03 October 2007

So why should good compromise?

Most supporters of the United Nations see it as a way of sorting out peaceful disputes between countries, to avoid war, and to promote dialogue rather than violence. On the surface, and in a vast range of cases that is a good thing. However, the United Nations was created as part of a idealistic view that it is better for countries to bicker within an international organisation than to use arms - it was specifically designed to oppose traditional initiation of war - that is one country invading another.

As much of a despicable action as that is, it doesn't take much thought to consider how much less bloodthirsty the 1930s and 1940s would have been had Hitler NOT been expansionist, or indeed had Japan not been expansionist beyond Korea (which the rest of the world effectively handed to Japan in 1910). German Jewry would still have been wiped out, Stalin would have continued to slaughter his own people, and Japan continued to treat Koreans as slaves and useful for chemical and biological weapons experiments.

The UN's supporters present it as an arbiter of morality. However any organisation is only a function of its members, and its members are the very worst members of the international community. You see the UN sends an envoy into Burma to seek peace and a compromise -a compromise between those with guns and bullets and their victims shot in the back and left to die. It mirrors the view of China, which seeks restraint from BOTH sides - imagine calling for restraint from Jews in Hitler's Germany in 1940, or those sent to Year Zero by the Khmer Rouge, or the Kurds gassed by Saddam Hussein.

What the Burmese deserve is uncompromising support to overthrow their murderous regime. If the Burmese government did what it does in any Western country its perpetrators would be locked up. Of course if someone could arm the monks...

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