The speeches at the 80th session of the United Nations General Assembly began Sept. 23. The central issue on the table is Israel’s fight to destroy Hamas and prevent another Holocaust. This is deeply in the interests of working people everywhere.
The Israeli people are under attack from many corners. France, England and other imperialist powers came out for the first time for recognition of a Palestinian state, while opposing Israel’s war. Given the reality in the Middle East today, this state could be nothing but a Hamas-run setup. Hamas has plainly said it will never rest until Israel is destroyed and all Jews are either killed or driven out.
The U.S. government says it opposes the step taken by Paris and London. But Washington is also an obstacle to preventing a new Holocaust. It cares nothing for Israel or the Jews. The U.S. capitalist rulers seek to end the war and impose a “Pax Americana” to defend their lust for plunder and power across the Mideast.
Nothing in the interests of the working class can come from the U.N. In January 1919, V.I. Lenin, the leader of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, denounced as a “thieves’ kitchen” the newly formed League of Nations, the predecessor to the U.N. The League had just been founded by the imperialist victors of the First World War.
He said it was “a piece of fakery from beginning to end.” It was set up to enforce “a usurer’s peace, an oppressor’s peace, a butcher’s peace, because Germany and Austria were looted and carved up” and seven-tenths of the world’s population were in servitude.
Two and a half decades later, this new den of thieves, the United Nations, was hatched by Washington — in collusion with London and the Stalinist rulers in Moscow. Washington sought to impose its blood-stained “peace” and “security” for domination of the world, as the victor in the second imperialist world slaughter, and to police its postwar world order.
Washington’s 1950-53 brutal war against the Korean people was carried out under cover of U.N. “peacekeeping forces” in blue helmets, as was its 1960 intervention in the Congo and numerous other interventions since.
Today that old world order — and the fiction of a U.N. global body above the fray of competing capitalist state powers — is being ripped asunder, as Washington’s domination weakens and rivalries grow both among the imperialist governments and with their capitalist competitors, from Beijing to Moscow.
The only road to the liberation of toiling humanity, an end to imperialist war, and the threat of nuclear annihilation is the building of a revolutionary party capable of leading the working class and its oppressed allies to take political power.