I don't have much patience or respect for the United Nations as an organization, nor am I able to take seriously those who insist on giving it primacy in international affairs. The shameful episode below gives one illustration of why I think the way I do.
United Nations personnel helping to censor information on the Great Firewall of China - isn't that just wonderful? When I said, in commenting on the award of the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize to Barack Obama, that the Nobel Prize Comittee's justification of its decision on the basis that
[Obama's] diplomacy is founded in the concept that those who are to lead the world must do so on the basis of values and attitudes that are shared by the majority of the world's population
was a load of claptrap, this was precisely the sort of nonsense I had in mind (as well as all the ridiculous "Israel is evil" resolutions so beloved by the UN General Assembly.) If the "values and attitudes that are shared by the majority of the world's population"* are allowed to dominate international affairs, heavy-handed censorship, crude authoritarianism, extreme ethnocentrism and rampant corruption will be the order of the day, and expecting very much of an organization so much at the whim of powers like Russia and China is the ultimate in stupidity, as senseless as expecting good works by an assemblage of thieves and cut-throats.
*Or, at any rate, by the governments representing the majority of said population, seeing how little the opinions of most people matter, even when they are supposedly given a choice at the ballot box, a bare minimum the Chinese communist dictatorship still fails to meet.
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