Normal service resumes

Our apologies for a slight (very slight) interruption in the service on this blog. Dr North was in London delivering a scintillating talk on defence procurement. I shall not try to explain why I have found it impossible to post anything yesterday.

However, normal service resumes with a link to an excellent article by Mark Steyn in this week’s Spectator on the UN and whether it is reformable.

Mr Steyn’s view is one we share: the UN a basically unaccountable structure, the large proportion of whose members would not recognize its supposed principles of freedom, democracy and human rights if any or all of them got up and bit them in the street.

It is, therefore, unreformable because there is no mechanism for reform. More to the point, there is no aim to which such a reform could lead.

That being so, SecGen Kofi Annan (father of Kojo) may as well remain in his position for the foreseeable future as the inalienable symbol of the UN’s corruption and power mania.

We would be hard put to disagree with or improve on the following summary of the bizarre symbiosis between the supposedly well-meaning tranzis and the world’s worst dictators and terrorists:

“Transnationalism is the mechanism by which the world’s most enlightened progressives provide cover for its darkest forces. It’s a largely unconscious alliance but not an illogical one. Western proponents of ‘sustainable consumption’ and some of the other loopy NGO-beloved eco-concepts up for debate in New York this week have at least this much in common with psychotic Third World thugocracies: both groups find it hard to win free elections, both regard transnational bodies as useful for conferring a respect unearned at the ballot box, and neither is unduly troubled by the lack of accountability in global institutions.”

Probably our readers will see an interesting parallel there with another organization that also claims certain moral superiority. Its headquarters are in Brussels, not New York and its budget is a tad smaller. Possibly, its scandals are on a smaller scale as well. But it is only a matter of scale.

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