Insofar as anyone thinks about it all these days, the UN just sort of ’emerged’ after WW2, at that conference in San Francisco, didn’t it?

Dan Plesch at SOAS has been looking deep into the history of those times and is pulling together a goodly bunch of fascinating material showing that the UN in fact grew from a Declaration of United Nations in 1942, which itself built on the Atlantic Charter of 1941.

In fact the allies of the United Nations fought as such and were busy planning the post-war world from quite an early stage of WW2.

British publicity material of the time of course had to jump over one very inconvenient truth, viz that Hitler had not started the war on his own.

Thus a 1945 booklet ‘published for the United Nations Information Organisation published by His Majesty’s Stationery Office’ described the outbreak of hostilities in 1939 as Germany "without even a declaration of war" advancing its armies deep into Poland. No mention of the attack from the East by Soviet forces two weeks later.

The need to accommodate Stalin’s lies and post-Yalta cheating as the price for an exhausted peace affected the actual San Francisco Conference itself. The Americans in the end had to concede the Soviet definition of the ‘Polish problem’, to keep the Soviets on board.

This Poland, one of the honourable original signatories of the 1942 Declaration by United Nations, was not present. 

This scandalous betrayal of core UN principles on the very day the UN Charter was signed prompted one of the greatest moments in musical history.

At the gala concert the great pianist Artur Rubinstein (of Jewish origins from Lodz in Poland) observed acidly that he could not see the Polish flag among all the flags in the hall.

He then changed the programme and played the Polish anthem, to a tumultuous and moving ovation.

Sixty-three years later in July this year we have seen post-Soviet Russia and still-communist China vetoing a UN Resolution aimed at putting pressure on their little pal Marxist Mugabe.

Result?

This:

Death is stalking Zimbabwe’s children, as a potentially catastrophic famine gathers momentum. Aid agencies say that half the population, about five million people, face starvation, two-thirds of children are out of school and water shortages have led to deadly cholera outbreaks.

Not to forget this:

Zimbabwe’s annual inflation rate – already the world’s highest – has soared to 231,000,000%, newly released official figures for July show.

Of course the UN does its fair share of good work.

But who counts the victims of UN-manufactured hypocrisy and double-dealing, brought into the UN by Communists and there from Day One, all those decades ago?