"Depraved and Beyond Reform"

Salim Mansur of the Toronto Sun doesn't usually catch my attention, but he has this weekend in a piece about the failure that is the United Nations:

The United Nations has become the gathering place for the hyenas of our world -- representatives of tyrannies, medieval fiefdoms, dictatorships and Mafia states -- devouring their own people and blackmailing liberal societies by the sheer weight of numbers in a regular mockery of democracy in the General Assembly.

Kofi Annan, who leaves the U.N. shortly, after a troubled, disjunctive career, is quoted as saying to the BBC:

"If I were an average Iraqi obviously I would make the same comparison -- that they had a dictator who was brutal but they had their streets, they could go out, their kids could go to school and come back home without a mother or father worrying, 'Am I going to see my child again?'... And the Iraqi government has not been able to bring the violence under control."

Thus, it is apparently Annan's view, and perhaps that of the UN generally in its worldpolitic view, that brutal autocracies are preferable to the fight for freedom. Well, from the U.N.'s perspective that may be true - they certainly are going forward on every imaginable front with the disarming of citizens over governments, something that plays into the hands of even the most benign of dictatorships, and then there's that proposed U.N. army, er, police force.

From Rwanda to the middle east to Darfur, the U.N. is impotent, deafened by the shrill wailings of its private agenda NGOs and awash with the sins it professes to want to cleanse from the world.

Mansur:

The United Nations is depraved and beyond reform.

Indeed, democracies such as Canada should resign from the UN and construct a democratic coalition where victims of the hyenas might at least get an impartial hearing, consistent support and even, on occasion, genuine assistance.