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Show LETTERS TO THE EDITOR It's Not 'Frankenstein's Monster Dear Editor, Although Mr. Baker is in the Marines and unable to reply, his attack on the U.N. should not go unanswered. Mr. Baker's analysis of the U.N. claims to be a "comprehensive and well-researched analysis." It is the intent of this letter to point out some inadequacies of both his reasoning and documentation. First, let us dispose of the claim that his articles comprise a "comprehensive "com-prehensive and well-researched analysis of the United Nations." The claim was made that he had given a 'complete list of those participating par-ticipating in the writing of the U.N. charter . . . and all but one were later identified as Communists." Commu-nists." If Mr. Baker had consulted even such elementary and widely available avail-able sources as the Encyclopedia Britannica he would have found that more than 46 nations, and almost al-most 10,000 people, participated in the San Francisco conference, which drafted the U.N. charter. Yet Mr. Baker's "complete" list named only 17 men, all of whom were Americans. Further, although the wartime "Big Four" had a powerful voice in drafting the charter, the document docu-ment was approved article by article by all the participating nations. na-tions. For this approval, the rule of majority, usual in political conferences con-ferences was abandoned. For approval ap-proval of any item a two-thirds majority was required. Nevertheless even assuming with Mr. Baker that 21 years ago a group of Communists, both foreign and domestic, had a possibly powerful pow-erful hand in writing the U.N. charter, what did they accomplish? The only portion of the U.N. charter char-ter obviously favorable to the USSR (and incidentally much used by them) is. the provision for veto power by members of the Security Council. The veto power is, however, a provision insisted upon by all the members of the "Big Four" and would not now be relinquished by the U.S. under present circumstances. circum-stances. What remains to be shown is that America has gotten appreciably appre-ciably worse results from utilizing U.N. machinery than when depending depend-ing upon our own lackluster State Department. Let us examine this aspect. Another of Mr. Baker's claims is that the U.N. has failed in its efforts ef-forts to keep world peace. Mr. Baker claims, "For an organization that has set itself up to be a mutual protection agency for the entire world, the U.N. is guilty of criminal disregard of its responsibilities." According to Mr. Baker, instead of putting our hopes ,for world peace in the hands of the U.N., "Maybe we had better take a look at those hands! They appear to have blood on them." Once again, the U.N. is not perfect per-fect and possibly could be modified, modi-fied, but would we be better off without it? NO! Definitely not. Can anyone believe that our State Department De-partment (the same old bumbling one we have always had) could have done as well as the U.N. with the explosive issues of Iran, Cyprus, Israel, Korea, and the Congo? Concerning supposed U.N. "failure" "fail-ure" in Hungary and other places Mr. Baker states, 'Time after time they have allowed countries such as Hungary and Goa to be subjugated, sub-jugated, while others such as Katanga Ka-tanga and Rhodesia catch it in the neck for wanting the freedom to run their countries themselves." Let us take up the cases of Hungary and Katanga. The United States incited the Hungarian rebellion. re-bellion. Our radio broadcasts asked for revolt! ' When the revolt actually occurred oc-curred we fortunately could not and would not support it. (For one thing how would we have got our troops there? An airlift against the world's most powerful land army would have been inconceivable.) Obviously the U.N. could also do nothing. As for Katanga, it is (and was) a part of the Congo. If the U.N. had not intervened in the post-independence convulsions of the Congo, there is a very likely possibility that today the Congo (including the province of Katanga) would be a Communist satellite under the leadership of Patrice Lummumba. The prevention of this, as in the case of Hungary, could have resulted re-sulted in a WW III confrontation with Russia. Although it obviously can be done, Mr. Baker should realize that there is little justification for selecting and "shaping" facts to fit preconceived ideologies or ideas, no matter how strongly their owner may wish them to be true. Far from being the "Frankenstein's "Franken-stein's monster" claimed by Mr. Baker, the U.N. is rightly regarded by most people as being an imperfect im-perfect but nevertheless a very valuable val-uable tool for world peace. Jim Todd Graduate Student |