UN General Assembly on 12 October 1960, in the midst of the Cold War, the representative of the Philippines delivers a speech against the Soviet Union (USSR). Russian communist leader Nikita Khrushchev shouted for the president of the Assembly to call the Asian delegate to order (sic!), first banging his fist on the table, then brandishing and banging one of his shoes.
“Any international organisation that departs from the idea of God cannot fail to lead to the domination of the strongest over the weakest” (Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira, “Legionário”, 16 March 1947)
In 1945, after the conference of Yalta, approval was given to the statute of the “United Nations”, the new international organization that would replace the “League of Nations”. From the beginning Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira foresaw that it was destined to fail for the very same reasons for which the League of Nations had failed before it.141
“The United Nations is doomed to failure, because it is secularist. (…)
“Nothing is accomplished merely with the ‘idea of God’. Firstly, because God is not a figment of the imagination, but rather a reality, the absolute Being. Secondly, because from time immemorial the peoples have believed in God, or at least in gods. And wars nonetheless occurred. The solution is to be found in Christianity. And by Christianity we mean Catholicism.
“If the UN were organized under the shadow of the Papacy, under the presidency of the Vicar of Christ, by Christian people, then a universal order would not be a chimera. However, not all the peoples represented in the UN are Christian, not all the Christian peoples are Catholic. Nor are all the Catholic peoples governed by Catholics, nor is it possible for the Vicar of Christ to exercise an efficacious influence in such an ambience.
“In these circumstances, failure is inevitable. The League of Nations is already in the cemetery of History. There is another plot ready beside it: the one for the United Nations.”142
Notes:
141. On the failure of the UN, especially with regard to its powerlessness to face the crimes of war and modern genocides, cf. Yves Ternon in L’Etat criminel. Les Génocides au XX siècle (Paris, Seuil, 1995) which offers a shocking description of the great mass exterminations of our century, from the Jewish genocide to that of Armenia, from that of Cambodia to those of the Soviet Union.
142. P. Corrêa de Oliveira, “7 dias em revista”, O Legionário, no. 762, 16 March 1947. “The UN purely and simply ignored the existence of the Papacy. It, thus, repudiated the only pillar upon which normally can be organized International Law. And it failed just as the League of Nations did and for the same reasons” (ID., “Um ano em revista. A consolidação das