The UN unmasked: in his new book, Steve Bonta shows that behind a facade of peace, the UN and its supporters are ruthlessly determined to create an all powerful world government. (Book Review).

Inside the United Nations -- A Critical Look at the UN, by Steve Bonta, Appleton, Wisconsin: The John Birch Society, 2003, 127 pages, paperback. (For ordering information, see page 4.)

At a February 21st press conference, White House spokesman Ari Fleischer was asked if U.S. support of the UN Security Council was "conditional in the future on their agreeing with the United States on the course of action in Iraq." Fleischer responded by pointing out that "the President said to [UN Secretary-General] Kofi Annan this morning that the role the Security Council plays is important and continues to be important." Dissatisfied with this noncommittal answer, the reporter then pressed for a more definite statement. "Well," Fleischer responded, "the President has said what is important is that the word of the United Nations be honored."

This has been the Bush administration's position from the beginning of the current Iraq "crisis." The impending war or occupation will not be carried out to defend the United States, but to enforce the UN's will and bolster its power and authority. In his September 12, 2002 address to the UN General Assembly, President Bush himself declared that this was his administration's goal. "Iraq has answered a decade of U.N. demands with a decade of defiance," said the president. "All the world now faces a test, and the United Nations a difficult and defining moment. Are Security Council resolutions to be honored and enforced, or cast aside without consequence? Will the United Nations serve the purpose of its founding, or will it be irrelevant?"

The American people should consider this question as well, especially since it is they who will bear the burden of underwriting, through their blood and treasure, the expansion of the world body's authority and power. To this end, the publication of Steve Bonta's new book Inside the United Nations is particularly timely. The book presents an overview of the UN covering its history, its foundational documents, and the activities and initiatives of its major departments and divisions. While only meant to serve as a brief introduction to the UN, the book nevertheless convincingly dispels the myth of UN benevolence. Mr. Bonta reveals instead that the UN's founders clearly intended for the UN to become an eventual world government, an objective rapidly being realized.

Born of Secrecy

Pundits and politicians have long portrayed the UN as an organization dedicated to peace and justice. Yet, for an organization supposedly dedicated to such a noble cause, its origins were peculiarly secretive. Early in the book, Bonta revisits the almost covert conference (now euphemistically referred to as "conversations") at Dumbarton Oaks that gave rise to the UN. Held in 1944 when national and international attention was focused on momentous events in Europe and the Pacific, the conference largely escaped public notice. Those media organs attempting to cover the conference were barred from the tightly controlled proceedings. Hidden behind the closed doors of the stately federal-style mansion was an American delegation composed largely of Communist spies and sympathizers. "A number of them," Bonta writes, "including the now notorious Alger Hiss, who served as secretary of the conference, were eventually unmasked as spies and traitors." Also in the American delegation were Soviet agents Victor Perlo -- KGB codename RAIDER -- and Noel Field, who eventually took refuge behind the Iron Curtain. Notably among the Soviet delegation were then-ambassador and later foreign minister Andrei Gromyko and the man who at the time was the Soviet foreign minister, Vyacheslav Molotov. Note that just a few years before collaborating with Hiss in creating the United Nations, Molotov and his Nazi counterpart Joachim von Ribbentrop signed the notorious German-Soviet Nonaggression Pact resulting in the joint German-Russian partition of Poland at the outset of World War II.

The UN founders' objective was to create an organization that could "take effective collective measures for the prevention and removal of threats to the peace and suppression of acts of aggression or other breaches of the peace...." Put simply, says Bonta in Inside the United Nations, "the United Nations was to be a mechanism for the entire world to gang up on any country thought to be a threat." Or, in other words, in good Communist fashion, the UN would bring peace to the world through war.

War and Peace

As Bonta notes, the UN's essentially warlike and aggressive nature was apparent to seasoned observers from the beginning.

Former Undersecretary of State J. Reuben Clark argued as early as 1945 that the UN Charter "is a war document not a peace document...." Clark predicted that the UN would "not prevent future wars, [and make] it practically certain that we shall have future wars, and as to such wars it takes from us the power to declare them, to choose the side on which we shall fight, to determine what forces and military equipment we shall use in the war, and to control and command our sons who do the fighting."

Clark was incredibly prescient. As Bonta writes, "modern warfare since World War II has been almost exclusively a by-product of our relationship with the UN." Undeclared wars and military engagements fought by U.S. troops under UN authority since 1945 include Korea, the first Persian Gulf War, Somalia, and the Balkans. None of these wars ended in a militarily satisfactory manner, but each affirmed UN authority to wage war. Indeed, in 1991 President George Bush predicted that UN success in the first Gulf War would provide a "real chance at this new world order, an order in which a credible United Nations can use its peacekeeping role to fulfill the vision and promise of the UN's founders."

As Inside the United Nations convincingly demonstrates, the vision of the UN's founders, and the goal still unerringly sought by the world body and its internationalist promoters in America and abroad, is nothing less than the creation of a full fledged world government. Already the UN has progressed far down this road. In having an executive branch in the office of the secretary-general, a semblance of a parliament in the General Assembly, a sort of Joint Chiefs of Staff in the Security Council, central banking institutions in the IMF and World Bank, and a kind of judicial system in the World Court and the new International Criminal Court, the UN has all the trappings of a modem state.

Steve Bonta is an erudite and accomplished scholar. With penetrating analysis he probes all these topics and more. Yet he does so with a light and accessible style, making the book an easy read. This was intentional, as the book was conceived and designed to reach as wide an audience as possible. The author's clear and lucid prose and frank discussion of the issues, as well as his remarkable brevity, will ensure that the issue of the UN, the drive for world government, and the future of the United States will finally be placed with honesty before the American people.

In sum, Inside the United Nations is a book all Americans should read as the nation once again contemplates war on behalf of the UN.