UN-believable! UN-workable!

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The United Nations is one of those ideas that is almost a good idea…..at least on paper. What would make it a great idea is that all, not just a few, of the countries who were members actually lived up to the august principles set out in the UN charter.

They don’t.

The United Nations are anything but united and the organization has become just one more forum for dictatorships, tyrannies and oppressive governments to legitimize their suppression of human rights through collective support for each other.

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the somewhat erratic
President of Iran

As difficult as it is to believe, the UN has appointed Iran to the Arms Trade Treaty Conference. This would be the same Iran that has been supplying arms to the Syrian regime which is actively engaged in the killing of its own people by the thousands; the same Iran that is telling its people to prepare for the ‘end times’ and which is aggressively trying to develop a nuclear weapon.

In a report just released, Human Rights Watch has documented in great detail, the human rights abuses by the Syrian government against its own people. They include imprisonment, torture and murder. Amnesty International and countries around the world have rightly condemned the Syrian government. The United Nations which originally also condemned Syria is now planning to appoint it to the UN Human Rights Council. The hypocrisy is so abject it borders on sheer lunacy or stupidity or both.

It makes a mockery of the very principles upon which the UN was founded and perverts its own stated objectives. Indeed, the pending appointment of Syria would fly in the face of the UN’s own peace plan for Syria but Russia continues to use its veto in the Security Council to block any outright action against the Syrian regime. How would the people of Syria who are fighting for their freedom ever trust the organization that appoints its oppressor to its Human Rights Tribunal? 

How indeed; but then, how many anywhere still really trust what the United Nations has become?

It was the United Nations that passed a resolution on November 29, 1947 to partition Palestine and create the state of Israel. Since then, it has allowed member states to attack the state it created both verbally and physically and for no other reason than simply because it exists. The United Nations (including most western democracies) has never come to a resolution for the Palestinian people and the broader organization basically turned its back on them while supporting terrorist organizations like Hammas and Hezbolla. 

The UN Security Council. Each of the five permanent
members has a veto which means that China and/or
Russia can block any attempt to impose sanctions or other
actions against rogue states they support.

It was the United Nations which stood with a frozen gaze as the Cuban Missile Crisis between the United States and the Soviet Union unfolded in the sixties and it was the UN that failed to act in Libya or Afghanistan when innocents were being brutalized and murdered by rogue regimes. It was the United Nations that ordered its peace keeping missions to stand idly by while more than 100,000 men, women and children were being slaughtered in front of them in Rwanda and it was the UN that ordered the coalition to stop and not enter Baghdad during Desert Storm which led to another decade of oppression in Iraq and the killing of thousands of Kurds.

At a time when poverty in North Korea has become so extreme that its people are literally starving and some have actually been driven to eat grass, the United Nations decided it was Canada that should be criticized by UN food inspectors.

Robert Mugabe, President of Zimbabwe

The United Nations invited Robert Mugabe, president of Zimbabwe, to be a guest speaker at the  60th anniversary of its Food and Agriculture Organisation. This was at a time when Mugabe thanks to his bizarre policies could not feed his own people without UN support and is sort of like inviting OJ Simpson to speak to the National Bar Association about crime.

At a time when the UN spent just over a paltry $1 million on Kyoto and Climate Change conferences, it was Canada that it chose to criticize for its environmental policies. It doesn’t criticize the world’s largest polluters or emitters of green house gas emissions including China and Russia. Instead it criticizes the smallest emitter; a country with eight of the ten cities with the cleanest air in the world while actually providing money to China despite that country's atrocious environmental record.

The diplomatic bureaucrats of the UN now believe
they should have the authority to impose taxes on
member nations.

The list of UN failures is far more extensive but the point is made and now, the United Nations wants the ability to impose and collect taxes. The arrogance is UN-believable!

The United Nations is not a government. It is an organization where member nations were meant to come together to resolve their differences in a peaceful manner. It has no legitimacy for taxation or to govern. It has more than amply demonstrated that it lacks the ability to even govern itself or its own membership.  The idea is absurd and yet there will be people who will support it oblivious to the fact that taxation without representation is the road to more corruption. 

Increasingly, the United Nations has become a hypocritical perversion of its original intention. It is filled with bombast that has little meaning and virtually no moral authority because it has betrayed its own principles and its rhetoric is empty and seldom followed up with meaningful action. It has been co-opted by China and Russia who have permanent membership on the Security Council and who use their positions to support rogue states like Iran, Syria, North Korea and countless others that oppress their people and suppress human rights though torture, murder and military control.

The world is filled with global organizations today: The World Health Organization, The International Monetary Fund, NATO, The G8 and the G20 to name a few. Judging from the state of the world’s economy, the global security situation, child hunger, global poverty or human rights, none of them have been overly effective. 

None, however, has been as ineffective as the United Nations which has become a hypocritical parody of its original purpose.  It’s long past time to shut it down or failing that, for countries that actually do believe in human rights and collective security to resign and take their annual funding with them.

The longer countries like Canada and other western democracies remain in the United Nations, the longer we continue to fund the support of oppression by totalitarian regimes through this failed organization.

The United Nations has failed to the point that it is now UN-believable and UN-workable!

© 2012 Maggie's Bear

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