On Monday, UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres commanded the world to “step up to stamp out [insert selected sectarian hatreds] and all other forms of racism, xenophobia, discrimination and incitement.”
He then sped away on his Big Wheel.
Where to begin?
Given nothing of any value has been done by the UN since the Inchon Landing, and it has done grievous harm by giving voice and moral equivalency to racist, murderous, and tyrannical regimes of all sorts, hearing this coming from the SecGen is akin to hearing a lecture on chastity coming from an accomplished nymphomaniac.
Are the sentiments noble? Sure. However, the strong language he employs is better suited to a call to arms than an emotional overreaction to recent terrorist outrages. That the head of a world body should be indulging in gratuitous global emoting is another question entirely.
The larger issue is that he is such a clodhopper, such a rube, as to think that any government can mandate what he demands above. It’s a daily guarantee of Skittles for breakfast for all of Asia, unicorns at every 6th birthday party. It’s like fetch: it’s not going to happen.
Adults know that the maladies he lists will always be with us in one way or another, and to set a goal for their total eradication is to hasten bitterness and disillusion when the unrealistic dreams never come true.
Kind of like the lasting legacy of The Great Society.
And if he is not a naïve but manipulating gullible idealism to feather his own nest by next proposing the necessarily coercive means sufficient to attempt such a plan, so much the worse.
He goes on to speak of “loathsome rhetoric” aimed at migrants and refugees, has railed against “populism,” and tops it off by bragging about an “initiative” against that most Orwellian of concepts: “hate speech.” Obviously reading from a certain playbook, I wonder what specific evil is he referring to. The various dictators and presidents-for-life who make up the leaders of the organization he heads? Not likely. Why criticize his bread and butter?
Tediously, he means President Trump and the resurgence all over the world of peoples who reject multinational governmental octopi similar to the UN and the EU, thus spoiling the all-you-can-spend buffet Guterres and his pals have been supping at for several decades.
He means nation states that would control their own borders and not subcontract the responsibility to those who would gain power in the vortex that the failure of the nation state, through uncontrolled immigration, would bring.
It is yet another shambling silly performance by the leader of an organization that has long outlived its usefulness for anything other than a convenient and luxurious foreign posting for intelligence officers keeping tabs on the United States. In its nefarious wisdom, the UN puts regimes such as Iran on Human Rights Committees and asks public health advice from the Cubans.
The present American administration has cut its funding. That’s a beginning. Better to make any U.S. cash contingent on the UN finding a new home within a year. I’m thinking lovely and picturesque Pyongyang or Tehran.
I hear the Secret Police are blossoming there this time of year.
