No, those charity thingies that misplace jillions of dollars in Third World hellholes won’t cut it. We can do all that less inefficiently by other means. Likewise the peacekeeping quagmires. And the Security Council is hopelessly compromised.
And there’s this sort of thing:
Why keep the UN around? Old times sake? The old times weren’t all that great. Hope against hope? At this point, it’s just denial.
Maye the UN can be reformed into something worthwhile, or maybe it can’t. But they’re not going to change voluntarily. They need an existential threat.
Tell them if they don’t make some fundamental changes, the US will stop paying dues and stop playing along and kick them out of Manhattan.
UN actually stands for Ummah Nation. (Ummah is a term used to refer to the Community of all Muslims). What else would you call an organization that has Saudi Arabia on the Human rights commission?
The problem with the UN is that it represents the governments of every country in the world (well, except for countries like Taiwan), which makes it a lowest common denominator kind of organization. Like most governments in the world, it’s corrupt, bureaucratic, inefficient and decidedly Third World. How can you reform an organization like that without reforming most of the world’s governments?
As the good doctor points out, the UN is a true reflection of the governments that comprise it, just as most governments are a true reflection of the peoples they govern.
It did occur to me that - given the ease of international connectivity these days - it would be theoretically possible to construct a parallel UN from volunteer individuals. That would probably last for as long as it would take for the UN to shut down international connectivity.
I agree that the UN just like any other large organization will have many inefficiencies as well as some misguided people who will abuse their positions to their own advances (just like FIFA). However many people who work at the UN, especially, http://www.unhcr.org/
have genuine interest for humanity by actually helping the people who need real help.
We must do something. The UN is something. Therefore we’re doing something.
After 60 years and astounding amounts of money spent, the UN hasn’t solved many problems. It’s created a lot of new ones. Where problems are being solved, it’s generally being done by small, under-the-radar groups, not vast bureaucracies.
Rowland’s link isn’t a one-off. African “peacekeeping” forces wearing UN berets are avoided like the plague by local populations, because they’re usually worse than the people they’re supposed to be protecting them from.
Yeah, that’s one I never got. Have a chaotic situation in an African hellhole? Send in troops from another random African hellhole wearing powder blue UN uniforms to solve the problem. And people wonder why this doesn’t work…
Neoconservatives loath the UN for the same reason they loathed Barack Obama – and it’s not because of UN peacekeeper sex for food scandals in Africa. It’s because the UN recently passed a resolution condemning Israeli confiscation of Palestinian land and forced removal of its inhabitants as a violation of international law. Now that Obama has departed the world stage the UN is the only organization not turning a blind eye to the “settlement” of a land which already has millions of inhabitants and centuries-old cities, towns and villages and that puts it in the crosshairs of religious extremists in America.
The UN would be a bit more believable if it condemned China for invading two countries and actually tried to do something about it. In fact, China has a spot as a permanent security council member. Invade two countries, conquer them, kill their people, flood them with Chinese and be a top UN member. The UN is a joke.
And that is exactly why the UN is the perfect agency/organization to spearhead efforts to deal with global warming SORRY!!! CLIMATE CHANGE!!! Because this time, collective action by the world’s leaders WILL WORK!!!