Category: Dithering

I am about to commit a great heresy. I’m going to get a lot of hate mail in the next couple of days because I am about to speak the unspeakable, violate the inviolable, and generally be a mean, nasty, right-winger. Here goes:

The United Nations is a completely useless body that has long since outlasted its intended purpose and Canada should withdraw from it altogeather.

Better yet, scrap the whole damned thing and start from scratch with a new league where dictatorships and countries with abyssmal human rights records are not welcome. Half the reason that nothing ever gets done at the UN is because dictatorships vote on many issues as a bloc. And giving China veto power was just plain stupid to begin with.

I’m not the only one who has noticed this. Over at the Calgary Sun, Ezra “the Lip” Levant had his own little rant about the Un today while Peter Worthington in TO had his own thoughts about the futility of diplomacy and other such weapons of mass discussion.

What useful purpose has the UN actually served since the collapse of the Soviet Union? None whatsoever that I can see. Its list of failures, however, is absolutely staggering in its scope:

1. Utter failure to prevent the 1994 Genocide in Rwanda.
2. Deafening silence in response to slavery in Sudan.
3. They take over in East Timor and drop the ball.
4. The Dutch government resigned en masse as a result of UN “peacekeeping” failures.
5. The UN did nothing when Mugabe expunged all white farmers and caused a famine that threatens to kill 8 million. Now the UN is talking with Mugabe about solutions.
6. The UN frequently fails to condemn human rights abuses in countries such as Iran.
7. Speaking of human rights, remember when they let Libya run that show?
8. They failed in Somalia.
9. They failed in Bosnia.
10. They failed in Kashmir.
11. They failed in Angola.
12. They failed in Iraq.
13. They failed in Afghanistan.
14. Hell, they’re even a joke in Sierra Leone.

Just one screwup after another, and these are only the ones off the top of my head. Type “UN failures” into any search box and see what you get. When I googled it, I got 15,300,000 results. A search for “UN successes” gets about half that number.

So why is this colossal widget society still around? What does it actually do, other than to provide money to buraucrats and other assorted windbags that wouldn’t be able to find a job anywhere else? The answers are: wishful thinking and nothing, in that order. And that’s why we should get out.

Canada’s exit from this farce would also serve to throw some much needed cold water on the wishful thinkers of the world who still cling to the belief that this toothless tiger is of any use. The blueprint for the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights was written by Canadian John Humphrey, and if Canada decides it’s time for something else, the rest of the world will have no choice but to take notice and start asking some hard questions that should have been posed over a decade ago.