Helen Clark: UN must “get better” at the core job it’s never done

 

Helen Clark is still going for the top job at the only place in the world that could teach FIFA something about corruption (not being about merit, a job she’s unlikely to get), yet her speech in support of her goal yesterday tells you something about how it became that way.

“We have to get better at preventing conflict and resolving conflict,” she said in her opening address.

Just think about that for a moment: We, the United Nations Organisation, have to get better at preventing conflict and resolving conflict. Think about that for a moment while you take a small piece of paper on which you write down the very reason for which the UN was allegedly formed.

Now, hands up all of you who wrote down something like “preventing and resolving conflict.”  You know, peace? Do I have a clear majority here? It’s core job, at least what it said on the box it came in, was supposed to be preventing and resolving conflict. It was right there in all the well-wishing speeches that launched it. But that was before it began delivering helpless country after helpless country into the arms of those sitting on the UN’s board; sending Trojan horses into western democracies with names like Agenda 21, Earth Charter, Climate Change, sustainable development and declarations of indigneous psuedo-rights; sending blue-helmeted troops to the world’s most dangerous places to get shot at while unspeakable horrors happened around them; and setting up commissions on what they call “human rights” on which sit some of the biggest torturers on the planet …

You might call all of this “mission creep,” except what else could you expect of an organisation whose mission in its founders’ eyes was never perpetual peace and who had on its founding board, and regularly hosts on its podium, some of the biggest and most devious butchers on the planet. It hasn’t just lost its way. It never had any other.

To see just a small part of the problem, take that small piece of paper again and list on it all the conflicts, genocides or ethnic cleansings the UN has prevented or resolved. Still got plenty of space left? Of course you have. Its abject failure in preventing or resolving any conflict or ending any genocide must surely give pause to even the most ardent supporter of this bastion of bloated corruption. “Get better at preventing conflict?” It would have to begin doing that job at all!

“When an institution reaches the degree of corruption, brazen cynicism and dishonour demonstrated by the U.N. in its shameful history,” suggested Ayn Rand many years ago, “to discuss it at length is to imply that its members and supporters may possibly be making an innocent error about its nature—which is no longer possible.”

I wish Helen Clark well in her bid to cleanse these foul-smelling Augean stables.  It is possibly genuine. She is possibly innocent. Or, like Arthur Schlesinger, close adviser to and hagiographer of President Kennedy, maybe she too “cannot resist the feeling that the UN world is really an immense and picturesque form of make-believe” -- one in which she knows she performs well.

Why wouldn’t you want to make the most of your talents?

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