============================================================================ Date: Thu, 10 Aug 2000 13:15:27 -0400 To: •••@••.••• From: Hans Sinn <•••@••.•••> Subject: Re: rn: re: Nader's ideas on peace force Mime-Version: 1.0 Dear Paul, I appreciate your concern with bringing armed gangs and militias of various stripes under control. I am not sure how your idea of "force" fits into Ralph Nader's statement "What we need is to declare as a foreign policy is that non-violence is the top priority". It seems, you are supporting the original and as yet unrealized plan of the UN founders to provide the UN with its own standing Armed Forces. While I am supporting a new proposal, which is to provide the UN with its own standing Non-Violent Peace Force. It remains to be seen if the UN could have in fact both, a standing armed (peace) force and standing non-violent peace force. Best wishes, Hans. ========== Dear Hans, I think we need to look at the sources of the various conflicts in the world before it makes sense to talk about remedies. Media propaganda blames conflicts on tribal emnities, demented dictators, and the like -- while characterizing the West as some kind of good-samaritan who comes along and saves the day. This propaganda is of course false. It is the Western powers who intentionally create the conditions that lead to conflict, as a means of maintaining imperial control. As long as this continues, it is rather absurd to think the UN could do anything to alleviate the situation. Either the UN would be impotent, as it traditionally has been, or else it would act as an agent of the imperialist West -- a role it is being increasingly dragged into. Before we can talk about a regime of _maintaining peace; we need to remove the _cause of conflicts. As for "the original and as yet unrealized plan of the UN founders to provide the UN with its own standing Armed Forces"... consider the citation below. rkm Recommendation P-B23 (July, 1941) stated that worldwide financial institutions were necessary for the purpose of "stabilizing currencies and facilitating programs of capital investment for constructive undertakings in backward and underdeveloped regions." During the last half of 1941 and in the first months of 1942, the Council developed this idea for the integration of the world.... Isaiah Bowman first suggested a way to solve the problem of maintaining effective control over weaker territories while avoiding overt imperial conquest. At a Council meeting in May 1942, he stated that the United States had to exercise the strength needed to assure "security," and at the same time "avoid conventional forms of imperialism." The way to do this, he argued, was to make the exercise of that power international in character through a United Nations body. - Laurence Shoup & William Minter, in Holly Sklar's Trilateralism (see access), writing about strategic recommendations developed during World War II by the Council on Foreign Relations. ============================================================================ Richard K Moore Wexford, Ireland Citizens for a Democratic Renaissance email: •••@••.••• CDR website & list archives: http://cyberjournal.org content-searchable archive: http://members.xoom.com/centrexnews/ featured article: http://cyberjournal.org/cj/rkm/Whole_Earth_Review/Escaping_the_Matrix.shtml A community will evolve only when the people control their means of communication. -- Frantz Fanon Permission for non-commercial republishing hereby granted - BUT include and observe all restrictions, copyrights, credits, and notices - including this one. ============================================================================ .