Was a lot of this messy? 1000%. Has the UN made massive mistakes? 10000%. Would the world be in a better place without it? -1M%.
Most of the criticisms of the UN amount to:
1. “It’s trying to be a one-world government!” It’s not and never has been.
2. “Why *doesn’t* it act as a one-world government and force its will on the nations of earth (but in a moral way, moral defined by me)”
3. “Decolonization was a fuck show”. Yep. It always was going to be. There are definitely legitimate criticisms of the UN on this topic, but it *generally* navigated it well and on this and other topics…
4. …most true fuckery in world history since 1945 has been on individual nations and groups that the UN couldn’t directly stop because see #1.
Edited to add one point
DrHolmes52 on
Not sure how much I agree with the nuclear bomb one (on a USA vs. USSR perspective). Those things were handled locally (Truman telling MacArthur to get fucked, the Soviet officer that realized Able Archer was just a war game). Might be for the rest of the nations. And the rest of the stuff is spot on.
Gestum_Blindi on
It feels like the lack of a direct war between major powers is less because of the UN, and more because of fear of mutual destruction.
ExtraPomelo759 on
We stan the UN
Wilson7277 on
Apathy about the UN is how we lose it.
And believe me, you don’t want to lose it.
Blackpowderkun on
What we could point our fingers at when aliens ask, take us to your leader.
Short-Echo61 on
Whats with the sudden influx of UN posts?
wyattlikesturtles on
I feel like most people that hate the UN on the internet don’t really know what is it
Matar_Kubileya on
Personally, Id call Korea a direct war between major powers given that American and Chinese troops were directly shooting at each other in large numbers.
see-these-bones on
Its the same with safety and disease prevention. No one thinks “wow I’m alive because that law that required inspection on chicken made it so I didn’t die from food poisoning when I was 7”
All things that could have gone wrong but didn’t … didn’t. So we don’t think or even know about them.
cerberus_243 on
I doubt anything war or colonisation related is the credit of an organisation without right of enforcement. UN sub-organisations could exist without UN as well.
luna_the_tgirl on
I do see your points, but the UN is far from being good, they have let their soldiers get away with some bad stuff.
_Voxanimus_ on
Countless other disease ?
Smallpox is literrally the only officially eradicated disease on the planet T_T
Otherwise I quite agree with the remaining point, we can argue about the point on war between major powers tho
Pure-Physics1344 on
The problem are the veto rights. Everytime there is an issue that involves the veto powers the UN is basically useless
anihasenate on
Shit clings to a ship and says “we’re sailing”
The_memeperson on
Preach brother!
The problem with the UN is what it does is so mundane no one hears about it or it actively prevented something and “war didn’t happen” is not a good headline. But when it fucks up *everyone* knows about it so the failures are highlighted while the successes are ignored
DrHolmes52 on
The UN PR problem mostly comes from passing resolutions that countries (through actual power or just the situation) just ignore. Most of the time they are fine. But in conflict resolution, if one country or the other (or both, or another country wanting to third party) doesn’t want to listen, it makes the UN look ineffective. Which takes away from all the good things they do.
The U.N. isn’t there guarantee no conflicts, just to work to avoid/limit them.
Zac-Raf on
People think the UN should be the mom of the countries. That’s pretty much why people online hate it.
GiToRaZor on
The most important thing about the UN is, that with it, it is bad, but without it, it is so much worse.
National leaders can be comically bad shitheads. At least this forces them to talk to each other. And if you think that can be taken for granted, read up why the red phone was invented. Political assumptions kill people.
dvd102k on
All of this amounts to squat
avbitran on
The last one is a big stretch. Most of them are. I don’t think any of this is solely the UN.
AndreasDasos on
At least a couple of these, like ‘most’ decolonisation and lack of nuclear war, are at best difficult to definitively attribute to the UN itself
MisterAbbadon on
I really thought the idea that nations who are in dialog with each other are less likely to go to war was Poli Sci 101. Why is that such a hard concept for people to grasp?
GustavoistSoldier on
The UN has been quite effective outside of preventing wars
Glittering_Let2816 on
I like to think of the UN as that one neutral bar on the street that every gang meets at to at least try to maintain some peace and equality. And the bar does some good for the community from time-to-time (smallpox eradication being the biggest)
It is useless in literally every other way. The gangs can and will ignore the agreements if they feel they have the power to. And the fact that they haven’t gone to war with each other is purely their discretion and wish to not destroy themselves.
XhazakXhazak on
The only good point here is to be an international forum.
LateScarcity5092 on
The UN seems to be frighteningly effective so long as the great powers agree with it, but as far as great powers disagree the UN is very ineffective. The UN probably contributes close to nothing to the prevention of large wars between great powers, all of whom have at least hundreds of nuclear weapons. Decelonisation was something both superpowers agreed upon and colonisation was something the European powers were in all likelihood to weak to sustain. The UN is a forum, and there’s something to be said about its utility for that, and obviously the WHO is quite tremendous, but as far as power politics goes the UN basically can’t do anything without the countries that can impose themselves unilaterally anyway agreeing with it (they would just impose themselves anyway).
lanathebitch on
Yeah you are giving the UN way way too much credit. Disingenuously so
Jon_the_Hitman_Stark on
Did the UN prevent wars between major powers or did MAD?
BornCoyote87 on
You are never remembered for what you did but what you didn’t do while you’re alive.
Only when you are dead will you be remembered for all you accomplished.
blue_kit_kat on
Is the UN perfect no have they done good things yes are they still doing good things that’s debatable at times. Have they done more good for the world than bad? At this moment yes and hopefully that stays true in the future.
kizentheslayer on
The nukes stop wars between major powers more than the UN does
MammothPenguin69 on
Hi OP, fuck you.
The UN is worthless. Lack of nuclear war is not an argument. That has more to do with Mutual Assured Destruction.
The UN is great for allowing former Colonial Empires to feel good about themselves while they send poor people’s sons to foreign warzones with no support, ridiculous Rules of Engagement and surprisedpikachu.jpg when they get killed.
Just ask those poor Danish boys in Srebrenica, the Irish in Jadotville or the Presidential guard in Kigali.
UltraBurd on
But what have you done for me lately?
oylesine2019 on
In the end it can be just vetoed by one of the five even though majority voted in favor of something
GB_Alph4 on
They certainly are still bureaucratic but yes they do at least have quite a bit they did with standardization.
Granted yeah their way of handling wars sometimes was a mess. Bosnia was severely mismanaged by them.
zyrkseas97 on
This is literally a lesson I teach on the Rwandan Genocide. One of the questions is “What is the UN good for if it doesn’t stop a genocide?” And the students have to find evidence to explain why the UN is still a worthwhile organization even if it can’t muster a massive army Korean-War style.
KimJongUnusual on
That’s fair, but I can’t help but remember Rwanda, where the UN bravely stood aside and let the genocide happen, or the Yugoslav Wars, where the UN politely allowed Serbs to massacre Bosnian civilians cause they didn’t want to do their job, and proceeded to solidify Serbian gains every time the Serbs broke the UN ceasefires anyways.
SuperFaceTattoo on
Colonies are still a thing. The US has Guam and Puerto Rico. We just don’t call them colonies anymore, we call them territories.
HistoryFanBeenBanned on
The UN is just a forum.
If it doesn’t work, it’s not because the UN is flawed, it’s because it’s participants don’t want to work together. It’s like getting mad at a parliament building for elected representatives fillibustering.
ShayCormacACRogue on
The fact that people dog on the UN “for doing nothing” while it’s a supernational organization that intends to keep the sovereignty of the member states, and EVERYTHING THEY CAN DO while allowing for sovereignty, is insane
PopeLatte on
You could put no major wars to a number of different peace theories outside of the UN. Democratic PT, Codependence, Territorial PT, hegemonic stability, capitalist PT, MAD etc. etc. etc.
I think the UN probably has helped in achieving “world peace” between major powers, but it’s such a widely debated topic that you could easily say look how many wars the UN failed to prevent or even cause. Big UN stan, but it’s not as simple as saying the UN prevents war when there are dozens of factors operating at once.
My degree in international relations won’t help me get stable employment, but it can help me respond to reddit memes
Edit: also theorists in the past have claimed continental/global organisation and peace theories as the end to major wars right before both world wars. Food for thought
randmguyonreddit on
One of the things the UN doesn’t get enough credit for is the setting of international standards. It’s not glamorous or glorious but without standardized things like airport codes, maritime ship IDs, telephone standards, safety symbols etc. our world would be a much worse and more confusing place.
Invisible_Stalkbug on
I gotta say giving the UN credit for decolonisation sounds like revisionism to me. Like yes, they were vehicle through which some of it happened, but it reads like erasure of the efforts of independence movements, and the pressure from the USA.
NoWingedHussarsToday on
People deliberately ignore that UN “can do” only what member states agree to do. And same people who scream “UN is useless because it’s powerless!” would scream even louder about “world government” and “sovereignty of states” if UN actually had power to force countries into doing something they don’t want to do.
warfaceisthebest on
To be fair I would contribute the “no nuclear bombs dropped since ww2” part to USA. They do not against all wars but they do against all nuclear wars and discouraged Soviet from dropping nuclear bombs to China at 1969.
apupaples on
Yes finally someone who understand the greatness of the UN
47 Comments
Was a lot of this messy? 1000%. Has the UN made massive mistakes? 10000%. Would the world be in a better place without it? -1M%.
Most of the criticisms of the UN amount to:
1. “It’s trying to be a one-world government!” It’s not and never has been.
2. “Why *doesn’t* it act as a one-world government and force its will on the nations of earth (but in a moral way, moral defined by me)”
3. “Decolonization was a fuck show”. Yep. It always was going to be. There are definitely legitimate criticisms of the UN on this topic, but it *generally* navigated it well and on this and other topics…
4. …most true fuckery in world history since 1945 has been on individual nations and groups that the UN couldn’t directly stop because see #1.
Edited to add one point
Not sure how much I agree with the nuclear bomb one (on a USA vs. USSR perspective). Those things were handled locally (Truman telling MacArthur to get fucked, the Soviet officer that realized Able Archer was just a war game). Might be for the rest of the nations. And the rest of the stuff is spot on.
It feels like the lack of a direct war between major powers is less because of the UN, and more because of fear of mutual destruction.
We stan the UN
Apathy about the UN is how we lose it.
And believe me, you don’t want to lose it.
What we could point our fingers at when aliens ask, take us to your leader.
Whats with the sudden influx of UN posts?
I feel like most people that hate the UN on the internet don’t really know what is it
Personally, Id call Korea a direct war between major powers given that American and Chinese troops were directly shooting at each other in large numbers.
Its the same with safety and disease prevention. No one thinks “wow I’m alive because that law that required inspection on chicken made it so I didn’t die from food poisoning when I was 7”
All things that could have gone wrong but didn’t … didn’t. So we don’t think or even know about them.
I doubt anything war or colonisation related is the credit of an organisation without right of enforcement. UN sub-organisations could exist without UN as well.
I do see your points, but the UN is far from being good, they have let their soldiers get away with some bad stuff.
Countless other disease ?
Smallpox is literrally the only officially eradicated disease on the planet T_T
Otherwise I quite agree with the remaining point, we can argue about the point on war between major powers tho
The problem are the veto rights. Everytime there is an issue that involves the veto powers the UN is basically useless
Shit clings to a ship and says “we’re sailing”
Preach brother!
The problem with the UN is what it does is so mundane no one hears about it or it actively prevented something and “war didn’t happen” is not a good headline. But when it fucks up *everyone* knows about it so the failures are highlighted while the successes are ignored
The UN PR problem mostly comes from passing resolutions that countries (through actual power or just the situation) just ignore. Most of the time they are fine. But in conflict resolution, if one country or the other (or both, or another country wanting to third party) doesn’t want to listen, it makes the UN look ineffective. Which takes away from all the good things they do.
The U.N. isn’t there guarantee no conflicts, just to work to avoid/limit them.
People think the UN should be the mom of the countries. That’s pretty much why people online hate it.
The most important thing about the UN is, that with it, it is bad, but without it, it is so much worse.
National leaders can be comically bad shitheads. At least this forces them to talk to each other. And if you think that can be taken for granted, read up why the red phone was invented. Political assumptions kill people.
All of this amounts to squat
The last one is a big stretch. Most of them are. I don’t think any of this is solely the UN.
At least a couple of these, like ‘most’ decolonisation and lack of nuclear war, are at best difficult to definitively attribute to the UN itself
I really thought the idea that nations who are in dialog with each other are less likely to go to war was Poli Sci 101. Why is that such a hard concept for people to grasp?
The UN has been quite effective outside of preventing wars
I like to think of the UN as that one neutral bar on the street that every gang meets at to at least try to maintain some peace and equality. And the bar does some good for the community from time-to-time (smallpox eradication being the biggest)
It is useless in literally every other way. The gangs can and will ignore the agreements if they feel they have the power to. And the fact that they haven’t gone to war with each other is purely their discretion and wish to not destroy themselves.
The only good point here is to be an international forum.
The UN seems to be frighteningly effective so long as the great powers agree with it, but as far as great powers disagree the UN is very ineffective. The UN probably contributes close to nothing to the prevention of large wars between great powers, all of whom have at least hundreds of nuclear weapons. Decelonisation was something both superpowers agreed upon and colonisation was something the European powers were in all likelihood to weak to sustain. The UN is a forum, and there’s something to be said about its utility for that, and obviously the WHO is quite tremendous, but as far as power politics goes the UN basically can’t do anything without the countries that can impose themselves unilaterally anyway agreeing with it (they would just impose themselves anyway).
Yeah you are giving the UN way way too much credit. Disingenuously so
Did the UN prevent wars between major powers or did MAD?
You are never remembered for what you did but what you didn’t do while you’re alive.
Only when you are dead will you be remembered for all you accomplished.
Is the UN perfect no have they done good things yes are they still doing good things that’s debatable at times. Have they done more good for the world than bad? At this moment yes and hopefully that stays true in the future.
The nukes stop wars between major powers more than the UN does
Hi OP, fuck you.
The UN is worthless. Lack of nuclear war is not an argument. That has more to do with Mutual Assured Destruction.
The UN is great for allowing former Colonial Empires to feel good about themselves while they send poor people’s sons to foreign warzones with no support, ridiculous Rules of Engagement and surprisedpikachu.jpg when they get killed.
Just ask those poor Danish boys in Srebrenica, the Irish in Jadotville or the Presidential guard in Kigali.
But what have you done for me lately?
In the end it can be just vetoed by one of the five even though majority voted in favor of something
They certainly are still bureaucratic but yes they do at least have quite a bit they did with standardization.
Granted yeah their way of handling wars sometimes was a mess. Bosnia was severely mismanaged by them.
This is literally a lesson I teach on the Rwandan Genocide. One of the questions is “What is the UN good for if it doesn’t stop a genocide?” And the students have to find evidence to explain why the UN is still a worthwhile organization even if it can’t muster a massive army Korean-War style.
That’s fair, but I can’t help but remember Rwanda, where the UN bravely stood aside and let the genocide happen, or the Yugoslav Wars, where the UN politely allowed Serbs to massacre Bosnian civilians cause they didn’t want to do their job, and proceeded to solidify Serbian gains every time the Serbs broke the UN ceasefires anyways.
Colonies are still a thing. The US has Guam and Puerto Rico. We just don’t call them colonies anymore, we call them territories.
The UN is just a forum.
If it doesn’t work, it’s not because the UN is flawed, it’s because it’s participants don’t want to work together. It’s like getting mad at a parliament building for elected representatives fillibustering.
The fact that people dog on the UN “for doing nothing” while it’s a supernational organization that intends to keep the sovereignty of the member states, and EVERYTHING THEY CAN DO while allowing for sovereignty, is insane
You could put no major wars to a number of different peace theories outside of the UN. Democratic PT, Codependence, Territorial PT, hegemonic stability, capitalist PT, MAD etc. etc. etc.
I think the UN probably has helped in achieving “world peace” between major powers, but it’s such a widely debated topic that you could easily say look how many wars the UN failed to prevent or even cause. Big UN stan, but it’s not as simple as saying the UN prevents war when there are dozens of factors operating at once.
My degree in international relations won’t help me get stable employment, but it can help me respond to reddit memes
Edit: also theorists in the past have claimed continental/global organisation and peace theories as the end to major wars right before both world wars. Food for thought
One of the things the UN doesn’t get enough credit for is the setting of international standards. It’s not glamorous or glorious but without standardized things like airport codes, maritime ship IDs, telephone standards, safety symbols etc. our world would be a much worse and more confusing place.
I gotta say giving the UN credit for decolonisation sounds like revisionism to me. Like yes, they were vehicle through which some of it happened, but it reads like erasure of the efforts of independence movements, and the pressure from the USA.
People deliberately ignore that UN “can do” only what member states agree to do. And same people who scream “UN is useless because it’s powerless!” would scream even louder about “world government” and “sovereignty of states” if UN actually had power to force countries into doing something they don’t want to do.
To be fair I would contribute the “no nuclear bombs dropped since ww2” part to USA. They do not against all wars but they do against all nuclear wars and discouraged Soviet from dropping nuclear bombs to China at 1969.
Yes finally someone who understand the greatness of the UN