The Inmates Take Over the Asylum
The UN plans to name Zimbabwe head of the Commission on Sustainable Development. Western countries are "concerned". Samizdata is rolling on the floor laughing. Zimbabwe will get the position because it is rotated through a number of countries.
The UN can do little harm as long as it is universally understood that it operates according to the principles of magical realism. Unfortunately it often presented as the very fount of wisdom, capable of offering sound advice on climate change, economic development, human rights and nuclear proliferation when it is not always well qualified to do this.
posted by wretchardthecat at 5/11/2007 04:15:00 PM
7 Comments:
If space time matter energy politics are really sides of the same coin, then who should be flipping the coin?
Invite Mugabe to New York and put a bullet in his head.
Put up the cash to produce all the food that Zimbabwe farmers can grow and feed those people.
It's time folks, it's really time. We don't have to make a big thing of it, just explain to the Secretary General that we'd like headquarters relocated within 10 years and that we will be withdrawing our financial support at that time too. It's really not worth negotiating about, or making a big issue over -- just tell them we can no longer support an organization that makes a mockery of its own lofty ideals and always turns first to the same big donor when help is needed. F
I feel like metuselan's post makes me feel.
Nonplussed.
Why do we stand for it?
Wretchard?
My friend PJ made this cogent observation.
"The United Nations, which in a nonviolent world might be a useful forum in which genuine difficulties could be resolved by argument and negotiation, has become a kind of Roman arena, in which the advanced nations of the West are hunted, in the expiation of largely imaginary crimes, past, present and to come. In a world where real distinctions are being deliberately eroded or inverted by pseudoscience, where reason is derided, knowledge assassinated and the most fundamental principles of civilization assaulted, we must not be surprised to find that the United Nations, the fount of international authority -- such as it is -- should have become the World Theater of the Absurd, a global madhouse where lunatic falsehood reigns and the voices of the sane can scarcely be heard above the revolutionary and racist din."
The U.N. is, has always been, a bad joke. Zimbabwe as the head of the Commission on Sustainable Development is wholly consistent with it's bad joke status.
Of all the appellations for it I have seen, I like "the Turtle Bay Crime Syndicate" best. 10 years is far too much time for them to leave.
It gets worse - or better depending upon whether one views the UN as a source of amusement. The Zimbabwean minister expected to head the Commission is Francis Nhema. According to an article in today's National Post in Canada (I can't find a link) Nhema has presided over the ruin of his own 800 hectare farm (seized from its white farmer owner in 2002). From originally supporting 250 permanent workers and 250 contract part time workers, the farm is devoid of any meaningful crops. Nhema has also reportedly presided over the collapse of the nations's wildlife sanctuaries.
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