UN General Assembly
2024

We’ve grown used to third-rate fiction films and YouTube clips. We’re conditioned to accept this oversimplified way of consuming information, forgetting truths that humanist writers once captured. So allow me to invoke **three American authors**: 1. From *O. Henry*, in *Cabbages and Kings* — "Tiny operetta nations amuse themselves with the game of governments, until one day a silent warship appears in their waters and tells them: Don’t break the toys." That warship, of course, is American. 2. From *Graham Greene*, in *The Quiet American* — a CIA operative under embassy cover searches for a “third force” to carry out bombings and install a pro-American regime in Vietnam. 3. From *Kurt Vonnegut*, in *A Man Without a Country* — who questioned why, at the end of World War II, when the outcome was already known, **the US and UK firebombed Dresden**, killing over 100,000 elderly, women, and children. We know why: to **intimidate** the future. That same pattern — provocations, third forces, and heavily armed US warships — continues today. ---