The U.N., the I.M.F.,
and the Chimera of World Peace

 

On the 24th of June 1995, several friends and I attended The Children's World
Peace Festival in Celebration of Fifty Years of the UN, at East Fort Baker, on
the Golden Gate, just south of Sausalito. It was a warm, sunny day, and a festive
atmosphere was fostered by the casual, New Age ambience of the musical acts and
speakers, from the stage in the meadow to the adjacent Circle where each attendee
could gather two free crystals.

The crowd, made up of children of all ages, basked in the sun by the bandstand
and alternately prayed and chanted, in perfect mediumistic fashion, in response
to the "Great Invocation" and swayed and danced to the more up-tempo bands, while
"Guardian Angels" in white T-shirts and Red Berets benignly stood guard, directed
traffic, and manned all check-points.

At one point, a cherubic choir of multi-cultural young people sang a
We-Are-The-World type of song, exhorting their hearers to take the pledge to
"Support the web of life." Late in the afternoon Graham Nash, now a solo act,
came out and sang a song about the need to have a code when you are on the road,
and another, dedicated to the UN, about the children of Oklahoma City, who were
blown up because someone was trying to make a point about something.

Earlier in the afternoon, my friends and I circulated among the thin crowd with a
video camera for a while, seeking a single solitary soul who knew anything about
the International Monetary Fund (I.M.F.). What we found confirms what we already
knew about such audiences, to wit, that almost nobody attending such a gathering
knows anything about the reality of the two sister, core institutions of the
United Nations - the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. This is not
surprising, since the clientele at such gatherings, although well meaning and not
apolitical, are generally economically illiterate.

The United Nations, as everyone should know, was founded in San Francisco in
1945, just after the War was over. What most people nowadays do not realize,
unless they are old enough to remember the wartime propaganda or collect old
books, is that the phrase "United Nations" first came into use in December of
1941, just after Pearl Harbor. At that time it was used interchangeably with the
phrase "The Allies," which it came to supplant.  The "Allies," of course, were
the British Empire and - after Pearl Harbor - the U.S., who were fighting against
the "Axis Powers," in particular, Germany, which occupied "Fortress Europe."

After Nelson Rockefeller was dispatched by FDR to Caracas, Venezuela, to organize
the Organization of American States (OAS), most of the South American republics
also joined the "United Nations." While in Caracas, Nelson also saw to it that
the "Axis" was supplied with enough oil from Standard Oil, via the Azores, to
keep the war going as long as necessary. (Charles Higham, Trading With The
Enemy).

So there was a direct continuity between the Anglo-American alliance and the
formal, global agency, the UN, which was founded in San Francisco and established
in New York City on land donated by the Rockefeller Foundation in the immediate
post-war period. The "last great hope of mankind" was, in reality, a "soft" front
for the globalist, empire-building aspirations of Anglo-American imperialism.

And that is precisely the reason why the U.S. and Britain ensconced themselves
into permanent seats on the top-heavy UN Security Council. The imperialist nature
of the Security Council is not a secret.  It is also axiomatic that the ends of
imperialism are economic. The fundamental contradiction of the UN is that the
World Bank and the IMF are a front for a consortium of international, privately  
owned, commercial banks.

The principle at work here is actually fairly simple: First World finance
capitalists have written the monetary rules for the rest of the world to play by.
Since the establishment of the Bank of England in 1694, bankers have granted
themselves a monopoly over "credit" and "money." In essence, you either accept
the Monopoly Money that the big boys issue, or else you don't play the game. No
Third World nation can purchase the technology or the products of the First World
with their own government-issued fiat currency.

To industrialize, to trade, and buy and sell on the world market, Third World
nations must use the hard currencies of the G-10 nations, or Swiss Francs. The
G-10 are: Britain, Germany, France, Italy, Canada, the U.S., Japan, Sweden, Holland, 
and Belgium. "Hard" means that these nations have acquired the bulk of the monetary 
gold in the world. Roughly 85% of this hoard is kept under the runway of the 
International Airport in Zurich, Switzerland. In reality, the Gold Standard is so 
much hocus-pocus. First World banks, on account of this collective hoard of gold, 
are franchised by the UN World Bank to lend "credit money" - in today's terms, 
mere "computer-blips" - to the debtor-nations of the Third World.

Under the Fractional Reserve system by which the international banks conduct
business, they are allowed to lend out in loans ("credit money") as much as 26
times the amount of "reserves" they have "on deposit" in their vaults. The
"capital pool" of both the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund are
private corporations ‹ the Prime Banks of the G-10 and Switzerland.




                    The Roots of British Colonialism


Historically, the Exchequer, the finance ministry under the British Crown, began
to go into debt to the Bank of England almost as soon as it was founded in 1694.
Foreign wars were fought at great expense to the Treasury, and the cost of these
wars was added to the National Debt. The stockholders of the Bank - the owners of
the "consols" - began to receive tidy quarterly dividends from the interest on the
ever-expanding National Debt. This system, established in London in the 1690s
with the founding of the Bank of England and the Stock Exchange, is called
Capitalism and represents the transition from the old, medieval feudalism, based
on fealty and ground-rent, to the new, modern feudalism, based on monopoly and
interest-bearing debt.

During the overt period of the British Empire, from roughly 1750, until 1946, the
Bank of England functioned as a looting instrument in the interest of the British
(Whig Aristocracy) bond-holding class, not only to Britain's internal economy,
but to the macro-economy of the Empire, as well. After World War Two, with the
establishment of a new set of "international" institutions, the center of gravity
was transferred from the Bank of England to the World Bank/IMF.

The commercial banks of the City of London, which had owned and controlled the
stock of the Bank of England, became a portion of the "capital pool" of the new
twin entities. Subsequently, in a purely symbolic move, the post-war Fabian
"Socialist" government of Clement Atlee "nationalized" the empty shell of the 
Bank of England. The IMF then replaced the Bank of England as the vehicle of
debt-collection.




                       New Rules for An  Old Game


From that time forth, (owing in part to the antiquity of its industrial base) the
economy of Britain itself began to gradually slide deeper and deeper in debt to the 
I.M.F., which also became the new, streamlined instrument for global economic looting.
Today, in 1995, with the purchase of Barings Bank (one of Britain's historic
"prime" banks) by a Swiss conglomerate, the Continental (i.e., German and Swiss)
banks are ascendant. Some say that the financial capital of the world has moved
from London to Switzerland.

On paper, a thorough description of the World Bank and the IMF is very complex.
There are the "subscriptions" to the Fund itself and the votes conferred in
proportion with each subscription (this aspect alone gives the First World
hegemony within the Fund); there is the gold-tranche and the various
credit-tranches, and so on.

It is not in the scope of this article to fully demystify the elaborate veil of
window-dressing that covers the perverse heart of the beast - nor do I fully
understand it myself, though I have striven to do so. It is enough for the
lay-person to understand that behind the facade of the U.N. World Bank and the 
I.M.F., international commercial banks are lending computer-generated "credit-
dollars" at usurious rates of interest-rates that the Third World debtor nations 
cannot repay.

Initially then, the borrowing nation goes in debt to the World Bank - in reality
to the private bank-corporations which constitute its "capital pool." Then, when
the debtor nation is thoroughly in hock, the IMF steps in to refinance the
original debt. This is like getting a second mortgage. Then, after the poor
little nation becomes so thoroughly in debt through the "miracle" of compound
interest that it cannot pay even the interest on either mortgage, the General
Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) steps in to call the debtor-nation on the
carpet in Geneva. First World debtor-nations (like Britain) are quite naturally
exempt from this kind of humiliation.

Ultimately, the Third World debtor-nations are forced by GATT to cough up raw
materials - their own precious national resources - in order to pay this fictitious, 
interest-bearing, un-payable "debt" that was originally generated out of nothing 
in privately-owned, First-World bank corporations. If progressives are opposed to 
imperialism and neo-colonialism, they should be aware of the neo-colonial function 
of the IMF and GATT, both founded in 1946, two of the chief institutions of the 
United Nations.




            Pollyanna  Appearances Sugar-coat  Ugly  Reality


Another inherent contradiction between the illusion of "wonderfulness" - of the 
UN as it is presented in such venues as the 1995 Children's World Peace Festival,
and reality - is the role of the international banks in fomenting and financing
wars and civil wars around the globe - especially in Asia, Latin America, and
mineral-rich Africa. The UN party line is that wars are caused by nationalism,
ignorance, and chauvinism. While these factors are clearly present in all 
conflicts, no ongoing war can be waged for more than a few weeks without financing 
- and financing comes from banks.

The really ugly aspect of this picture is that the international armaments
industry - euphemized in the 'teens, 'twenties, and 'thirties of the Twentieth
Century as the "Merchants of Death" - interlock with some of the same
international commercial banks which form the capital pool of the IMF, the agency
of the UN, the institution supposedly dedicated to the cause of "world peace."

The debacle that unfolded in Bosnia, formerly a province of Yugoslavia, is an
example of this essential contradiction. First World arms-merchants (and their
attendant, interlocking bank corporations) exploited the historic ethnic
antagonism between the Croatians, Serbs, and Bosnians to create & capitalize on a
ghastly little civil war, while apportioning the sales of death-dealing armaments
in a gentlemen's agreement between them - Britain, Skoda (arms-central of the
Czech Republic), and Russia arming the Serbs, while Germany and Austria armed the
Croats. Bosnia, kept under an arms embargo for a long while, could only buy
weapons on the black market - most of them from the Islamic bloc. In consequence,
Bosnia was ground like corn between the twin millstones of Serbia and Croatia.

And what was the role of the UN in all of this? Far from being "weak," "inept,"
or "lacking teeth," as the mainstream media portrays it, it did just what it was
designed to do, acting as a "soft" cop, presiding over another "managed conflict" 
-in effect, a supervised war of genocide and attrition. Meanwhile, the big boys,
the German bankers, who through the Bonn government precipitated the break-up of
Yugoslavia by immediately recognizing the independence of Croatia when it was
announced in 1991, cleaned up, and acquired just as much equity in Croatia as
they could gobble up (a sizeable spread along the Adriatic coast for starters) in
payment for the arms that were supplied to wage the war.

In point of fact, from its inception, the UN has presided over a series of
disastrous and bloody neo-colonial conflicts. There was the UN "police action" in
Korea in the early fifties and the rape of Katanga province by UN forces in the
bloody Congo war of the early sixties. The U.S. presence in Vietnam - an
imperialist presence if there ever was one - was sanctioned by the UN Security
Council and the South East Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO), an agency of the
United Nations.

In short, from the UN presence in Somalia as room-monitor for the oil interests,
to the UN sanctions against Iraq, which have effectively murdered thousands of
children by depriving them of medical supplies, to its non-action and silence
(equaling complicity) in the face of the Chinese depredations in Tibet and the
CIA-sponsored war in Angola (in which one and a half million people have died),
the contemporary record of the UN as global "peace-keeper" is pretty dismal.

When these realities are related to the illusion - the cherubic children's choir
exhorting the hearers to "Take the pledge to support the web of life" - the
discrepancy is enormous. On one hand, the ideal of internationalism, of love and
brotherhood/sisterhood and a world beyond national chauvinism and warfare, is
undeniably a good and positive vision. That's what we all want, n'est-ce pas? On
the other hand, as long as finance capitalism, directed from London, New York,
and Switzerland, continues to rule the planet, and individual nations and states
are denied their natural rights to control their own economies and own their own
resources, the UN can never bring "world peace."

In 1994, Global Exchange of San Francisco promoted a series of symposiums around
the slogan (regarding the IMF) "Fifty Years is Enough." In truth, the slogan
should be "Three Hundred Years is Enough," for that is the term and tenure of
finance capitalism, the neo-feudal system evolving out of the Bank of England,
which supplanted the old feudalism. We need to move on.

The progressive agenda should state that the people of each nation be granted
their sovereign and inherent powers over their own destinies through "home rule"
of their own economies, natural resources and industries. Nations, including this
one, should be allowed to regulate their own cash money systems. For until the
day when the hegemony of the international bankers shall be broken, the
neo-colonial system of which the UN is unfortunately a part, will continue to
exploit the people of the world, causing untold suffering, pain, and death.



                         - Mark Walter Evans,
             
             (Published in the North Coast Xpress, 1995)