Percussus Belli.

should arise, the United Nations would split, of course, and the victors—they’d probably call themselves the United Nations—might sit in judgment over the defeated as before, if they so chose. Yet the United Nations itself cannot prevent anything serious—it has neither power nor law to restrain, say, the Soviet invasion of Hungary or the invasion of Laos. Korea, of course, was a war of UN members against each other, the United States and its allies versus Russia and its allies. (If the latter had fought under the United Nations emblem, public relations cliches would have differed—nothing else.)

Where an actually international UN army was assembled, as in the Congo, it enforced a most dubious sort of ad hoc law, broke all the promises originally made to the contending parties, and committed barbarities worthy of any national army, enthusiastically violating the laws and customs of war. The UN did not even try to make its soldiers account for their atrocities—in this respect being well behind most national armies. (And at the present time it seems harder to find out who gave certain orders in the Congo than to find out who ordered what in Nazi Germany.) Not a hopeful outlook. Unless there is reason to believe that the supernational authority will do more than get us from the frying pan into the fire, we will have to go slow.

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Guy Davenport

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should arise, the United Nations would split, of course, and the victors—they’d probably call themselves the United Nations—might sit in judgment over the defeated as before, if they so chose. Yet the United Nations itself cannot prevent anything serious—it has neither power nor law to restrain, say, the Soviet invasion of Hungary or the invasion of Laos. Korea, of course, was a war of UN members against each other, the United States and its allies versus Russia and its allies. (If the latter had fought under the United Nations emblem, public relations cliches would have differed—nothing else.)

Where an actually international UN army was assembled, as in the Congo, it enforced a most dubious sort of ad hoc law, broke all the promises originally made to the contending parties, and committed barbarities worthy of any national army, enthusiastically violating the laws and customs of war. The UN did not even try to make its soldiers account for their atrocities—in this respect being well behind most national armies. (And at the present time it seems harder to find out who gave certain orders in the Congo than to find out who ordered what in Nazi Germany.) Not a hopeful outlook. Unless there is reason to believe that the supernational authority will do more than get us from the frying pan into the fire, we will have to go slow.