18 April 2003 - The UN's Inevitable Failure

Now that the US has clearly broken the UN charter by starting a war based on the arrogated right of pre-emptive strikes many people see the UN as a spent force with its credibility in tatters. Well, I have news for all those making this argument: It never had any muscle anyway. It was set up to legitimise the colonial seizure of lands from the Palestinians to establish Israel. Since then every aggression by the Israelis has remained unchallenged despite what is 70 odd security council resolutions against Israel, and what would be many more if it were not for US vetoes.  The UN was set up and functioned as intended:  to establish, not laws of justice among nations, but the entrenchment of material gains of colonial powers. Whether it be the Chinese grabbing Tibet, Israel established by grabbing Palestine, the French holding on to Algeria, the Russian occupation of Chechnya or the British and the Americans on their current colonial jaunts, it is all the same. The UN did not suddenly fail to keep world peace. It has never really done anything to hold back the war makers of the world. That wouldn't suit the needs of its sponsors. He who pays the piper picks the tune.

The world will never know justice while those set in authority to judge are only in their positions thanks to the money paid by the biggest criminals of all. Of course, they not only appoint the judges, they actually dictate what the law should be, so they can always claim that they are in no way criminals. The only argument apparently left to those who oppose these imperialist ambitions is to show inconsistency in how these people choose to interpret the law. This is essentially what the professors of international law are now reduced to - arguing the semantics of deliberately ambiguous security council resolutions. There is no consideration of justice, only a series of vain attempts to keep language from descending totally into the absurdities of Orwellian doublespeak. 

However, there is such a thing as justice and it is not decreed by any man-made institution. Its origin is in divine law, the very way God has made the laws of nature, God has also set out moral laws of justice. Basing any international order on anything less is bound to unravel sooner or later.

One key aspect of understanding justice is to separate the justice that can be achieved on earth from the justice that can only be achieved through an all-knowing all-powerful God after we die at the day of judgement. 

In this life, there are many things we will never know. The evidence is simply not available to us. The intention in the heart of someone, what was written on a document now burned, the secret conspiracies behind many events. The justice system that we can operate in this world is therefore necessarily limited in ambition. It can only deal with what is clearly proven. The situations where this cannot be done have to be humbly left to God to sort out on the day of judgement. To do otherwise is to fail to do justice just as surely as the criminal act you are seeking to rectify is an unjust act.

This principle is at the heart of the injustice of punishing Iraq until it proves it has no weapons of mass destruction, the injustice of attacking someone because you think that they intend to attack you and the injustice of labelling people as "illegal combatants" or "terrorists" so that you may imprison, punish and kill them while considering them as guilty until proven innocent.

We can only return to justice in this world once we recognise our limited capabilities in creation under God's laws, both natural and moral, for without God's justice there is no justice.