Fun With The Guardian’s Reactionary Guttersnipes
Follow this link to my original post on Paul Volcker’s UN report. (From February 3.)
I added this to the original post:
“FEB 5 UPDATE FOR GUARDIAN READERS: Glad to have you. Sadly, the Guardian’s reactionary guttersnipes expose their pre-conceived notions. (Do a little research, gents, it’s the proper thing to do.) I’m no UN basher– I am quite pro-UN (check my record). I am against corruption and for accountability. I regard the UN as a necessary institution, but one in desperate need of reform, re-direction, and re-organization. Oil-For-Food is symptomatic of the institution’s decay. Repairing the UN is a huge effort. Herculean aptly describes the task– for his fifth labor, Hercules had to clean the Augean Stables. After we clean up the criminal dishonesty at the United Nations, we’ll take on an even more difficult, though less significant, task– cleaning up the intellectual dishonesty at the Guardian. Here’s the link to the Guardian.”
An additional thought: The Guardian’s bloggers know the Volcker report is damning. Add the undeniable success of the Iraqi elections and it has been a tough, harsh week for “the international elites.” Hard facts have finally cracked their echo chamber.
UPDATE: The AP (via Newsday) reports that Volcker is now looking at documents from Kofi Annan’s office related to allegations that Annan’s son participated in UNSCAM.
UPDATE 2: Mark Steyn weighs in on UNSCAM. Welcome to UN-Land, where $160K suddenly appearing in your bank account is just beer money. I want to clarify a point raised by a commenter–in an emergency aid or developmental aid situation, I see a properly reformed UN as a coordinator and facilitator, not an actor.
Well I’m not pro-UN! That outfit is corrupt from Koffi Annan down to the lowest mass- murdering scumbag in the general assembly. I’m so sick of the UN that it’s almost anti-climatic finding out that those bureaucratic pricks were getting rich off the misery of the Iraqi people while genocide was going on in Rwanda, Bosnia and Congo. What are they going to do about the slave trade and ethnic cleansing in Sudan? Nothing ’cause there’s no money in it for Koffi’s boy Togo or Toto (or whatever the hell his name is) and the other genocide profiteers stinking up the UN headquarters. There, I feel better.
Comment by Reactionary Guttersnipe — 2/5/2005 @ 10:39 pm
OK…no more comments on Cream reunions, jam bands or other such…on to the serious stuff. I think your quotes in the Guardian speak truth to institutional idiocy, so you shouldn’t be surprised, or even disappointed, at the tenor of the piece. For the Guardian, this is rather mild and almost fair. Actually, I’m more surprised to see that you are this supportive of the UN–given your background and experience. See, for example, Winds of Change (http://www.windsofchange.net/archives/006109.php) for more on the UN, aka the ‘Toyota Taliban.’ I’m less sanguine than you about the prospects of ever reforming the United Nations.
Comment by JRK — 2/5/2005 @ 11:01 pm
Damn, I thought they hung that Tojo feller after the big war ‘cross the big waters.
Comment by Bubba Kincaid — 2/5/2005 @ 11:02 pm
Hmmm. Wanna see the Oil-for-Food scandal broken open like a rotten melon? Wait until there’s a duly elected soveriegn government in Iraq. Annan’s son doesn’t have diplomatic immunity of any sort. A sovereign Iraqi government could issue an arrest warrant for his corrupt buttocks and stick him in Abu Ghraib for the rest of his natural life. Plus any attempt by Annan to give his son any sort of diplomatic immunity would be seen for what it would be, an attempt to shield him from the consequences of his dealings. And Annan knows this.
Comment by ed — 2/5/2005 @ 11:26 pm
“Pro-war columnists have long argued that French and Russian opposition to the war in Iraq was an unprincipled attempt to protect a profitable oil-for-food arrangement with Saddam.” Actually I’ve argued that French and Russian opposition to the war was to prevent anyone from finding out about their “12th man on the field”. The money might have been nice, but those purchased UNSC votes were worth 10 times the bullion of the oil for food contracts.
Comment by Brennan Stout — 2/5/2005 @ 11:43 pm
Give the Guardian a break. In their attempt to change the undecided hearts and minds in Ohio, it backfired in Bush’s favor.
Comment by Steve — 2/6/2005 @ 12:31 am
Steve- I already sent ‘em a thank-you note, we’re even on that count.
Comment by rosignol — 2/6/2005 @ 12:47 am
Hard facts is not the word, at least in regard to Iraq. More like good, obvious, undeniable facts. And something else. Day by day the media has denigrated the Iraqis quest for freedom. But on Sunday, they had to look those people in the eye and the sane ones figured out that what they were doing had a cost on innocents. Suddenly their pyshological block–their hatred of Bush–gave way to their conscience. The hug at the SOTU added to that. The media will remain biased, but i think for the most part the bias will start to help us.
Comment by A.W. of Freespeech.com — 2/6/2005 @ 12:54 am
I used to think that the UN was necessary, but watching them turn on this final hook has made me give up on them. Now I think that the G7 should setup its own system for managing conflict, distributing aid, interceding into crisis points, and doing all the other stuff that the UN should do but doesn’t. Let the ~200 dictators in the UN GA have their party, and the rest of us should just stop showing up for the meetings.
Comment by Ursus — 2/6/2005 @ 1:17 am
Like the other “quality” newspapers in Britain, the Independent recruits its staff and contributors from the Oxbridge crowd. Like our own elite universities, they are petrie dishes for the cultivation of leftist attitudes. Beyond that, the upper class — there still is one — is irredemably anti-American. The political attitudes that prevail at places like the Independent can best be compared to those in the English department of a major university.
Comment by Jerry — 2/6/2005 @ 6:54 am
“Beyond that, the upper class – there still is one – is irredemably anti-American”. They despise Americans because Americans threaten their own sense of self-importance in the world. In America, we dumped the idea of “superior by birth” over 200 years ago. We value the immigrant who rises up from the ashes and makes their way in the world. A janitor who is the first in his family to complete college is viewed far more favorably in America than a spoiled rich jetsetter, born with a spoon in his mouth. They are at one with our own “intellectual elites, because they rely on the veneer of their diplomas and memberships to raise their sense of self-esteem. If those American cowboys, truck drivers, and other teeming masses in America can freely and successfully mock their ideas, their birth and their position of importance in the world - then they are no better. How much easier to just mock those “morons” first, and to proclaim that nothing they say or do is of merit.
Comment by Becky — 2/6/2005 @ 7:38 am
Ursus, forget the G7 too, any static setup of nations will develop a bureaucracy, various agenda,[don’t forget France would be part of it] and it would finish up as another bunch of Useless Numbskulls. Better to rely on such nations as responded immediately to the tsunami disaster to form coalitions as they are needed, which mostly means the Anglosphere. Anyone not coversant with the term Anglosphere, go here: http://www.pattern.com/bennettj-anglosphereprimer.html
Comment by Ligneus — 2/6/2005 @ 8:05 am
The UN as an ideal is corrupt - the ideal of treating free nations & dictatorships as moral equals, undercutting the sovereinty of the former while legitimatizing the oppression of the former. The current corruption is just one of a string of UN scandals extending all the way back to Dag Hammarskjöld. You can reform that which is — b/c of its basic principles — innately corrupt. Indeed, the League of Nations was corrupt for the same reasons, but our nation’s leaders — and Her citizens — at the time had more sense and more integrity than do either of those today. So let me sum it up as plainly as I can: In any compromise between good and evil, it is only evil that can profit — a paraphrase of a quote by Ayn Rand. It’s that simple, folks.
Comment by Steven — 2/6/2005 @ 9:04 am
Let’s see: The UN needs redirection, reorganization, and reform; oh, and the scandals that are “symptomatic of the institution’s decay” need to be rooted out. What’s left? I mean, besides the building. I guess in this sense I am a UN supporter, I think the building should stay as well. The only question is what do we fill it with?
Comment by Brad Ervin — 2/6/2005 @ 12:39 pm
I’m no UN basher– I am quite pro-UN (check my record). Why do you have to justify yourself, especially to the Guardian? That you are calling the UN on its corruption can only be interpreted in the Guardian’s sense by the idiots who run it, the UN and the Guardian. You should have called the Guardian on their logic that one who does Not bash the UN is one who swallows the corruption at play.
Comment by Cynic — 2/6/2005 @ 12:45 pm
I believe in reforming the UN. I think that the reform of the League of Nations worked out quite well and a similar procedure is needed for the UN as it is in a similar state of moribund decay. Sadly it’s going to take a lot longer for a consensus of world opinion to agree than really should be necessary.
Comment by TM Lutas — 2/6/2005 @ 9:49 pm