The Death of the United Nations?

Ladies and Gentlemen: We meet in circumstances most of us regard as bitterly sad. We all became accustomed to the reality of Mainland China. We grew, even, to acknowledge that the men who won the revolution after the Second World War in China embarked on a revolutionary course which was totalist in its ambitions: to remake man, no less. The usual practices by which accountants measure the cost of social enterprises seemed somehow inadequate. The learned debate among the necrologists is over the question whether ten or fifteen or fifty million human beings have been executed in the course of giving flesh to the thoughts of Mao Tsetung. The ghastliness of it all was on such a scale as to cause us to become almost clinical in our consideration of it, like the harried doctor who wanders insouciantly through the streets of a city in the final throes of a deadly plague. We felt we could maintain our balance only by indulging a little counterrevolutionary vision of our own, namely that the government of Chiang Kaishek would recover the Mainland: even as, on coming across the story of Anne Frank, the occasional reader experiences that sense of personal indignation which brings him to feel that by rushing personally to her aid, he might, somehow, save the legions destined to die in the extermination centers.

Well, Chiang did not recover the Mainland, the government of Mao Tsetung did not fall, and the West didn’t have the stomach to make it fall; and soon it become the fashion to allege that we were ignoring the largest country in the world by our failure to extend to it diplomatic recognition. Such in fact are the paradoxes of diplomacy, that we more conspicuously notice a nation by declining to recognize its government, than by recognizing it: we are more acutely conscious of Cuba, which we do not recognize, than of Guatemala, which we do. Still, along the way the assumption was stimulated that the government of Mainland China was co-equal with the people of Mainland China, a point our formal diplomacy tends gravitationally to accept, causing us sometimes to move from professions of friendship for the Chinese people, on over to professions of friendship for the Chinese government, without the ceremonial pause that, ideally, would acknowledge the hypocrisies to which international protocol so often drives us.

About the Author

William F. Buckley Jr.

William F. Buckley Jr. founded National Review magazine in 1955.

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Ladies and Gentlemen: We meet in circumstances most of us regard as bitterly sad. We all became accustomed to the reality of Mainland China. We grew, even, to acknowledge that the men who won the revolution after the Second World War in China embarked on a revolutionary course which was totalist in its ambitions: to remake man, no less. The usual practices by which accountants measure the cost of social enterprises seemed somehow inadequate. The learned debate among the necrologists is over the question whether ten or fifteen or fifty million human beings have been executed in the course of giving flesh to the thoughts of Mao Tsetung. The ghastliness of it all was on such a scale as to cause us to become almost clinical in our consideration of it, like the harried doctor who wanders insouciantly through the streets of a city in the final throes of a deadly plague. We felt we could maintain our balance only by indulging a little counterrevolutionary vision of our own, namely that the government of Chiang Kaishek would recover the Mainland: even as, on coming across the story of Anne Frank, the occasional reader experiences that sense of personal indignation which brings him to feel that by rushing personally to her aid, he might, somehow, save the legions destined to die in the extermination centers.

Well, Chiang did not recover the Mainland, the government of Mao Tsetung did not fall, and the West didn’t have the stomach to make it fall; and soon it become the fashion to allege that we were ignoring the largest country in the world by our failure to extend to it diplomatic recognition. Such in fact are the paradoxes of diplomacy, that we more conspicuously notice a nation by declining to recognize its government, than by recognizing it: we are more acutely conscious of Cuba, which we do not recognize, than of Guatemala, which we do. Still, along the way the assumption was stimulated that the government of Mainland China was co-equal with the people of Mainland China, a point our formal diplomacy tends gravitationally to accept, causing us sometimes to move from professions of friendship for the Chinese people, on over to professions of friendship for the Chinese government, without the ceremonial pause that, ideally, would acknowledge the hypocrisies to which international protocol so often drives us.