United Nations

Accidental Wars

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In this Reason Hit&Run post, the vile Patrick Buchanan takes a well deserved beating for his bizarre and ahistorical defense of Adolf Hitler in WWII. However, as loathsome, racist and stupid as he is, Buchanan is correct about one thing: Hitler did not intend to start a second world war that would drag in every industrialized country and leave 3/4 of the industrialized world in ruins.

Instead, Hitler planned on fighting a short, sharp war in Poland. Based on his experience at Munich, he expected that France and Britain would either merely raise a token protest or that they would would fight briefly, realize that they couldn’t recover Poland and then negotiate a peace. He never envisioned that he would fight a gotterdammerung war of global destruction.

Hitler miscalculated. In this he was far from alone. In the 20th Century every war that involved a liberal democracy resulted from the miscalculation of an autocratic leadership.

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Not Holding My Breath

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The headline reads “Global pressure builds for UN action to free Suu Kyi”.

Because, as we all know from past experience, the UN is just sooo effective at getting oppressive regimes to start making nice.

Images of Hate

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Zombie has extensive photo and video coverage of anti-Israel demonstrations around the world. Not pleasant viewing, but it’s important to understand how much of this stuff is going on and just how virulent it is.

Here’s a video about the inculcation of anti-Israel and anti-Semitic beliefs in Palestinian children, and the use of these children as human shields by Hamas.

A report on the sinister activities of the United Nations agency known as UNWRA.

On a much more positive note, here’s coverage of a pro-Israel demonstration in Italy. Fiamma Nirenstein, a journalist and new member of the Italian Parliament, believes that the obvious thuggishness of Hamas is leading to a revulsion against the “progressive” justification and romanticization of terrorist violence. I hope she is right, but I’m less sanguine. Many of those who identify as “progressives” feel such rage against their own societies that they have no anger left for the terrorist enemies of civilization, and are indeed all too willing to make common cause with these enemies.

Something Rotten in Geneva

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The headline reads “Armed killings cost nations billions of dollars”. survey from the United Nations Development Program and the

Okay, so there is an economic cost to violence. That is obvious just through the lifelong revenue lost when someone is murdered. But the first sentence of the news article wants to make a point.

“The United States leads the world in economic loss from deaths caused by armed crime, according to a global survey released Friday.”

The US leads the world when it comes to economic costs due to violence, but the author also points out that there are countries with higher levels of violence than the United States. No doubt the higher standard of living and GDP we enjoy here when compared to majority of the world has something to do with it, but the article makes no mention of that.

There is also no attempt made to define what is meant by the phrase “armed killings”. Do they mean any weapon, with rocks and sticks lumped in with machine guns and crossbows? Are improvised weapons included, such as normally innocent clotheslines used for hanging or water in bathtubs which is used to drown someone? How do they discount people who are killed by bare hands alone? Isn’t someone who is strangled or beaten to death just as dead, the economic costs just as high, as someone who is deliberately run over by a car?

And I wonder about suicides. Are they included as well? Suicide is illegal, so it would certainly fit the definition of “armed crime”. What about people who overdose instead of slitting their wrists or shoot themselves? Are prescription pills considered a weapon when deliberately used to end an innocent life?

All of these questions I am raising might seem frivolous, and they certainly are. But that is because I find the entire premise to be laughable. The people behind this study are obviously trying to advance an agenda of some kind, and the details they ignore say more about their motives than anything they claim to reveal. It is no surprise that the study was sponsored by the United Nations Development Program and the Small Arms Survey.

These are the same people that like to argue that the 2nd Amendment is actually a violation of human rights. (PDF file here.) Looks like they are up to the same old tricks, using smoke and mirrors to try and make their case.

“Boycott Durban II”

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Pascal Bruckner writes at signandsight about the upcoming UN Conference against Racism and explains why democracies should boycott it:

…good intentions rapidly degenerated into one-upmanship among victims and bloodlust directed at Israeli organisations and anyone else suspected of being Jewish. …

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…Durban became an arena where people screamed and hurled insults at each other in a re-enactment of the comedy of damned, in the face of the white exploiter. “The pain and anger are still felt. The dead, through their descendants, cry out for justice”, Kofi Annan said on August 31 of the same year an astounding choice of words for a UN secretary general and more a call for revenge than reconciliation. …

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In a nutshell: Anti-racism in the UN has become the ideology of totalitarian regimes who use it in their own interests. Dictatorships or notorious half-dictatorships (Libya, Pakistan, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Algeria, Cuba etc.) co-opt democratic language and instrumentalise legal standards, to position themselves against democracies without ever putting turning the questions on themselves.

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In the hands of [these] powerful and organised lobbies, the UN is becoming an instrument of retrogression in the world

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Europe must take a firm stand against this buffoonery: boycott it, plain and simple. Just as Canada has done. Perhaps we should also think about dissolving the Human Rights Commission or only letting truly democratic countries in…

That is not likely to happen, for it would be called, well, racist, by all the usual suspects and European politicians are pretty sensitive when it comes to that kind of thing. Just for example, Robert Mugabe was invited to the the last big African-European summit despite the European Union’s travel ban, for many African politicians were threatening to boycott the summit if he were not allowed to attend. Few European governments can be expected to show more backbone over a something as, in their eyes, inconsequential as an UN conference. They’ll attend, sign the final declaration, leave and forget the whole thing.