently warned, we face burgeoning threats from China and Russia––the “Axis of War”––cooperating to reduce the power and influence of our country, and expand their own. We can no longer indulge the bloody fantasies of the past, but return to the millennia of foreign policy realism of Plato in the Laws: “Every state by nature is at war with every other state, and peace is just a name.”
Human beings – with incapacitated exceptions – are designed by
Nature’s God or the Laws of Nature to choose right from wrong,
good from evil as they journey through life. To deal with “the
permanent reality of human nature’s destructive passions” – as Mr.
Thornton puts it – within themselves. Rages resentments
frustrations anxieties fears worries envy lusts greed and stress
and deceit and so on. Name one country on Earth where humans
do not experience such things.
The things that interfere with our relationships with others – with
our ability to love one another. The things that Immanuel Kant
seems to have blithely ignored.in his quest for ‘perpetual peace’
amongst humans.
President Trump and Mr. Thornton are right about the uselessness
of the UN. The in-your-face corruption, unfairness and treachery also
makes Plato right – even ironically by saying that “peace is just
a name”. Because in finding peace in this world that name is Jesus.
Plato is the philosophical father of Kant. Plato prepared the ground for Kant and Kant prepared the ground for Hegel. The three together are responsible for Marxism and Nazism, responsible for modern totalitarianism.
Christianity logically leads to theocracy and theocracy is a form of totalitarianism.
“Christianity prepared the ground. It paved the way for modern totalitarianism by entrenching three fundamentals in the Western mind: in metaphysics, the worship of the supernatural; in epistemology, the reliance on faith; as a consequence, in ethics, the reverence for self-sacrifice” -― Leonard Peikoff, The Ominous Parallels: The End of Freedom In America
“Plato is the philosophical father of Kant. Plato prepared the ground for Kant and Kant prepared the ground for Hegel. The three together are responsible for Marxism and Nazism, responsible for modern totalitarianism.”
And the foot bone’s connected to the leg bone, and the legbone’s connected to the thigh bone and the thigh bone’s connected the hip bone and the hip bone’s connected to the back bone and , in your case your brain bone is not connected to anything.
That could be why you just mindlessly state that Judaism and Christianity formed the basis for Nazism and Communism.
It is amazing how you can simplify the two most destructive philosophies of the 20th centuries and then push cartoon Objectivism as the one size fits all cure for all that ails us. Basically your conclusion makes it very easy for you and Lenny the Piehole to just turn your brains off and conclude you have actually accomplished something by simply coughing up, for the one millionth time, the usual stupidity.
If only life was a perpetual kindergarten.
THX – I know very little about Kant and Plato. My comment
addressed what Mr. Thornton – an expert and scholar in the
classics and humanities – mentioned about them in this
article – as his way of explaining how such Western ideas
influenced the formation of countries into useless bodies
like the League of Nations and the UN in attempts to achieve
permanent world peace.
Mankind’s number one enemy is Mankind. Because our
emotions and passions can veer into actions for good or for
evil. It’s always up to us to choose direction. It’s not a belief
in Jesus – in Christianity – that, as you say, leads to a totali-
tarian theocracy – it is the followers who have succumbed to
evil and turned away from God. Former Pope Francis is a
good example of such treachery – and his supporters
embedded within the Church. But that doesn’t mean that
the message of Jesus – of Christianity – should be damned
as well.
Tacitus is always correct. See Japan and Germany.
NATO, the EU, and whichever globalist outfit is running Canada and the democrat party in the U.S. are a bigger threat to my liberty and safety than are Russia and China.
Nietzsche was correct. Kant was a ” moral fanatic a la Rousseau”
Popper’s ‘ Open Society and it’s Enemies, also leads us down the same deluded past conclusion as does Kant by presenting weakness in adversity as some kind of warped virtue,
Just the stuff leftie globalists hanker after with deranged passion,
Good post as always From Prof Thorton .
“Kant did not preach Nazism. But, on a fundamental level and for the first time, he flung at Western man its precondition: “Du bist nichts” (“You are nothing”).”…
It is Kant who made possible the sudden mushrooming of the Platonic collectivism in the modern world, and especially in Germany….
The motor behind Hitler was not men’s immorality or amorality; it was the Germans’ obedience to morality [the morality of DUTY]—as defined by their nation’s leading moral philosopher [Kant]….
Every central doctrine of the Nazi politics, racism included, is an expression or variant of the theory of collectivism. Such doctrines cannot rise to the ascendancy, neither among the intellectuals nor in the mind of the public, except in a culture already saturated with a mystical-collectivist philosophy. In the case of Germany, this means: saturated with the ideas of Hegel.”…
three major philosophers who, above all others, are responsible for generating the disease of collectivism and transmitting it to the dictators of our century. The three are: Plato—Kant—Hegel. (The antidote to them is: Aristotle.)” ― Leonard Peikoff, The Ominous Parallels
“The three are: Plato—Kant—Hegel. (The antidote to them is: NOTHING.)” Can we just live our lives unencumbered by Lenny’s and your whack theories?
And the foot bone’s connected to the leg bone, and the legbone’s connected to the thigh bone and the thigh bone’s connected the hip bone and the hip bone’s connected to the back bone and , in your case your brain bone is not connected to anything.
That could be why you just mindlessly state that Judaism and Christianity formed the basis for Nazism and Communism.
It is amazing how you can simplify the two most destructive philosophies of the 20th centuries and then push cartoon Objectivism as the one size fits all cure for all that ails us. Basically your conclusion makes it very easy for you and Lenny the Piehole to just turn your brains off and conclude you have actually accomplished something by simply coughing up, for the one millionth time, the usual stupidity.
If only life was a perpetual Objectivist kindergarten.
As a very funny high school girlfriend bubble head used to say: “If Immanuel Kant, then who can?”
I haven’t though of that for over 54 years and it’s as silly now as it was then. Of course I thought it was almost as profound as her perky eyes and boobies.
It is kind of funny.
Coffee Cup Annan needs to clean up his own yard before he demands we cleanse up Ours
The first Hague convention, in 1899, called for redtrictions on aerial bombardment? That was before the Wtrght brothers took off at Kitty Hawk. They were restricting it before it was technologically feasible? I didn’t know that
Balloons may have been employed as bombers with questionable success.
Etic Adams, Mayor ot the City of New York, could repossess Turtle Bay today. All he has to do is invoke Kelo vs. New London