Ever since the UN Declaration was signed at the San Francisco Conference in June 1945, the broad avenues that run along New York’s East River are blocked for a week as motorcades and delegations criss-cross the city and converge on the UN building at Turtle Bay for the General Assembly. There is much diplomatic pomp and show. Most world leaders converge on the event and those from the smaller nations use this forum to steal the limelight. However, there is little substance to the deliberations and the proceedings although the media portrays it as the most auspicious institution on a world scale. One can see the diplomatic hypocrisy, deception and deceit at its zenith behind the façade of artificial smiles, handshakes and manoeuvrings. But not much comes out of it and after these leaders depart, the status quo returns, with the same conflicts raging even more ferociously, new contradictions exploding into wars and bloodshed, and the burning problems pulverising the oppressed masses around the planet. The UN was first conceptualised by the US State Department in 1939 to perpetuate its dominance and have control over the political and diplomatic processes, which was necessary to establish its role as a world policeman after the Second World War, a war responsible for the loss of over 55 million and devastating Europe, Japan and other countries, with the notable exception of the US. This in turn destroyed the dominance of the British and other European imperialist powers on a world scale. On the economic front, the US spearheaded a Conference held at Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, USA, from July 1-22, 1944. This was attended by 730 delegates, mainly bourgeois economists, from 44 allied nations. In this conference the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) was signed. Through these agreements, institutions like the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD) were established. The IBRD is today known as the World Bank. These institutions were devised in reality to ensure the economic domination of US imperialism and the crushing domination of the world market by the imperialist multinationals and corporate capital. What we have seen in the subsequent period is the extreme exploitation of the former colonial countries of Asia, Africa and Latin America through the division of labour, lowering of raw materials costs, and the high pricing of the technology and industrial products of the imperialist monopolies. The IMF, the World Bank and other imperialist institutions regulated this plunder, leading to inflated indebtedness of these countries in shoring up increasing trade deficits through credit financing by these institutions with loans tied to severe conditions and exorbitant interest rates. The debt crisis that we see today in Pakistan and other so-called third world countries is the direct result of these policies. The UN was fundamentally a compromise between the main powers of the entente, namely the Soviet Union, USA and Britain. The agreements in Tehran, Yalta and Potsdam in the early 1940s tried to create a balance between the world powers, but, in fact, resulted in the defeat of revolutions that had erupted in Europe and elsewhere. In reality, the UN is the reincarnation of the League of Nations that was founded as a result of the Peace Conference in Versailles near Paris in France at the culmination of World War I in 1919. It was another deal between the imperialist victors to further crush the vanquished nations. The League of Nations, according to Lenin, was the unification “on paper only; in reality it is a group of beasts of prey, who only fight one another and do not at all trust one another.” He branded the League as a “Thieves’ Kitchen”, a “piece of fakery from beginning to end; it is a deception from beginning to end; it is a lie from beginning to end.” The essence and the objectives the UN are no different from those of the League of Nations. Perhaps the hypocrisy and deceit has been enhanced but no serious decisions are taken or implemented. In the almost seven decades since the end of WWII and the creation of the UN, there have been five times more casualties in the wars and insurgencies that have and are ravaging the planet. These deaths and maiming are apart from the millions who have died and are dying due to the hunger, poverty and disease this excruciating capitalist system is inflicting upon the human race. From Palestine to Kashmir, it has failed to resolve a single serious conflict. Hundreds of resolutions have been passed by this glorified General Assembly of the UN on these two conflicts but none has been implemented. The Israeli Zionist state has thrown every resolution out of the window as it is backed by the imperialists due to its role of consistent destabilisation in the oil-rich Middle East. Over the last 67 years the US has exercised its veto 83 times. On 42 of these occasions it has done so to prevent Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians being censured. These permanent members have bullied the rest of the world into silence and exploited the workers. How can these great warmongers of the past 60 years, peddlers of weapons of mass destruction, responsible for countless wars, deaths of millions, talk of disarmament, global peace and control the administration of so-called ‘international justice’. In the last analysis according to Alan Woods, editor of Marxist.com, “The UN is no more than a keep of imperialism.” The frivolous and endless debates will go on and the masses will continue to suffer the depredations of wars, conflicts and brutal exploitation as long as this system exists. As the Iraq war proved, the imperialists give a damn about the UN resolutions. Its structures are undemocratic and the Security Council that comprises of the dominant powers takes all the decisions, with every power having a right to veto any resolution that they consider unfit for their foreign policy interests. The increasing conflicts in the Security Council are a reflection of the economic-social crisis and the turmoil that is aggravating on a world scale. The overthrow of this system in any one important country in this world of instability will have repercussions throughout the planet and the institutions that have been tailored to protect this system will become non-existent. The working classes of the world have to unite to replace such institutions of the ruling elites with genuine organisations of the people that would be the basis of the fraternity of the human race. The writer is the editor of Asian Marxist Review and International Secretary of Pakistan Trade Union Defence Campaign. He can be reached at ptudc@hotmail.com