Hesperophobia Hall
In 2009, I published a book with the title We Are Doomed, in which I urged American conservatives to abandon the vapid, post-Reagan optimism they had wandered into and recover a properly realistic, more pessimistic view of human nature. By way of pre-promoting the book, I was interviewed by a reporter from The Economist magazine.* He asked me for examples of how conservative pessimism might translate into policy. I gave him 10. The 10th was:
Withdrawal from the UN, followed by the razing of all UN structures on American soil and sowing the ground with salt.
(I have since been advised that salting the soil of Manhattan waterfront property requires hard-to-get permits. Eh, bureaucrats!)
I don't see the point of the United Nations and never have. The fool thing was started up by FDR and Winston Churchill, both intelligent and worldly men. What on Earth were they thinking? Wasn't the whole idea tested to destruction after World War I — the League of Nations, the Kellogg-Briand Pact renouncing war? As Nicholas Wade points out in his new book The Origin of Politics, all 15 signatory nations of the latter were major participants in World War II, which broke out just 11 years after the Pact's signing. Wars are not resolved or deterred by lofty intentions, but by military force or the threat of it.
President Trump spoke of the utter uselessness of the UN in his address to the General Assembly on Sept. 23. In his usual style — frank realism seasoned with self-regarding braggadocio — he told them he had ended seven wars, dealt with the leaders of each of the countries involved, and never even received a phone call from the UN offering to help broker peace. He said:
Not only is the UN not solving the problems it should, too often it's actually creating new problems for us to solve. The best example is the number one political issue of our time, the crisis of uncontrolled migration … Your countries are being ruined. The United Nations is funding an assault on Western countries and their borders.
The UN's 193-member General Assembly operates on an annual cycle: an opening session in September followed by a week-long "General Debate," where actual heads of member states take the platform, and then regular plenary meetings, in which full-time delegates deal mainly with procedural and budgetary issues.
Who are these delegates arguing and voting in the General Assembly? I can offer an informed opinion. I lived for five years on Manhattan's East 46th Street, just a stone's throw from the UN headquarters. Much of the neighborhood gossip — from residents, store assistants, cabbies, bartenders, hotel staff, and cops — concerned the manners and morals of U.N. Assemblycritters.
How do they get the job? Well, imagine you are President-for-Life of small, poor Kleptistan. Your wife has a cousin who, although none too bright, is cunning and associates with people who might give you trouble in the future. So, you need to find him a sinecure outside of domestic politics, where he's no threat to you: something well-paid, with lots of foreign travel and opportunities for graft and petty crime (under diplomatic immunity, of course). A post as Kleptistan's UN General Assembly delegate is just the ticket.
In the stratosphere above the General Assembly basks the 15-member UN Security Council. Five of the seats are permanent and hold most of the UN's authority, such as it is: Britain, France, Russia, China, and the U.S. In other words:
- Two decrepit, impotent once-Great Powers
lurching towards disintegration while foreign barbarian
warriors pour in across their undefended borders.
- Two imperial Asiatic despotisms whose rulers divide their
time between planning expansion of their imperial territories and
fending off palace
intrigues.
- The United States.
The 10 temporary members of the Council are each elected — by the Assembly, of course — for a two-year term. In the past five years, their ranks have included delegates from Gabon, Niger, Somalia, Guyana, and Albania. Paragons of security!
UN involvement in world affairs, when not utterly futile, is disastrous. Gang rape by UN "peacekeepers" has been so common, Wikipedia has a 1,700-word article about the thousands of allegations, and there is a Hollywood movie on the subject: The Whistleblower (2010). If you see guys wearing the blue-and-white UN peacekeeper helmet headed for your village, run!
President Trump got to the heart of the matter in his address to the General Assembly: the UN is an anti-Western organization. It is favored by nations and movements that hate the West, and by Westerners who hate their own civilization.
In the commentary flood that followed the 9/11 horrors, Anglo-American political scientist Robert Conquest (1917-2015) tried to float the word "hesperophobia." Its roots are Greek έσπερος (hesperos), which means "the West" and φόβος (phobos), which means "fear," but which as an English suffix is commonly stretched to include "hate." Hesperophobia is hatred of the West.**
Alas, this very useful word seems to have sunk without trace. Nothing deterred, I hereby offer an apt alternative name for the UN General Assembly chamber: "Hesperophobia Hall."
[Added when archiving:
* In case you hit the Economist paywall there, here's a text dump of the whole interview.
** I confess — offline, this was not included in the printed article — that Robert Conquest's neologism was only one half of my inspiration for this piece. The other half was the "Dear Bill" letters that ran in the British satirical magazine Private Eye in the years when Margaret Thatcher was Britain's Prime Minister. Written by Richard Ingrams and John Wells, these letters — they were of course spoofs — pretended to be from Dennis Thatcher, Mrs. Thatcher's husband, to Bill Deedes, editor of the conservative Daily Telegraph newspaper — two seventy-ish reactionary gents.
In these letters, "Dennis" usually referred to the House of Commons — the lower house of Britain's national legislature — as "Halitosis Hall."
I have never been in the UN General Assembly chamber and so cannot testify on the air quality there; but when you want to be rude about the meeting place of a deliberative body you dislike, "Halitosis Hall" is the gold standard, and bears imitation.]