Of Course the UN is not democratic

I would like to clear something up. There is nothing democratic about the UN. People seem to take it for granted that the UN represents all countries equally, and should therefore be heeded. That is the dumbest notion I have ever heard. The UN represents the leaders of most countries. The leaders, more often than not, are psychos. There is no reason to believe that they represent anyone but themselves. To that extent it is important to have a forum in which they are represented, because they do control armies and weapons and stuff. But they do not represent anyone. So they are not democratic except is some half-assed sense where we feel that all leaders of countries, no matter how illegitimate their reign is, should be given some say.

In addition, countries who refuse to heed some resolutions ought to have no say in how other get heeded. For example, the Saudi foreign minister was on TV this morning saying something like Iraq should not have to heed the UN resolution calling it for allowing weapons inspectors in to its country. Why? What was his reason? Because Israel has not heeded the resolutions calling for an end to its occupation of the Palestinian people.

This is a classic Arab ploy. Shift the focus of the problem to Israel. He is attempting to say that if only Israel would stop ruling the Palestinians then Saadam Heussain would not have chemical weapons. This is of course the clearest non sequitur that I have ever heard. Moreover, this fails to take in to account that most of the Palestinian problem stems from the Arab world's failure to take another of the UN's proclamations seriously: namely the creation of the state of Israel. Israel was created by the UN, and with the exception of Egypt and Jordan, is still not recognized by the Arab world. This lack of Israeli legitimacy is used as the justification for al their wars with Israel and support for anti-Israel and anti-Western terrorism.

But I digress. The UN is a bunch of dictators, and heads of democratic states who get together and have a place to scream at each other when wars happen. It is a convenient meeting place for everyone to tell everyone else what they think of each other. It is not a place where people make deals that they are bound by. People are bound by deals that they make when all parties act in good faith. The UN is not such a place.

Frankly it creeps me out that we have all these people coming in and out of New York. I wish it were someplace like Iran so that Americans have a good reason for not going there. The fact that all these people who represent some of the sickest genocidal people on earth walk the same streets as I do, only with diplomatic immunity, makes me very uncomfortable, and does nothing to make me feel like my city is host to a democratic institution.

The UN is not fair nor is it democratic. No matter how much it pretends to be it is not. When the security council, which contains China, Russia, and France, thinks it can have a say in how a democracy ought to behave we ought to just laugh.

When we look at the record of the UN on most things we really need to ask what the deal is. While I will not claim that they have committed many atrocities in the name of fairness and neutrality, I would certainly claim that they have done their share of unfair and unneutral stuff. The failure to hand over a videotape of an Israeli getting kidnapped, was just sick. I have this image in my head of some people in the UN sitting around at night watching and laughing about it, while these kidnap victims are being tortured by Hezbollah.

In 1991 when the Croats attacked the Serbs, the UN just hung around and watched. When in 1967 it was too inconvenient for the UN to do any peacekeeping in Egypt, it just left because Egypt did not want them to be there for the upcoming war. The UN sponsored a racist [sic] conference in Durban - naturally it was a fiasco, and it became a forum for anti-semitism. Just to remain neutral - they never thought it appropriate to condemn terrorism. That would offend the poor suicide bombers who died killing Israelis.

The whole UN makes me sick. Sometimes, in my own dark fantasies, I wish that the UN building would become infested with all the rats that live along the East River. Then I smile to myself and realise that whenever there is a general assembly, it is.