[extropy-chat] Restructuring the UN [was urban sprawl as defense]

[Terry W. Colvin]

Mike Lorrey wrote:
> 
> --- Brett Paatsch <bpaatsch at bigpond.net.au> wrote:
> 
> > The French fought. And there was a resistance. They were a war
> > power.
> 
> The French Resistance primarily fought itself, betraying partisans of
> opposing political fealties to the Germans at every opportunity. The
> French resisted Germany NO MORE than Poland did, and the exiled armed
> forces of the two nations shared a beach at Normandy. I say we toss
> France and add Poland to the Security Council. France has had it for 50
> years, it's Poland's turn.
> 
> Oh, and btw, there IS a way to remove a Security Council member. We've
> done it once already, when in the early 70's Taiwan was removed and
> Communist China was added. Until that time, the Nationalists had held
> that SC seat.

Bill Hanne, my old geography teacher, spoke of reorganizing the UN security
council to reflect a two-tier system of permanent and rotating members.  I
vote for removing France as an anachronism of de Gaulle's delusions of
grandeur. 

> > If you going to have an international law body dedicated to
> > maintaining
> > international peace and security you can't have a cast of thousands
> > on it or it wouldn't work. It would take too long to make decisions.
> >
> > To be legitimate (in the eyes of most people in the world)
> > it needs to represent most people in the world.
> 
> The spanish speaking people of the world are unrepresented on the SC.
> How about Spain, or Argentina, or Mexico? The african people of the
> world are similarly unrepresented, how about South Africa. India has a
> billion people, why is China on the SC and not India? The muslim people
> of the world are 800 million strong. Why isn't Saudi Arabia or Turkey
> on the SC?

Agreed to include Brazil, India, and Japan and perhaps South Africa.  This
would reflect more than the good ole boy's club we now have.
 
> > Its like the no taxation without representation thing.
> 
> So sorry, but I don't recall ever being permitted to vote for a single
> member of the UN General Assembly or the Security Council. Could you
> please post an election schedule?

Exactly, it's like too much taxation and too much representation.
 
> The UN does not represent mankind. It represents a club of legal
> fictions intent on perpetuating their power over mankind. It is
> therefore an anti-human institution and therefore an anti-transhuman institution.
> 
> =====
> Mike Lorrey
> Chairman, Free Town Land Development

Terry


The attached article seems very appropriate:


< http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/letter_from_america/ >

< http://www.wbur.org/inside/personality/detail6870.asp >

PEACE FOR OUR TIME by Alistair Cooke, BBC Broadcaster (he is ~95 years old)

About the author: In 1936, the NBC network invited Alistair Cooke to do a 
weekly broadcast of reflections on British life called London Letter. Cooke 
then emigrated to the United States in 1937, and asked the BBC to let him 
do the same thing in reverse. Eventually he succeeded, and 'Letter from 
America' is now the longest running radio broadcast in human history. In 
the process it has won a faithful worldwide audience of several million and 
many friends in high places. When Cooke was awarded an honorary knighthood 
in 1973, the Queen is reputed to have expressed bewildered admiration at 
his ability to sit down, week after week, and communicate so directly with 
his audience.

I promised to lay off topic A - Iraq - until the Security Council makes a 
judgment on the inspectors' report and I shall keep that promise. But I 
must tell you that throughout the past fortnight I've listened to everybody 
involved in or looking on to a monotonous din of words, like a tide 
crashing and receding on a beach - making a great noise and saying the same 
thing over and over. And this ordeal triggered a nightmare - a day-mare, if 
you like. Through the ceaseless tide I heard a voice, a very English voice 
of an old man - Prime Minister Chamberlain saying: "I believe it is peace 
for our time" - a sentence that prompted a huge cheer, first from a 
listening street crowd and then from the House of Commons and next day from 
every newspaper in the land. There was a move to urge that Mr Chamberlain 
should receive the Nobel Peace Prize. In Parliament there was one 
unfamiliar old grumbler to growl out: "I believe we have suffered a total 
and unmitigated defeat."

  He was, in view of the general sentiment, very properly booed down. This 
scene concluded in the autumn of 1938 the British prime minister's 
effectual signing away of most of Czechoslovakia to Hitler. The rest of it, 
within months, Hitler walked in and conquered. "Oh dear," said Mr 
Chamberlain, thunderstruck. "He has betrayed my trust."

During the last fortnight a simple but startling thought occurred to me 
--every single official, diplomat, president, prime minister involved in 
the Iraq debate was in 1938 a toddler, most of them unborn. So the dreadful 
scene I've just drawn will not have been remembered by most listeners. 
Hitler had started betraying our trust not 12 years but only two years 
before, when he broke the First World War peace treaty by occupying the 
demilitarised zone of the Rhineland. Only half his troops carried one 
reload of ammunition because Hitler knew that French morale was too low to 
confront any war just then and 10 million of 11 million British voters had 
signed a so-called peace ballot. It stated no conditions, elaborated no 
terms, it simply counted the numbers of Britons who were "for peace".

The slogan of this movement was "Against war and fascism" - chanted at the 
time by every Labour man and Liberal and many moderate Conservatives - a 
slogan that now sounds as imbecilic as "against hospitals and disease". In 
blunter words a majority of Britons would do anything, absolutely anything, 
to get rid of Hitler except fight him. At that time the word pre-emptive 
had not been invented, though today it's a catchword. After all the 
Rhineland was what it said it was - part of Germany. So to march in and 
throw Hitler out would have been pre-emptive - wouldn't it? Nobody did 
anything and Hitler looked forward with confidence to gobbling up the rest 
of Western Europe country by country - "course by course", as growler 
Churchill put it. I bring up Munich and the mid-30s because I was fully 
grown, on the verge of 30, and knew we were indeed living in the age of 
anxiety. And so many of the arguments mounted against each other today, in 
the last fortnight, are exactly what we heard in the House of Commons 
debates and read in the French press. The French especially urged, after 
every Hitler invasion, "negotiation, negotiation". They negotiated so 
successfully as to have their whole country defeated and occupied. But as 
one famous French leftist said: "We did anyway manage to make them declare 
Paris an open city - no bombs on us!"

In Britain the general response to every Hitler advance was disarmament and 
collective security. Collective security meant to leave every crisis to the 
League of Nations. It would put down aggressors, even though, like the 
United Nations, it had no army, navy or air force. The League of Nations 
had its chance to prove itself when Mussolini invaded and conquered 
Ethiopia (Abyssinia). The League didn't have any shot to fire. But still 
the cry was chanted in the House of Commons - the League and collective 
security is the only true guarantee of peace. But after the Rhineland the 
maverick Churchill decided there was no collectivity in collective security 
and started a highly unpopular campaign for rearmament by Britain, warning 
against the general belief that Hitler had already built an enormous 
mechanised army and superior air force.

But he's not used them, he's not used them - people protested. Still for 
two years before the outbreak of the Second War you could read the debates 
in the House of Commons and now shiver at the famous Labour men -Major 
Attlee was one of them - who voted against rearmament and still went on 
pointing to the League of Nations as the saviour. Now, this memory of mine 
may be totally irrelevant to the present crisis. It haunts me. I have to 
say I have written elsewhere with much conviction that most historical 
analogies are false because, however strikingly similar a new situation may 
be to an old one, there's usually one element that is different and it 
turns out to be the crucial one. It may well be so here.

All I know is that all the voices of the 30s are echoing through 2003...


-- 
"Only a zit on the wart on the heinie of progress." Copyright 1992, Frank Rice


Terry W. Colvin, Sierra Vista, Arizona (USA) < fortean1 at mindspring.com >
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