The time has come for the Western world to heed that old adage, ‘The road to hell is paved with good intentions’.

The fact is, despite the loss of a world war and the collapse of the Soviet Union, communists and fascists were never really defeated. They simply regrouped and began subverting an emotionally raw world, susceptible to glib notions of peace, tolerance, social equity, and benign government.

Through patient proselytising, they set about infiltrating the United Nations, using its agencies and international conferences as pulpits. In eighty years they have pulled off what world war could not.

They radicalised the West’s education system, using indoctrination, required-reading textbooks, critical race theory and the vilification of Western society.

Socialist ‘progressives’ promoted degeneracy and promiscuity as ‘normal, natural and healthy’. They scorned Christianity and mocked followers for needing a ‘religious crutch’.

They politicised the courts, enlisting judges to weaken legislated intent. The political prosecution of former US president Donald Trump and the corruption of Australia’s immigration laws illustrate the extent political elites have weaponised the justice system.

Sympathetic journalists censor editorial content, book reviews and student newspapers. Key positions in radio, television and film are filled with groupthink presenters, actors and producers.

Even the military has been captured.

All the while the People’s Republic of China has been in the vanguard of this ideological movement. And, through the use of soft power, debt-trap diplomacy, bribery, and threats, it now has effective control of the United Nations.

While Beijing provides just eight per cent of the UN’s overall budget, its influence is totally disproportionate to its financial contribution. Chinese officials run four of the UN’s 15 specialised agencies. A guileless  Washington, which contributes three times more than China and more than 185 (of the 193) member states combined, leads just one.

It is no surprise that former Portuguese prime minister and, past president of Socialist International, Antonio Guterres, has been given a second term as UN Secretary General. After all, when he was prime minister, Guterres expedited the ceding of Portugal’s colony, Macau, to China.

As Secretary General, Guterres has used his position to promote socialism. He contends multiple inequalities intersect and reinforce each other across the generations. People’s chances in life depend on their gender, family and ethnic background, race, whether or not they have a disability, and other factors.

Like the World Economic Forum, he advocates ideological conformity. He supports the long-term communist goal of a one-world government and notes the limitations of democracy, saying democratic systems need to be rethought.

With Guterres as its proxy, Beijing retains its ‘developing’ country status despite President Xi’s claim of ‘complete victory in (China’s) fight against poverty’. The UN turns blind eyes to China being the world’s second-largest economy, having the most billionaires, the third-largest fleet of nuclear power plants, the biggest standing army and a Mars and four lunar landings.

This ‘developing’ status allows Beijing to pay lip service to the Paris Agreement and Guterres’s warnings of ‘global boiling’ despite its emissions outstripping the developed world combined. Meanwhile, Western competitors dutifully struggle to achieve UN ‘Zero 2050’ targets by resorting to unreliable, expensive, taxpayer-subsidised wind turbines and solar panels, mostly manufactured in China.

At the same time, an overtly multilateral UN deferentially overlooks China’s breaches of the World Trade Organisation charter. Hidden subsidies, slave labour, theft of intellectual property and market access restrictions all contravene its WTO obligations. Still, Beijing’s violations help maintain world dependence on large volumes of Chinese exports.

Then there’s Beijing’s appalling human rights record, which demonstrates yet another shameless contempt for the UN Charter. Its abuses are on such a scale and are so egregious that they clearly qualify as crimes against humanity and genocide. Yet the UN acquiesces. It accepts Beijing as a member of the Human Rights Commission, safe in the knowledge that the majority of UN members oppose interference in another country’s internal affairs in the name of human rights.

The truth is, the United Nations is a champion of human rights in name only. It not only ignores abuses in China, but also Iran, Myanmar, North Korea and countless other jurisdictions. Rampant Israel- and Jew-hatred permeates the entire UN system, as exemplified by the moral equivalence evident in the International Criminal Court deeming Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar to be equally guilty of crimes against humanity.

That the UN does the bidding of the Chinese Communist party is undeniably confirmed by the actions of the World Health Organisation during the Covid pandemic. Head of the World Health Organisation, Dr Tedros Ghebreyesus, effectively a Beijing appointee, praised Beijing for ‘setting a new standard for outbreak control’. In reality, while the pandemic raged around the world, the WHO’s perfidy and Beijing’s deceit bought China time to import necessary medical supplies.

When finally an investigation into the source of Covid was agreed, Beijing insisted the WHO run it. Predictably it concluded it was ‘extremely unlikely’ Covid-19 came from the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

Yet, weak Western governments, including Australia’s, are considering a treaty which will effectively contract out future pandemic management to a proven dishonest WHO.

It is therefore beyond dispute that the Chinese Communist party exerts a malign and disproportionate influence on the United Nations and its agencies. Its aim is to obliterate democratic, free market capitalism in favour of a new world order. It also means, that, as well intended as its founding fathers may have been, for believers in freedom and democracy the UN is a failed institution.

Unilateral resignation of UN membership is not an option. However, withdrawal from some agencies and agreements could hasten reform. It may also allow genuine democracies to rediscover the benefits of competitive capitalism and smaller government and send a signal to non-aligned UN members.

Well intended or not, continuing down the present road will lead inevitably to a tyrannical, less prosperous and less secure world.