Argentine President Javier Milei did not mince words last month when he took aim at the United Nations, calling it “a useless organization whose only purpose is to sustain a cast of fatally arrogant parasites, masquerading as well-intentioned bureaucrats.” The speech drew predictable applause from critics of global governance and predictable eye-rolls from its defenders.
But in a column for American Thinker, Lloyd Billingsley argues that Milei’s critique—sharp as it was—left out the most damning part of the story. The UN’s failures, in Billingsley’s telling, aren’t a matter of bureaucratic drift or institutional inefficiency. They were baked in from the beginning, by an organization that he says was skewed by Stalinism from its founding and was once led by a man who had served in the Nazi Party’s paramilitary wing.
The Waldheim problem
The centerpiece of Billingsley’s argument is Kurt Waldheim, who served as UN secretary-general from 1972 to 1981. According to the column, Waldheim had been a member of the Sturmabteilung, or SA—the brownshirted storm troopers who provided military protection for the Nazi Party. Waldheim served in an intelligence unit that Billingsley says was known for transporting civilians to slave labor camps, deporting Jews to death camps, carrying out reprisal executions of hostages, and massacring partisans and civilians in the Balkans.
None of this came out when Waldheim was chosen to lead the United Nations. The record only surfaced in the mid-1980s, when Waldheim ran for president of Austria. Late-night comics, Billingsley notes, diagnosed him with “Waldheimer’s Disease,” a convenient condition that made him forget he had been a Nazi. The United States subsequently barred Waldheim from entering the country.
The Soviet Union, according to the column, knew about Waldheim’s past and used it as leverage over the man running the UN. The result, Billingsley writes, was an organization that looked the other way at some of the worst atrocities of the modern era.
Cambodia and the double standard
Billingsley points to Cambodia under Pol Pot as the clearest example. Beginning in 1975, the Communist Khmer Rouge murdered somewhere between 1.3 million and 3 million people—roughly a quarter of the country’s population. He cites the book Murder of a Gentle Land: The Untold Story of Communist Genocide in Cambodia by John Barron and Anthony Paul, as well as the Tuol Sleng Museum of Genocide, which now occupies a former Communist prison site.
Under Waldheim’s watch, Billingsley writes, the UN never issued a formal resolution condemning the Cambodian genocide and did not even consider the regime’s human rights violations until 1978. After Vietnam invaded in 1979 and deposed the Khmer Rouge, the UN allowed the ousted regime to keep Cambodia’s seat under the name Democratic Kampuchea. For Billingsley, that’s not an anomaly—it’s the bias toward communist states showing itself as a feature of the institution from the start.
Alger Hiss and the founding generation
The column reaches back even further, to the UN’s earliest days in 1945. According to Billingsley, Soviet ambassador Andrei Gromyko recommended Alger Hiss for secretary-general—at a time when Hiss’s role as a Stalinist spy inside the State Department was not yet publicly known. Billingsley cites Whittaker Chambers’s Witness and Allen Weinstein’s Perjury: The Hiss-Chambers Case as sources on that history.
The connections, he argues, ran deep. Secretary of State Edward Stettinius had been under the influence of both Hiss and Harry Hopkins, a close White House adviser to Franklin Roosevelt. Stettinius’s speech at the UN, Billingsley writes, was drafted by the Communist screenwriter Dalton Trumbo, whom Hiss had brought to the conference. Billingsley points readers to his own book, Hollywood Party: Stalinist Adventures in the American Movie Industry, for more on that milieu.
During the 1939–1941 Stalin-Hitler Pact, Trumbo wrote The Remarkable Andrew, in which the ghost of General Andrew Jackson argues against aid to Britain—then standing alone against the Nazis. That detail, in Billingsley’s rendering, captures the ideological currents that swirled around the UN’s founding.
He also notes that during the pact, Stalin and Hitler both invaded Poland, and Stalin handed German Jewish communists directly over to Hitler’s Gestapo. Margarete Buber-Neumann described the transfer in Under Two Dictators: Prisoner of Stalin and Hitler, a book Billingsley calls perhaps the most neglected work—and author—of modern times.
After World War II, Billingsley writes, Stalin swung the USSR and its captive territories back toward traditional anti-Semitism, branding Jews “rootless cosmopolitans.” In Czechoslovakia, the Communist regime executed eleven officials—a purge that All the King’s Men director Robert Rossen, in testimony Billingsley cites, described as being carried out “for being Jews and nothing else.”
What Milei got right—and what he left unsaid
Billingsley’s core complaint is that this history has been forgotten, or perhaps never learned in the first place—a kind of collective “Waldheimer’s Disease.” Given a Stalinist pedigree and a Nazi secretary-general, he argues, it should surprise no one that the UN became, in Milei’s words, an organization that shelters bloodthirsty dictatorships while presenting itself as the world’s moral authority.
The column closes by pointing to concrete steps. Milei’s Argentina, as he noted, has withdrawn from the World Health Organization. The United States has done the same. Washington, Billingsley reminds readers, pays 22 percent of the UN budget. Perhaps the time has come, he suggests, for both nations to cut loose from the UN entirely—echoing Milei’s rallying cry of “long live freedom, damn it.”
Whether that’s a serious policy prescription or a rhetorical flourish is a separate question. What Billingsley is really arguing is that the debate over the UN’s usefulness tends to skip past its origins—and that Milei’s speech, however blunt, only scratched the surface of an institution whose problems, in his view, go back to the men who built it.
Source: www.americanthinker.com — https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2026/10/what-milei-missed/