United Nations Journal
Kristol, William
"United Nations Journal" William Buckley's United Nations Journal is a depressing book. Buckley effectively portrays, with grace and wit, shunning harsh polemics or apocalyptic predictions, this organization characterized...
...The honor of American democracy was being impugned...
...But the various trends of our age—intellectual, social, political—seem to have come together in helping to corrode individuals' sense of self-respect in favor of either a desire to lose oneself in the mass or (and the two are not mutually exclusive) a desire for mere ''expression" of a "self ' whatever the worth of that expression or self...
...The "genuine outrage" felt by Buckley and others at the baseness and hypocrisy of the UN may not be the best guide for the making of foreign policy...
...Self-respect seems to be necessarily based on a sense of man's elevation, which in turn rests on a sense that there are standards by which men can be judged elevated and that there are elevating achievements...
...In half of them the present regime would collapse without American support or American acquiescence...
...This instance of utterly shocking candor at the UN could only be said by a comic figure like Baroody...
...Any, repeat any, country that does not support us on a matter of this consequence not only damages the United Nations, but must quietly be brought to understand it has damaged itself...
...What have we become...
...while moral evasion seems to be increasingly the stance of the nations of the free world, whose abstaining votes in the UN are only one manifestation of their policy or lack of it...
...after a while, nobody notices...
...rather he ends his Journal by printing a once-confidential cable from Daniel P. Moynihan, which expresses "concern not only at the emergence of an anti-democratic bias at the United Nations, but at the curious seeming acceptance by the United States that there is nothing to be done about it, indeed that it is scarcely even to be protested save by men such as Scali...from outside the system...
...But still it was his job...
...There are about ten dozen of them...
...These days, the moralistic commitment seems to be all on the side of the terrorists...
...This sound advice has usually been neglected either in favor of moralistic crusading or mere accommodation, or worse, a perverse combination of both...
...In suggesting the need for a concern with honor, Moynihan —and Buckley— may have been thinking of Churchill's advice in The Gathering Storm with respect to the "tormenting dilemmas" nations face in foreign policy: "There is, however, one helpful guide, namely, for a nation to keep its word and to act in accordance with its treaty obligations to allies...
...Yet it is not the UN itself that is so depressing...
...What drove me to despair was the complacency of ourputative allies in this matter...
...to be surprised, for example, that "while as a legislative body it is useless, and while as a debating body it is invaluable, it does a great deal of legislating and absolutely no debating...
...This guide is called honor...
...but such outrage cannot and should not be ignored, for it is justified, and represents at least in part our attachment to a notion of decency and justice...
...And it is our neglect of our honor that may help explain our evident quandary in foreign policy, which stems from the insufficiency of either moralism or mere putative realpolitik...
...We accommodate ourselves to the UN, for example, by refusing even to raise the issue of the exclusion of Israel from UNESCO, a blatant violation of the UN charter, because we do not have the votes...
...He works for a Stalinist...
...I am not going to mention names—God help me if I were to...
...I looked down the list of those who go along and those who go along by abstaining...
...Something specifically bad should happen to each one of them, and when it has happened they should be told that Americans take the honor of their democracy most seriously...
...Let us talk of malaria eradication, and aid levels...
...one could substitute self-respect...
...He is a Stalinist...
...Moynihan, who preceded Buckley as a public member in the U.S...
...participation in and support of the UN serve to corrupt us...
...Churchill suggests that a sense of honor is the necessary prerequisite for a foreign policy that is practical and yet not unprincipled, that is neither willful nor supine...
...But to ignore those that are being hotly debated at the very moment...
...To hell with it...
...Honor may be a quality unsuited to a democratic society and a democratic age...
...said our allies...
...As Buckley writes, it is only 'by distinguishing between life in the United States and life in the Soviet Union that one generates the energy to resist the sovietization of American life...
...moralistic commitment or what Buckley calls "moral evasion" are easier positions for nations to maintain...
...It is Buckley's great merit and honor, far more, I believe, than his position on any particular issues, that he has stood and fought on the side of human dignity and self-respect against the many and powerful forces of our age which would debase man...
...Forget about a slander on our honor...
...The kind of stance Buckley suggests is difficult to find and hold...
...This disregard, according to Buckley, "becomes something in which everyone is automatically trained...
...We debase our public discourse by obeying the UN convention simply to ignore Soviet infractions of the stated ideals of the organization, and "not merely against those ideals that are tucked awayin the old idealisms of the venerable documents of the very early years...
...Buckley refrains from setting forth his own conclusive answers to this question...
...What is most depressing about Buckley's book is his suggestion of the extent to which U.S...
...Buckley effectively portrays, with grace and wit, shunning harsh polemics or apocalyptic predictions, this organization characterized by stultifying hypocrisy, shameless irresponsibility, and moral cowardice, and made more disheartening and repulsive by the fact that its character results entirely from the freely-chosen words and actions of its members...
...After all, one would have to hold a preposterously high opinion of the various rulers of mankind to be surprised by their performance in the UN...
...What is honor...
...or to be surprised by the hypocrisy Buckley identifies as the UN's salient characteristic...
...In the debate on the exclusion of South Africa, only Baroody of Saudi Arabia had the courage to point out a simple truth: "I want also to draw the attention of my colleagues, regardless of whether they come from Africa, Asia, or from anywhere else, to another point...
...We seem to be willing to forget about a clear violation of the charter, a direct lie about the United States...
...He does suggest that it is not inconsistent for the United States to negotiate constructively with the Soviets on several matters while at the same time maintaining in public debates on questions of human rights "a dogged position seeking to reaffirm the ideals of the United Nations...
...Moynihan's anger at our allies is surely justified...
...How can the United States avoid moral obtuseness on the one hand, while acknowledging the claims of prudence in foreign policy on the other...
...Unfortunately, there are many governments that are not representative of their people...
...For this above all we a:imire him and are grateful...
...The United Nations is the most concentrated assault on moral reality in the history of free institutions, and it does not do to ignore that fact, or worse, to get used to it...
...delegation to the UN, recollects "the fury with which I sat in the General Assembly and listened to the Stalinist son of a bitch from Cuba go on...
...but as he himself suggests, their neglect of our honor has to an extent only followed our own neglect...
...He can get killed if he makes a mistake...
...What has come over us...
...In every-day jargon we call them dictatorships...
...even as, say, altogether spontaneous conversation deploring drunkenness will take place in households in which a principal is an alcoholic...
...I believe there are about three or four dozen of them...
...Buckley does not call for a liberal democratic crusade to free the world, nor for a liberal democratic absolutist stance vis-a-vis the rest of the world...
Vol. 8 • February 1975 • No. 5
