What Good Is The UN? And The Title Of This Blog

My wife says the question the use of the UN was posed on the television yesterday morning by some or all sitting around an oval table on The Morning Joe on MSNBC.

The hash and re-hash of it was what good is the UN?.. yadda-yadda-yadda. Kids are being killed in Aleppo, yadda-yadda-yadda. The UN doesn't even lift a finger, yadda-yadda-yadda.

I responded that the UN can do nothing that the permanent members of the Security Council do not want to happen. The US and Russia are not in agreement about Syria, so do not expect the UN to do anything. If you wish to assign blame, the clear targets are the US and Russia.

Further, if you remember Iraq, the US entirely ignored the UN.
The USA went to war, ignoring any protest from the member states of the UN, and arrogantly dismissing the findings of the UN weapons inspectors.
Hans Blix and the UN weapons inspectors found no evidence of Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMDs). This finding was totally ignored by the Bush Administration, which relied upon fake news and false intelligence and outright lies.

Iraq.
Mistakes were made. Kids were killed. Lots of bad things happened. Were they asking then why the UN did not DO anything?

The bill for Iraq is coming due.
I remember my astonishment that some dark Power was able to get the entire population of the USA to march lockstep to that dubious battle. That is when I began to understand the Powers of the world, what I now call the Tuatha - the powers which not divine, unseen, unsubstantiated by modern rationality, yet which RULE the hearts of mankind... no matter what the UN may say, no matter what our consciences may say.... no matter what God may say.
The dark force controlled us.
Some people call it mob mentality and so did I for the longest time, until I saw that our surrender to the Mob was a vast and intense sacrifice and scarification of our indivduality which went far beyond following the crowd.

 Hans Blix, Head of the UN Iraq Weapons Inspection Team

I remember wrestling over the question of WMDs after the UN weapons team had turned in its report and the US was having nothing of it. I was truly upset by what was going on. I finally decided to pray on the matter.
I fell asleep soon in front of my computer. I recall that I awoke looking at an Excel spreadsheet of something.
At that point I knew that there were absolutely no weapons of mass destruction present in Iraq.

I did not like this one bit. There was a bit too much of Prayer and the Divine about it. I do not like putting God "to the test", as it were, for if there were to be found even some smallish WMDs, sort of like "appetizers for Armageddon" or some tantalizing "amuse-gueules"   (mon frère dit "amuse-bouche"... but I prefer more ancient and less polished expression)   for the Eve of Destruction, then my sudden insight and intuition - message from above, as it were - would be nothing but my own mental palaver.

And my intense feelings of the divine - like so many prophets who have foretold the end of the world, for example, and had the whole thing NOT blow up in their embarrassed faces  - would be the musings of an emotional dunce.

Of course, when it was proven true, it was a bit scary, too.

Anyway, that's why this blog has the title it does. I was so moved by the events of 2001 up to Iraq - and beyond - that I felt the earth was like the waters and I felt divinity mutely moving upon the face of the earth.
I thought it best to share with my daughter.

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Vox Rationis

Sweet Voice of Reason...

Mr. Putin said:

... We also remember certain episodes from the history of the Soviet Union. Social experiments for export, attempts to push for changes within other countries based on ideological preferences, often led to tragic consequences and to degradation rather than progress.

It seemed, however, that far from learning from others’ mistakes, everyone just keeps repeating them, and so the export of revolutions, this time of so-called democratic ones, continues. It would suffice to look at the situation in the Middle East and North Africa, as has been mentioned by previous speakers. Certainly political and social problems in this region have been piling up for a long time, and people there wish for changes naturally.

But how did it actually turn out? Rather than bringing about reforms, an aggressive foreign interference has resulted in a brazen destruction of national institutions and the lifestyle itself. Instead of the triumph of democracy and progress, we got violence, poverty and social disaster. Nobody cares a bit about human rights, including the right to life...

Seems spot on to me. Mr. Putin reminisces about the days when the super powers - 2 of 'em - exported ideologies by hook or by crook. He observes that the outcomes were often tragic. Now there is only one superpower left, but there still seems to be ideological packaging for export.

Since when did Democracy become a commodity to be handled by the Export-Import Bank? So much a commodity easily shipped across country borders that even Amazon could sell and ship Democracy.
Want brand-new democracy? Low price... just allow 5 to 7 days for shipping and civil wars to take place.

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On The Wind

My mother received a letter - quite a long letter - from some group whose money-raising wheeze was the assertion that the UN was waging a war on religion, and the UN was trying to get the Vatican kicked out of the UN.

First, it was much too redolent of H.G.Wells account of the war against religion in The Shape Of Things To Come, 1933, which I had just read the day before, and I wanted to mention this, but this was not my mother's obsession at all; it was my obsession, and, as such, she would not or could not pay attention to a report on the coincidence.
So Wells had to languish.

Second, I was not aware that the Vatican was a member, but upon "wiking" it up, I learned that it had "observer" status until 2004, when it received full membership, except for voting rights.

Third, the letter was a gem of obsessional nonsense. It was at least 10 sheets of paper long, printed on both sides, and rambled on through various scripts, scenarios, legends, myths, some truths and some falsities until it came to rest upon the altar of supplication: give us money to assist our noble effort.
(For example, on page 3 there was a spirited reference to "false gods". I asked her whether "false gods" was repeated somewhere else in the pamphlet. She did not think so. It was more like a subliminal appeal to her outraged sense of orthodoxy rather than an assertion that the golden calf had been erected at UN HQ.)

I'm not so sure.
I'm not so sure that there is any "New World Order", or international UN power, or UN government that requires a tax on every citizen, or any other of these nonsensical gaspers, for it seems to me that the edifice of any sort of Order has been falling apart, brick by brick,until the copestone remains teetering precariously.


My problem is pirates, the Somali pirates.
There is a new Tom Hanks film out based on a piratical hijacking of a ship off the Somali coast. It is based on a true story some years ago, but the pirates are still there. In fact, it was Somali As-Shabab people that shot up the mall in Kenya.

Pirates in my understanding have always been a feature of an environment in which central power has broken down.

It was a part of my education. When Rome was on the verge of empire, Pompey and Caesar rid the Mediterranean of the brigands; the Dark Ages led to an infestation of pirates and highwaymen, a limited state power allowed Robin Hood to flourish within the "sea" of the Forest of Nottingham, and in all the dystopian visions of the future, from A Canticle For Leibowitz to Waterworld to Mad Max, the proof of societal breakdown is demonstrated to the reader or viewer by the lawless freebooters and buccaneers infesting the place.

Now these Somali pirate types have been around for a long while. There seems to be no international order or power available to clear them out.
So how effective is the UN? And why don't the member states care about the situation?

It has been my opinion for a long time that we were in a long, drawn-out, slow motion death spiral, a lemming-like march to oblivion that seemed to culminate in the period of 1989 to 2003 with the incredible story of how we supported bin Laden in Afghanistan against the USSR, how the USSR fell apart, our parochial arrogance as that happened, then our experience of 9/11, and then the War in Iraq to which we sent our dearest people and our fortunes in pursuit of illusory weapons that we knew we had given to Saddam Hussein in his war against Iran...  and how Saddam Hussein completely buffaloed us by actually telling the truth about the weapons!
(Imagine being totally bamboozled by the truth! Tells us something about our frame of mind at the time.)

And do not forget torture. We not only instituted a regime of rendition and torture, our finest minds argued about its desirability - the argument about the ticking bomb and the captured terrorist - and the legal bases of it.

It was as if we feared that the sins of the fathers would be visited upon their children, and the only way we could bollox up that karma was to commit our own sins... and lots of 'em!

Once again, President Obama's surprising choice of peace over war in Syria is the very first act I have seen where one of our leaders has stepped out from the lemming march to the sea, held out a hand and said, "Stop!"

It was the first major push-back against the spiral downwards. And make no mistake, the fruits of a Syrian war would have been devastating, not for the debacle in Syria itself, but the contribution it would have made to making a permanent preference for violence and destruction.....

....for as we become more and more befuddled by the bullets whizzing by our ears, and our schemes continue to collapse into failure, we would have become more and more brutish. (You only have to recall the speech of the NSA "Commandant" about how he wished to be able to keep every telephone call in the USA to realize how degraded we have become!)

We may actually live to see pirates cleansed from the seven seas.

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