THE UNITED NATIONS: Power Greed Soulless

The United Nations sells a vision of peace and unity, but its foundations tell a harsher story. Bankrolled by John D. Rockefeller Jr., its headquarters rose where a neighbourhood once stood, wiped away to make room for global power. 

Their language is peace but the reality is leverage, money, and influence concentrated at the highest levels. 

A conversation with Lawrence Rogak

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:10

Lawrence Rojak, we're going to be discussing the UN. It's one of those institutions that you either love or hate, and it depends very much on your political views, but also, as it turns out, your views on society more broadly. Lawrence, welcome to the show.

SPEAKER_01 0:29

Thank you, and hello Australia.

SPEAKER_00 0:32

Lawrence, the United Nations, it's just one of those topics that raises all manner of debate. And I'd like us just to go back to the very beginning, if we could. Being in New York City, the financial hub of the world, or it was, not sure if it still stands today with that title, it was built on property donated by Rockefeller. Now, I believe it was about$8.5 million that he donated in order to purchase a site and then have the property built. Right on the East River there. Is the foundation of the United Nations partially, I suppose, can contributing to the different views in which we see the value or otherwise of what goes on inside that building?

SPEAKER_01 1:27

Just to go back for a second, although Rockefeller donated a plot of land, much more land was required for the United Nations building and its surrounding property than was donated. In fact, the City of New York condemned and bulldozed an entire neighborhood on the east side of Manhattan in order to build the United Nations. A whole neighborhood that was full of two and three-story brownstones with stores on the ground floor was taken by eminent domain, which is the legal principle in the US Constitution that permits government to force a sale of private property for government use. They condemned the entire neighborhood, displaced thousands of residents and small businesses, and used that property for the United Nations grounds. So I I just thought that was an important point because nobody ever brings that up.

SPEAKER_00 2:39

I didn't know about that and uh you've just said displacement that the construction of the United Nations meant the displacement of an entire community. And then that goes into Palestine and Israel in terms of making sure that Israel had land holdings and a nation of its own. What was the sort of displacement involved there?

SPEAKER_01 3:04

What happened the history of Israel vis a vis the Arabs is highly detailed and it gets very distorted. To just to re recount the brief history there, the Jews of Europe and other countries in the Middle East, their migration to the area called Palestine began in earnest around 1890, when the concept of Zionism as a homeland for the Jewish people was first proposed. Now the in Palestine, the name comes from the area that today comprises Israel. It was called the Mandate of Palestine, because after World War One when Great Britain had defeated the Ottoman Empire, which was the owner of all that territory, Great Br Great Britain named it the Mandate of Palestine. And then the Jews after World War One began to immigrate there in great numbers. But the land was owned primarily by absentee Arab landlords, very wealthy Arabs who lived in other countries and owned the land. The Jews who moved there bought the land from those absentee Arab landowners, and they were able to buy it cheap because it was barren. There was absolutely nothing there. So they were able to buy it fairly cheaply, and by the sweat of their own brows, they they plowed it, they cultivated it, and they turned it into productive farmland. Now there weren't very many Arabs living in that area at the time. And we're when now we're talking now about the 1920s. But because the Jews created all this farmland, they created opportunities for Arabs to work there. So Arabs began to immigrate into this mandate of Palestine from surrounding Arab countries. And as the population of the Jews grew, friction began to develop between the Jewish residents and the Arab farm workers, bec because mostly because there was a built-in dislike for new arrivals. And numerous episodes of civil unrest and massacres, primarily massacres of Jews by Arabs began. So the British, who owned the area and were in charge of policing it, kept trying to come up with a solution. And the solution that that the British finally came up with is let's divide Palestine into Jewish and Arab areas. And what the British proposed was to give 10% of the area to the Jews and 90% to the Arabs. The Jews accepted it. They said, we'll take our 10%. But the Arabs refused. They felt that 90% was just unfair. It was not enough. And while this controversy was going on, it came to a head in 1947. And what the Jews of Palestine decided to do finally was, you know what? We're just going to declare ourselves a state. And in 1948, they declared that the Jewish area of Palestine, which the British had set aside for them, the area which is now called Israel, they declared that this is the state of Israel. And the reaction of the surrounding or the Arab neighbors was to declare war. Now what the Arab leaders of the surrounding areas did was they sent messages to the Arabs living in the Jewish area, which was now called Israel, and they said, you better get out because we're going to come in and we're going to kill every living thing. So get out. About half or two-thirds of the Arabs living in Israel fled. Those Arabs are today's what we call the Palestinians. The ones who stayed are today's Israeli Arabs. Israel won that war. They defeated all their Arab neighbors with hardly any help. And the so the Arabs who stayed in Israel are today's Israeli Arabs, the ones who went to the areas outside Israel's borders. They were not called Palestinians. They were just called Palestinian Arabs. And they did not begin to call themselves Palestinians until 1964, when Yasha Arafat decided to co-opt that term and created the Palestinian people. I have seen a million newspaper articles and other scholarly publications from the time which always referred to the Jews as Palestinians. It wasn't until 1964 that Palestinian began to mean Arab. And they've been resisting the acceptance of Israel as a state ever since. And they have rejected every proposal for a Palestinian state, and the leaders of the Palestinian people have stated publicly time and time again, this is not about the land. We want to destroy Israel. And yet the fiction persists that it's a fate about land. Land has nothing to do with it. I'll stop here and ask the next question.

SPEAKER_00 9:36

Look, Lawrence, that history is incredibly important because it's not recognized enough within society broadly. But more importantly, when we have the current issues that we do have, and we're seeing now that there is such a lack of faith in the UN according to some, and others still determined to see the UN as the one world order, if you will. That history is critical because it appears that's exactly how the United Nations has decided to operate and function with this sort of opposing views of society and this division that just continues day in, day out at the same time trying to have control over every situation in every country around the world through all of their charters, many of them which are errant nonsense because we don't have agreement on all of these charters. There are conditions placed on these charters with every nation that signs up to it. It's a mess, isn't it?

SPEAKER_01 10:45

We need to take a look at the organic composition of the United Nations. There are 193 member states. Only twenty-six of them are democracies. The majority of the member states of the UN are dictatorships, communist countries, and other non-democratic regimes. Many of them have terrible human rights records. North Korea, China, Iran, and Syria are all full UN member states, and they sit on the on the UN Human Rights Commission, despite the fact that they're repressive and they don't recognize most human rights. The UN has no way of holding its member states to account for the abuses that they commit. The UN has no enforcement ability.

SPEAKER_00 12:23

And we mustn't forget also that there is that whole issue around funding and money flow and what happens there. We don't know who's moving money where or how unless things do start to unfold, which is for example, Gaza, the education system is fully funded by the United Nations. Now when you talk about the way in which the membership situation is, then again we've got regimes funneling money to regimes effectively, haven't we?

SPEAKER_01 13:03

Yes, and a very large portion of the money that is funneled around by the UN is used by dictatorships and abusive regimes to repress their own people. Billions of dollars funneled to Hamas in Gaza over the past twenty years, supposedly for humanitarian aid, and then it turned out that over ninety percent of it was used to build underground tunnels and buy arms and prepare to launch attacks on Israel. So there's no accountability for the money. It's the biggest money laundering organization in the world. There have been many monetary scandals uh in the UN's history. There was a when Saddam Hussein was still the dictator of Iraq, the UN had created an oil for food program where supposedly instead of Iraq being able to sell its oil to arm itself, it would receive food instead. And that turned out to be just that was completely abused. It was a cover-up for a money laundering scheme. So the UN does more harm than good. In fact, I I would challenge anybody to point out some major accomplishment of the United Nations, a war that it prevented, uh a genocide that it stopped. Nothing.

SPEAKER_00 14:39

No, absolutely not. And it goes back to as well when we're talking about not only finance but control. When we have billionaires that are involved in UN initiatives that do have that influence via massive social media and reach, I suppose the benefits of reach that they have worldwide. And I'm not saying anything specifically about Bill Gates, but just using his name as an example because he is one of the most well known. They pal up and they partner with the UN and they drive initiatives to suit whatever agenda it is that they have, that then becomes an international worldwide agenda. So how does how do they actually dis how do we distinguish what's right and wrong when there is so much power at play not only through the UN members but those who come on board with that membership and continue to influence world thinking?

SPEAKER_01 15:41

Well, i in my opinion, you can assume until you receive evidence overw otherwise that everything the UN does is wrong. That that's the presumption. Because almost nothing that they do has a purely beneficial humanitarian purpose. In in fact, I may catch some flags for this, but in my opinion, the UN is just Epstein Island with a veil of legitimacy. The abuses that go on, they enable sex trafficking, they enable the sale of children, they enable slavery. People don't talk talk about the fact that there are thirty million black slaves today who are owned and bought and sold in Africa and the Middle East. Why does nobody talk about it? There are a few who do, but their voices don't get amplified. Why does nobody talk about the slave trade today? Why is it never a discussion at the UN?

SPEAKER_00 16:59

Oh look, I couldn't agree more. I couldn't agree more. There are so many issues, but again, it comes back to this control, doesn't it? And the UN has been, in my view, strategically positioned, exactly as you said, to have this control over society and effectively ignore all of the humanitarian issues that they claim to care about. So how do we flip this? How does the world come on board to back President Trump when he's pulling out of the UN, pulling funding out, pulling out of so many initiatives that aren't working, he's on board. How do we help him in other countries?

SPEAKER_01 17:39

I think that the most effective thing that can be done as a practical matter is for President Trump to defund the UN and kick it out of New York. If those things are done, if you take them because money is always at the root of course of everything. If you defund it and evict them, the organization will collapse and the world will be much better place for it.

SPEAKER_00 18:11

Wow. I love it. We're going to evict the UN from New York if Lawrence Rozjak has his way. When are you getting on the phone to President Trump and advising him that this is the way to go?

SPEAKER_01 18:25

I'm sure he's got much smarter people than me around him who are thinking but I'll send him an email and see if see if if it gets answered. But I I'm serious though, that would be a dramatic move for the better. Of course, there'd be lots of yelling and screaming from the people who benefit from all the UN's corruption. But I would knock down the UN building and put up a residential neighborhood.

SPEAKER_00 18:53

Brilliant. And then also you've got to unpack unravel all of the financial implications involved with that. So big task, but there's always something that can be done to improve the world. And Lawrence, you've just improved the world by giving us that outstanding history of the UN that many of us aren't aware of, and but we certainly are now. So thanks again for being on the show. Looking forward to your company again next week.

SPEAKER_01 19:16

Thank you.

SPEAKER_00 19:17

Pleasure. Lawrence Rojak, our US correspondent, speaking about the United Nations and having a couple of solutions to some of the dire things that need to be dealt with around the world, and certainly to ensure that we do care about one another a lot more than we do if we're being controlled to an e by an entity that cares not for us but only themselves.