There is a reason the United Nations exists. It was born from the ashes of Nazi Germany, and the war to defeat that power and its allies.This week, pundits and other media types have been, along with sly politicos, crowing about the failure of the U.N. to reform itself, to get its act together.
The T.S. Review finds the claim that the United Nations is a failure a short-sighted, simplistic and ultimately defeatist position, which is, from a global perspective, also false.
The first consideration must be - who else, and how else - to discuss, negotiate and ultimately achieve truly international consensus on key issues? The only alternative to the U.N. (and one which Mr. Bolton is aware of) is, indeed, an alternate coalition, perhaps, in a post-modern sense constantly shifting, formed and lead by the dominant hyper-power of the day, in this case America. The idea that such random, open-ended alliances are in any true sense an equivalent to a body consisting of approximately 200 member nation states is counter-factual, for the very reason that such coalitions come into being precisely to seek objectives (often military) that run counter to the interests of many other, often opposed nations (as with Iraq).
To wit: the United Nations exists precisely not to replicate the existing hierachies that some very powerful nations might wish to impose on the world order - as was the case with Hitler's Germany - but instead to approximate to some sort of balanced diplomatic (and perhaps Hegelian) struggle, in which oppositional forces clash, merge and mesh as some stable median point is agreed to; but such an inter-national forum was predicated on the idea of some sort of mutual sense of responsibility.
The failure identified as belonging to the United Nations - the failure to stop Rwandan Genocide, and so on - in fact belongs to the far starker world community, bereft of anything to govern its actions but the crudest self-interest and real politique. It is, in fact, the members who make up the U.N., and too often (always?) bring their limited, national interests to the table, that are responsible for the failure to achieve greater and wider agreements and goals.
Clearly, America's position with regards to the world, the U.N., and many binding international treaties at this time - from Kyoto to world courts - is in direct contradiction to the aims and ideals of the U.N. - in so far as America's current stated foreign policy is to seek the clear best interests of its own people first. That such a policy can be then blanketed in wider universal claims for world good is silly, and the hypocrisy is so evident that it becomes terror's best recruiting sergeant. No nation can have it both ways, though America and the UK via Tony Blair's senseless preaching faux-idealism, seek to: you cannot pursue naked self-interest and achieve wide-scale global justice with the same words and acts.
And of course, time and time again, this is the case, with arms control, the environment, the arms trade, and world health and poverty goals. To take is not to give; and to genuinely aim to ameliorate unjust distributions of wealth is not to withhold money unless narrow faith-based interests are served.
What is needed is simple: a sustainable politics, one which actually seeks to envision mutual, long-range, cross-border concerns, and aims to devalue nation states as instruments of self-aggrandizement. This would have to mean the end to the use of conflict to resolve disputes (except in the most radical of instances); a world economy that took into account global warming and other environmental concerns, and which severely limited the manufacture and sales of weapons - among other things.
It isn't the U.N. which constantly "fails". It is us - supposedly free people - who fail to act, to bring into being organisations and policies that are ethical, non-violent, and sustainable.
Comments
To log on to what we can only imagine to be its original ethos of liberty, and hopefully the freedom to express in any way which doesn’t cause physical suffering may well be impossible now, (10.22 Sunday 18/9/05) as there are so few people alive who remember the near mid-twentieth century horror to keep a full planetary awareness of certain truths balanced alive in the minds of those who came a score and more years after the cessation of hostilities between certain factions involved in the carnage of total war.
A conflict suspended with weapons of devastation; their full gravity hidden behind painted on names bestowed to salve and disguise an unthinkable truth whose originating heir, of naked annihilation at sub-molecular level, is far removed from past ongoing territorial solution talk all those years ago in times when poets were the weapon inspector scientist;
badged and tagged up bosses of kings akin to us all, whose "natural" and "misunderstood" science,was incapable of producing the powerful laboratories of destruction unfound in Iraq, but known to be places adjacent where UN talks return a much more resistant dividend;
where the main few geezers jarring on the world stage now fear to tread, as their checkmate endgame of two big sticks is the only envisaged closure should any of them start waving the magic bash wand of heated physical pain by microwaves in the guise of pursuing peace in a planet wide democracy for all scale of engaged response to whatever goes on which necessitates sticking in further replies.
I imagine it goes without saying that we all have stories of a closeness to the flame of imperial nihilism and how we brushed by and hoovered up whatever banality was present in the historical vibes of any given time, but three generations down the line of sociological-centric evolution and living at the fastest first post modern moments’ edge ever; which it is tempting to imagine as the well tempered plain supporting our age of vacuous sophistication, many misconceive,
it is my current position
that events unrolling at the UN are being worked in tenors construed to suggest language and communication is a scientific pursuit of enhancing truth with computer aided levels of cleverality only the next generation of artificially assisted robotic human minds will be able to fully comply with in order to safegaurd a total disengagement contingency;
as though certain formulae of words alone can sway all literate peoples reading in native "English" text, should they choose to adopt them as arbiters of recourse, or some incontrovertible holy grails of justification for acts subsequent to the creation of wordic spells released by sages in current times.
Logic suggests the writer's "answers" are but expressions of faith being acted out beneath a weather ready broad umbrella stored in an appropriate recepticle at the humanities office of a latter day idea academy, where snap decisions and quick fix closures of opinion make no contributing difference to the final trajectory of mankind;
leading me to posit that many proffering ready made mends to ills of contemporary events perceive existence, primarily, through a pseudo-scientific precision lens state, technology inspired, created and shared by the main first world populace of human civilisation today, including myself.
A nonchalant state of piled ideas with a manufactured hope bored into its central as the Newtonian seed motoring to a settlement where an inherently ordered state of being distorts in proportion to the exponential rate the science of communication advances a doctrine of Solution.
A definitive understanding;
the chimes of which set the mind to answer in modes of resounding clarity, much like masculine end-rhyme, full and finely tuned into pieces of poesy by creators keen to offer a universal set of apple pie answers, at alltimes in subliminaly presentational states, due to the high basting glaze wrap of argument which is, in realty, technology's "spiritual frame"
"This is the solution" is what appears to be getting said, but what do you think reader?
How often and easy do we shout, like career high street charity collectors
"Lets save the planet,"
then cry
"What's happening with the rainforest/Iraq/Northern Ireland/Niger/ unrolling on the TV news, is as intense and coded as a prediction of wave stopping poet wand sale purchases at the reiki crystal wharehouse in Stillorgan's pure spiritual industrial estate of true poetic commerce."
This, I would suggest is the main business of the hopefull open micer unfiring in the flesh on conventionally live stages, but never the less, still striking wider, absent cores;
carping from the sidelines,
much like I am doing now, here as I sit in front of my screen, conquering the wrongs I detect as I trawl through the information deluge, attempting to dodge and duck the torrential downpours of irrelevance dogging the days of poetic endeavour all us wannabe kids of Parnassus suffer on our separate roads to nowhere, as we await the arrival of returns which whisk us to greater peaks of fancy in our quest to fly beyond our own personal Hegelian height of semiotic rationale and attend the temple of contemporary exchange, hermetic and strange to the uninitiated looking bewildered at and on the screen of trafficked ideas where the combination of sound, picture and text is often all too baffling to contemplate in the depths of understanding language artists possess once they have accessed the boot of knowing and emptied it into their brains, like Ode to a Nightingale opiates dissolved as micro solid drips of opinion pegging out grounds of belief offered to ones who gaze upon the words the readers hope translates as the documents of their own world peace agendas.
So take little notice beyond the wish to connect dear literary high quality reader, as once the powers have kicked in we both may soar through mirrors to an emptiness of replicating spiritual frames beloved of Muse groupies pecking away like beaks hacking their way and pasting onto canvas their own patch of creational oblivion in cumulative deposits of personal myth hoped to draw the "rational pattern" and return its swing at a point of balance poised to tip weights outside of reality and impact as a positive change envisaged for the universal good of art.
Yes, friend, if I may call you that, time is short and talk is cheap so let me begin, with a few words from a woman long forgotten, but whose beacon of wisdom was once revered throughout a land whose language had remained uninterrupted to such an extent, that sound could be measured with an accuracy never knowingly surpassed, in the most truly scientific of terms and provable textual measures, which the unknowing would find exoterically correct, but only after a long period of study and serious introspection on the received, of what is sometimes a very sadly misplaced, notion of poetic concept, in its most trusty state of identifiable sound units whose relevancies are mathematically based, due to the uninterrupted evolution of language, which by the time of her demise, had gone along its course for 2000 years with little of the traumas that shaped the ever changing lexicons of other cultures continually crossing in war and peace at the heart of what was and is still, to the complete bemusement of many, commonly described as the early “civilisations” from which our contemporary Western mindset hatched into its full “wonderful” bloom of “superb”ly knowable tracks to righteousness, the dominance of which is now wrestled out in English.
But what “English,” as well as whose, is a pertinent point to raise, as the predominant instances of attempting to better most problematic world issues is dominantly supplied in that formulae, and it is my belief that once readers cop on to my deposits then we may locate a way to make it work out to the mutual benefit of both.