This is not likely to endear organization to Bush administration whose hawks regard it as a superfluous leftover from Cold War era. Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas) even introduced legislation to withdraw from organization altogether. Nile Gardiner, a visiting fellow at Heritage Foundation, summed up these sentiments in Insight Magazine thus:

"I think U.N. has been in gradual decline for many years. It failed to act spectacularly in Rwanda and did nothing about Slobodan Milosevic's brutal regime. Iraq is latest in a long line of failures."

Admittedly, like any bureaucracy, organization is self-perpetuating, self-serving and self-absorbed. But it - and its raft of specialized offshoots - still give back far more than they receive. In recognition of U.N.'s crucial role, several liberal Democrats have entered legislation to create a "permanent U.N. security force" and to "voluntarily contribute" to U.N. Population Fund.

Consider peacekeeping operations. At a total annual cost of c. $5 billion last year, U.N. peacekeeping missions employ close to 40,000 police and military and another 11,000 civilians from 89 countries. The budget is shoestring and more than half pledged contributions are still outstanding. The U.N. consumes less than 0.001 percent of world's gross domestic product. As James Paul, Executive Director of Global Policy Forum, observes:

"All UN staff, including specialized agencies and funds, are fewer than civil service of City of Stockholm or staff of McDonalds. The core UN budget is one half of one percent of US military budget and far less than cost of one B-2 bomber aircraft."

Even United States Mission to United Nations, on its Web site, seeks to debunk a few myths. Despite a massive increase in remit and operations, organization's budget, at $2.6 billion, has remained constant since 1995. The workforce was cut by 11 percent, to 9000 employees, since 1997:

"The UN has done a great deal to increase efficiency and overall accountability. In 1994, UN created Office of Internal Oversight Services (OIOS) to serve as inspector general and promote efficient management and reduce waste, fraud and abuse. During year ended June 30, 2001, OIOS recommended $58 million in savings and recoveries for UN and persuaded UN program managers to implement hundreds of recommendations for improving management and internal controls. OIOS investigations also led to successful convictions of UN staff and others for fraud and stealing UN funds."

Yet, bad - and expensive - habits die hard. Budget discipline is lax with no clear order of priorities. The United Nations suffers from an abundance of obsolete relics of past programs, inertly and futilely maintained by beneficiary bureaucrats. Follow-up U.N. conferences - and they tend to proliferate incontrollably - are still being held in exotic resorts, or shopping-friendly megalopolises. United Nations entities at country level duplicate efforts and studiously avoid joint programming, common databases and pooling of resources.

The aforementioned OIOS has hitherto identified more than $200 million in waste and fraud and issued 5000 recommendations to improve efficiency, transparency and accountability. Disgusted by flagrant squandering of scarce resources, United States - which covers one fifth of august establishment's pecuniary needs - accumulated more than $1.2 billion in arrears by 1999, double debts of all other members combined.

It has since repaid bulk of these even as it reduced its share of United Nations' finances. It now contributes 22 percent of regular budget, down from 25 percent and 25-27 percent of costs of U.N. peacekeeping forces, down from 30-31 percent.

In boundless love as a Christian and as a man I read through passage which tells us how Lord at last rose in His might and seized scourge to drive out of Temple brood of vipers and adders. How terrific was his fight against Jewish poison.

Today, after two thousand years, with deepest emotion I recognize more profoundly than ever before fact that it was for this that He had to shed his blood upon Cross.

As a Christian I have no duty to allow myself to be cheated, but I have duty to be a fighter for truth and justice . . .

And if there is anything which could demonstrate that we are acting rightly, it is distress that daily grows. For as a Christian I have also a duty to my own people. And when I look on my people I see them work and work and toil and labor, and at end of week they have only for their wages wretchedness and misery.

When I go out in morning and see these men standing in their queues and look into their pinched faces, then I believe I would be no Christian, but a very devil, if I felt no pity for them, if I did not, as did our Lord two thousand years ago, turn against those by whom today this poor people are plundered and exploited."

(Source: The Straight Dope - Speech by Adolf Hitler, delivered April 12, 1922, published in "My New Order," and quoted in Freethought Today (April 1990)

Hitler and Nazism are often portrayed as an apocalyptic and seismic break with European history. Yet truth is that they were culmination and reification of European history in 19th century. Europe's annals of colonialism have prepared it for range of phenomena associated with Nazi regime - from industrial murder to racial theories, from slave labour to forcible annexation of territory.

Germany was a colonial power no different to murderous Belgium or Britain. What set it apart is that it directed its colonial attentions at heartland of Europe - rather than at Africa or Asia. Both World Wars were colonial wars fought on European soil. Moreover, Nazi Germany innovated by applying prevailing racial theories (usually reserved to non-whites) to white race itself. It started with Jews - a non-controversial proposition - but then expanded them to include "east European" whites, such as Poles and Russians.

Germany was not alone in its malignant nationalism. The far right in France was as pernicious. Nazism - and Fascism - were world ideologies, adopted enthusiastically in places as diverse as Iraq, Egypt, Norway, Latin America, and Britain. At end of 1930's, liberal capitalism, communism, and fascism (and its mutations) were locked in mortal battle of ideologies. Hitler's mistake was to delusionally believe in affinity between capitalism and Nazism - an affinity enhanced, to his mind, by Germany's corporatism and by existence of a common enemy: global communism.

Colonialism always had discernible religious overtones and often collaborated with missionary religion. "The White Man's burden" of civilizing "savages" was widely perceived as ordained by God. The church was extension of colonial power's army and trading companies.