On the brink of the 21st century, the UN draws its authority and credibility from the "international community". What is this grand amorphous state?
In reality, it is not "international" at all; it is the Western establishment, whose will is sometimes expressed through the Security Council, at other times through NATO, generally unilaterally. At all times it is dominated by the US. It is a new order with an old meaning: imperialism.
It is, of course, apostasy in the West to describe the US and its principal lieutenant, Britain, as imperialist. Surely, imperialism died at Suez in 1956?
From the invasion of Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos, to the invasions of Grenada, Panama, Somalia, the Gulf, to the current genocidal blockade of Iraq, all of them authorised or condoned directly or indirectly by the UN, the evidence is that imperialism lives on - the difference today is its presentation.
There are serious blueprints at hand for this "new" imperialism. The most famous and influential is the work of Professor Samuel Huntington, director of Harvard's Institute of Strategic Studies.
Called The Clash of Civilisations, it has been hailed as a 1990s equivalent of George F Kennan's historic essay on "containment", which rationalised American imperial supremacy following the second World War.
Huntington's argument is that Western culture must be preserved in splendid isolation from the rest of humanity in order to "generate a third Euro-American phase of Western affluence." He wrote: "The leaders of Western countries have instituted patterns of trust and co-operation among themselves that, with rare exceptions, they do not have with the leaders of other societies."
He described NATO as "the security organisation of Western civilisation (whose) primary purpose is to defend and preserve that civilisation." NATO membership should be closed to "countries that have historically been primarily Muslim or Orthodox" or in any way non-Western "in their religion and culture."
Huntington's language relies on racial stereotypes and a veiled social Darwinism. It is a vision of global apartheid. Of course, the responsibility to police this Western laager "falls overwhelmingly on the most powerful Western country, the United States". Henry Kissinger has endorsed his call for an updated Mandate from Heaven as "the most important since the Cold War."
Everybody will know their place in the global apartheid system. The EU has shown the way. Anti-refugee and asylum-seeker laws now ensure that people are sent back to regimes that want to imprison or kill them.
There is, of course, the Third World Nuclear Threat. India and Pakistan are a "threat"; so, too, are the "Atomic Ayatollahs" in Iran. In response to this, there is to be an American Nuclear Expeditionary Force, "primarily for use against Third World targets", according to Pentagon planning documents.
No fuss is made about the Middle East's only genuine nuclear-armed power, whose murderous invasions of a neighbouring country, all of them in violation of at least six UN resolutions and overwhelmingly condemned by the General Assembly, have been carried out with impunity. This is Israel, whose terrorism, known as "self defence", is underwritten by the US.
In the new imperialist order, the victims, not the oppressors, are the terrorists: a perception widely held, according to professor Richard Falk at Princeton University, because of "the domination of fact by image in shaping and shading the dissemination of images that control the public perception of reality.
"Even critics on the left generally started from the prefabricated association of terrorism with the politics of the dispossessed, and try from that vantage point to explain and argue why such patterns of violence have emerged."
That all but a few members of the UN General Assembly vote year upon year for a resolution calling on Israel to withdraw from the occupied territories of Palestine is, like so much else, irrelevant; what matters is that Israel represents Western, mostly American, imperialist power. Thus, an American-sponsored "peace process" in the Middle East means the opposite. It is a war process that has corralled the Palestinians between Israeli military forces and foreign invaders, known as "settlers", who are sponsored and armed by the Israeli government and subsidised by the US.
It is entirely appropriate, if heartbreaking, that the beleaguered cantons that comprise 3 per cent of the West Bank, which the "peace process' has allotted the Palestinians in their own country, resembled the impoverished Bantustans or "homelands" of apartheid South Africa.
One of the striking features of the post-Cold War period is the rehabilitation of the concept of imperialism. Like Prime Minister Harold Macmillan in the 1950s, the Samuel Huntingtons of the 1990s grieve the "loss of white prestige" that, unabashed, distinguished the old imperialism.
In those days, the moral claims of imperialism were seldom questioned. Imperialism and the global expansion of the Western powers were represented in unambiguously positive terms as a major contributor to human civilisation.
Today, the economic and political crisis in the Third World serve as a retrospective justification for imperialism. For the first time in half a century the past is openly celebrated. The Wall Street Journal has described American opposition to the Franco-British invasion of Suez in 1956 as "perhaps the biggest strategic mistake in the post-war era".
SHORTLY before the American attack on Iraq in 1991, the Cambridge academic, John Casey, announced that the Western powers "can now do what they like (in the Third World)".
And he was right. With the subjugation of the UN, the current expansion of NATO, the American legitimisation of ethnic cleansing in the Balkans, the "containment" of the Middle East and the restoration of American influence throughout Africa and in the Central American "backyard", the former British Foreign Secretary Douglas Hurd can understandably sigh with relief when he says that "we are slowly putting behind us a period of history when the West was unable to express a legitimate interest in the developing world without being accused of neocolonialism".
New euphemisms are required: Orwellian beauties like "preventative diplomacy" and "humanitarian intervention". The UN Security Council was still meeting on January 16th, 1991, debating whether or not to authorise the American-led attack on Iraq, when a reporter came into the chamber and said: "They're bombing Baghdad. It's on CNN."
This was "humanitarian intervention" executed impatiently by the US. According to the Medical Health Trust in London, almost a quarter of a million Iraqis died during and in the immediate aftermath of this humanitarian intervention.
Thanks to a perception of a surgical scientific and "good" war, promoted assiduously by the Western media, the scale of the carnage is barely appreciated in the West: just as the deaths of almost two million Iraqis, many of them children, as a direct result of Western and UN-approved sanctions, is a truth hardly known.
For one observer of the suffering of imperialism's latest victims, this is a "silent holocaust". It is time the rest of us recognised that the means may have changed, while the consequences have not.
John Pilger's new book Hidden Agendas is published by Vintage