Dear Colleague:
Perhaps new leaders at the United Nations can reign in some of its
bureaucracy's lesser-known but highly destructive projects.
Steven W. Mosher
President
PRI Weekly Briefing
15 December 2006
Vol. 8, No. 49
The UN's Future
By Joseph A. D'Agostino
Major personnel changes at the United Nations have just occurred, and
major international events will unfold next year as President Bush pursues
a new Iraq policy and all the other trouble spots of the world continue on
their unmerry course. These events and top UN personnel get a lot of
attention, and rightly so. But what about deeper underlying trends, the
ones that drive surface events and which will do so much to determine the
future of the world ten, twenty, thirty years from now? These
issues--demographics, ideological shifts, slowly changing structures of
power--don't get as much attention as sectarian violence in Iraq, mass
murder in Darfur, or U.S. ambassadors to the UN. Yet they are more
important in the long run.
Unfortunately, John Bolton is out as U.S. ambassador to the UN, deep-sixed
by a loser liberal Republican senator (Lincoln Chafee) and Democratic
senators angry over Bolton's opposition to Fidel Castro, still a darling
of the left in his dotage, and his effectiveness in defending American
interests. Bolton was also the main driving force behind efforts to
reform the transparently corrupt and inefficient UN bureaucracy, a reform
drive that will probably die now.
Kofi Annan is out as UN Secretary-General. It is tempting to say he was
the worse UN secretary-general ever, but the competition is too stiff.
His replacement sworn in yesterday, South Korea's Ban Ki-moon, doesn't
seem to have a clear agenda, or a mandate to reform the UN.
Yet reforming the UN's many agencies so that they become less corrupt and
more effective would not necessarily be a good thing. Of course, if UN
officials and their Third World dictator friends stole less of the
humanitarian aid funds meant for starving people, that would be a good
thing. If UN peacekeepers spent more time keeping the peace and less time
raping local women and girls, that would also be a good thing. But
increasing the efficiency of much of what the UN does away from the
limelight would not be beneficial.
Here is a brief reform agenda for the incoming UN Secretary-General and
U.S. ambassador to the UN regarding the destructive long-term trends
promoted by various UN bureaucracies, away from the razzle-dazzle of the
Security Council:
1. End the promotion of population control. When will population
controllers realize that they have won? Birthrates have plummeted almost
everywhere in the world in the last 30 years, yet the United Nations
Population Fund (UNFPA) and other UN agencies continued to work under the
assumption that there are far too many children being born, particularly
if they are yellow, brown, or black. Latin America's birthrate is down to
2.5 children per woman in her lifetime, not far above the replacement rate
of 2.1, and headed further down. Mexico is already below replacement.
China, with 20% of the world's people, is at 1.7--and UNFPA is still
active there. Asia as a whole is at 2.5 and dropping fast. Europe is at
a suicidal 1.4. The United States is at 2.0. Only sub-Saharan Africa
still has high birthrates, and they are desperately needed due to the
ongoing decimation of African populations through war, famine, and
disease. Does the entire human population of the world have to be on the
road to extinction before the UN stops promoting population control?
2. End the promotion of feminism. One of the paramount forces destroying
families, societies, and birthrates in the modern world is feminism.
Feminism's denigration of positive feminine values of domesticity and
child nurturance and exaltation of negative masculine values such as
careerism and power-seeking is currently exterminating the Western world,
in a literal sense-there are too few children being born. The UN, through
all its social agencies from UNFPA to UNESCO to the Convention on the
Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW),
relentlessly promotes feminism, including abortion "rights." All kinds of
studies as well as common sense show that two-career couples face greater
stress and are more likely to divorce, and both also show that raising
children outside of the traditional family leads to disastrous
consequences far more often than when they are raised inside of one.
CEDAW doesn't bother the United States, but has commanded small, weak
nations to legalize abortion and abolish Mother's Day. When will the UN's
insane project to make women into men cease?
3. End the radical environmentalist jihad. When I visited Ireland last
month, I marveled at the unthinking acceptance of the global warming
mythology. Of course, many interests and organs have come together to
promote the fraudulent claim that we must lower our standard of living in
order to avert environmental catastrophe, but the UN busies itself with
spreading this secular millenarianism around the globe, including in Third
World countries where people desperately need industrialization rather
than economy-destroying theories of a coming apocalypse.
4. End the push for world government. We supposedly live in an age of
increasing democracy. Yet here are home, so many of our most important
policies--on abortion, on marriage, on criminal's rights, on religion's
place in the public sphere--are decided by unelected judges. In Europe,
the elites that control the elected governments there have been
transferring greater and greater power to the European Union. The UN,
too, has been gradually accumulating more power though none of its
officials or voting delegates in the General Assembly are elected or are
otherwise accountable to ordinary people. In fact, the UN is mostly a
collection of dictatorships, oligarchies, and quasi-democratic regimes.
This treaty organization wants to turn itself into a world government,
with direct power of taxation and other marks of sovereignty. One of the
newer ideological methods of expanding the UN's power is the concept of
"human security," defined to include health care, employment,
anti-discrimination laws, housing, etc. UNcrats use this concept to argue
that security among nation-states--the UN's primary mission--can only be
guaranteed if each nation-state guarantees human security, thus giving UN
potentates unlimited power to meddle in nations' internal affairs. This
is a new twist on the old Communist argument about economic rights.
Notice that none of my suggestions entail the UN doing something good,
only refraining from negative activities, activities that are incidental
to its mission of promoting peace and international security anyway. All
of these suggestions would save money, too. Few rational people believe
that UN bureaucrats can be made to do much good or that these bureaucrats
can be replaced with decent people. All that we can hope is that they may
be prevented from doing harm. Since the United States provides 22% of the
general budget of this destructive organization, using financial leverage
could be a good place to start.
Joseph A. D'Agostino is Vice President for Communications at the
Population Research Institute.
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The pro-life Population Research Institute is dedicated to ending human
rights abuses committed in the name of "family planning," and to ending
counter-productive social and economic paradigms premised on the myth of
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