THIS DAY IN 1945.
The United Nations is born
PURPOSE
The United Nations was designed to replace the ineffective League of Nations, an organization the isolationist United States refused to join. FDR and Churchill hoped that a world body could prevent the conflicts that so many individual nations could not.
Two important objectives described in the Charter were respecting the principles of equal rights and self-determination of all peoples and international cooperation in solving economic, social, cultural, and humanitarian problems around the world.
RESULTS
World conflicts that were once the blame of a small group of nations were spread to a much larger group. Now everyone could be guilty of doing nothing. And the legitimacy that the U.N. gained through vocal utopians meant that any dictator could inoculate their actions by bribing one or two influential nations that would hence veto any response.
By giving equal voice to all nations, despot regimes have ganged up to support the idea of national sovereignty of dictatorships as an ideal more important than individual rights. Not too different from the way the U.S. Supreme Court has re-written the constitution to justify whatever current position it may hold.
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