Emblems of UN Immaturity

Accountability, that source of institutional health, had been excluded from United Nations experience; and, along with it, indivisibly, the stimulus of direct public engagement and response. ``It is not a United Nations Organization,'' Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was to say, in his Nobel address in 1970, ``but a United Governments Organization.'' In offering itself as the mere creature of its member governments, the United Nations system entered a state of arrested moral development, marked by the habitual emblems of immaturity: demands for approval, hostility to truth, and an incapacity for individual or collective self-questioning. The organization emerged from its definitive trauma of the McCarthy years - which had encompassed the forced resignation of its principal officer, the exposure of his chief deputy as a national agent, and the suicide of his legal advisor, together with a host of less conspicuous tragedies - with no admission of error, no gesture of atonement, no effort at self-recognition. - From `Countenance of Truth'