Last month Argentine president Javier Milei blasted the United Nations as “a useless organization whose only purpose is to sustain a cast of fatally arrogant parasites, masquerading as well-intentioned bureaucrats.” Those who were supposed to guarantee collective security and human rights, Milei said, “failed in their task. Instead, they allowed chaos, violence, and international terrorism to flourish. The alleged defenders of human rights have sheltered bloodthirsty dictatorships and regimes that stone women in the streets,” and so on.
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This was predictable for an organization skewed by Stalinism from the start and once headed by a Nazi war criminal. UN Secretary-General Kurt Waldheim had been a member of the Sturmabteilung, or SA, which provided military protection for the NSDA, the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, better known as the Nazi Party. SA members were also known as Sturmtruppen (storm troopers), or Braunhemden (brownshirts). Waldheim served in an intelligence unit known for transport of civilians to slave labor camps, deportation of Jews to death camps, reprisal execution of hostages, and massacres of partisans and civilians in the Balkans.
This record escaped revelation when Waldheim was tapped to head the United Nations, where he prevailed from 1972-1981. The truth only emerged in the mid-1980s, when Waldheim ran for president of Austria. Comics diagnosed him with “Waldheimer’s Disease,” which made him forget he was a Nazi. The United States duly banned Waldheim from entering the country.
The Soviet Union knew the record and used it as leverage over the UN boss. True to form, under Waldheim the UN looked the other way at the worst atrocities of modern times. Under Pol Pot, beginning in 1975, the Communist Khmer Rouge murdered from 1.3 to 3 million people, approximately one-fourth of the population. See Murder of a Gentle Land: The Untold Story of Communist Genocide in Cambodia, by John Barron and Anthony Paul, and the Tuol Sleng Museum of Genocide, on a former Communist prison site.
Under Waldheim, the UN never issued a formal resolution condemning the Cambodian genocide and failed even to consider the regime’s human rights violations until 1978. After Vietnam invaded in 1979, the UN allowed the deposed Khmer Rouge regime to retain Cambodia’s seat under the name Democratic Kampuchea. The bias toward communist states was baked in from the start.
At the outset of the UN in 1945, Soviet ambassador Andrei Gromyko recommended Alger Hiss for secretary general. It wasn’t known at the time that Hiss was a Stalinist spy in the State Department. See Witness, by Whittaker Chambers and Perjury: The Hiss-Chambers Case, by Allen Weinstein. Still more was going on behind the scenes.
Secretary of State Edward Stettinius had been under the wing of Hiss and Harry Hopkins, a White House resident under FDR. Stettinius’ speech at the UN was written by Communist screenwriter Dalton Trumbo, whom Hiss had brought to the conference. See this writer’s Hollywood Party: Stalinist Adventures in the American Movie Industry. During the 1939-1941 Stalin-Hitler Pact, Trumbo wrote The Remarkable Andrew, in which general Andrew Jackson’s ghost argues against aid to Britain, then standing alone against the Nazis.
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During the Pact, Stalin and Hitler both invaded Poland and Stalin returned German Jewish communists directly to Hitler’s Gestapo. Margarete Buber-Neumann described the transfer in Under Two Dictators: Prisoner of Stalin and Hitler, perhaps the most neglected book, and author, of modern times.
After World War II, Stalin swung the USSR and its captive territories back to their traditional anti-Semitism, branding Jews “rootless cosmopolitans” and such. The Communist regime in Czechoslovakia executed eleven officials, as All the King’s Men director Robert Rossen testified, “for being Jews and nothing else.”
In a variant of Waldheimer’s Disease, people seem to have forgotten this history, if they ever knew it in the first place. With a Stalinist pedigree and a Nazi secretary general, it’s no surprise that the United Nations should become a useless organization of fatally arrogant parasites that shelters bloodthirsty dictatorships, as Javier Milei so accurately put it, and a “bureaucratic leviathan devoted to deciding how the peoples of the world and their citizens should live.”
As Milei noted, Argentina withdrew from the World Health Organization (WHO). So has the United States, which pays 22 percent of the UN budget. Perhaps the time has come for both nations to cut loose from the UN, echoing Milei’s cry of “long live freedom, damn it.”
Lloyd Billingsley is a policy fellow at the Independent Institute in Oakland, California.
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