THE PSYCHOLOGIST : As vital to humanity as nuclear war

As vital to humanity as nuclear war

Kofi Annan has regularly been blowing his own trumpet and that of the UN's. It seems however that the trumpet gets more and more out of tune everyday.

UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan defended the United Nations, which is beset by scandals from the Iraqi oil programme to sexual abuse by peacekeepers, as "vital to humanity" in the Wall Street Journal yesterday.

This was an article I was hoping to fisk to death, but unfortunately it was one of those $$$ subscriber articles. Vital to humanity? Surely he can't have said that with a straight face. Let's wait for the quote.

"I have served the UN all my life. I have done, and am still doing, everything I can to correct its imperfections, and to improve and strengthen it," he wrote in an opinion piece. "And I believe profoundly in the importance of that task, because a strong UN is of vital importance to humanity."

Annan has been at the UN since 1962, and thus must surely know as well as anyone else that the UN has done next to nothing for humanity in that time. They have a horrid record on pretty much everything under the sun. On one of the biggest issues today, they can't possibly do much worse:

Terrorism: The United Nations accepts and circulates statements from state sponsors of terrorism that either denounce terrorism or claim they are victims of terrorism, while also electing them to positions on the UN Security Council (Syria), Human Rights Commission (Cuba, Sudan, Syria, Libya), and International Law Commission (Iran, Syria). This is something they're proud of. Only 43 of 189 UN Member States supported a resolution opposing the financial support of terrorism.

...But that's really not enough. Let's now do a checklist by country:

Morocco/Western Sahara: The United Nations arrived in 1991 with a few goals: stop "restrain local security forces, identify and register voters, conduct the referendum, certify the results, and supervise the losing side's withdrawal or disarmament." By 1997, they had achieved none of these. By the end of 1998, peace looked likely, but even today the UN have not completed the rest of their goals.

Rwanda: The United Nations had chances to stop genocide, but didn't. 500-to-800,000 people died, and the UN showed no serious interest in prosecuting those responsible. Independent reports accepted by the UN found Kofi Annan was mostly to blame, as he ignored numerous reports.

East Timor: The United Nations was slow to establish basic institutions, and has been sloppy in its overall running of most aspects of East Timor. But then again, since this was a mission the UN didn't even want, and the UN supported Indonesia running East Timor in 1999, it's almost understandable. Even Marxists lost confidence in the UN over this, and they supported East Timor.

Sudan: The United Nations refused to condemn slavery in Sudan (who happen to be on the Human Rights Commission at around the same time), yet are more than happy to celebrate the end of slavery even though they admit it's still going on [more here]. Human rights abuse resolutions against Sudan are hushed up because they're led by the United States. The Darfur genocide showed once again the UN doesn't act against genocide until it's too late, and even then won't admit it's genocide.

Iran: The United Nations refused to condemn human rights abuses by Iran in 2002, a stance they continued in 2004. This was part of a weakening stance by the UN on human rights abuses in general. The UN was also lazy on Iran's nuclear progress.

Sierra Leone: The United Nations sent in peacekeepers - but there was not enough of them, and they weren't properly armed. 500 of them were taken hostage in one month alone.

Liberia: The United Nations appears to be allowing Liberia to head down the same path as Sierra Leone. The UN was unable to do anything about large caches of arms and the militias who controlled them.

Zimbabwe: The United Nations supported Zimbabwe's position as overseer of human rights abuses, despite Zimbabwe being one of the worst offenders in the world.

The UN has also proven themselves virtually useless in Kashmir, Afghanistan, Palestine, Somalia, Bosnia [more], Kosovo [more], Colombia [more], Haiti, etc, etc...

The list goes on. I'm yet to see any evidence that humanity needs the United Nations to survive. If anything, the less the world has to deal with the UN, the better off we are.

(Cross-posted to The House Of Wheels.)

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Background

The essence of conservatism is caution. The essence of Leftism is anger

This blog is written solely by John Ray, who has a Ph.D. degree in psychology and 200+ papers published in the academic journals of the social sciences. It does occasionally comment on issues in psychology but is mainly aimed at giving a conservative psychologist's view on a broad range of topics. There are very few conservative psychologists.

The blog originated in Australia and many (but not most) posts discuss Australian matters. Australians have an unusually good awareness of events outside their own country. Australian newspapers feature news from Britain and the USA not as an afterthought but as a major part of their coverage. So Australians do tend to have a truly Western heart, which is the reason behind the old name for this blog. So events in Australia, Britain and the USA all feature frequently here, plus occasional coverage of other places, particularly Israel.

A primer in American politics for non-Americans:

SCOTUS is the Supreme Court of the United States, the highest court in the land

The "GOP" stands for "Grand Old Party" and refers to the Republican party. The GOP is at present center/Right, while the Democrats have been undergoing a steady drift Leftwards and now have policies similar to mainstream European Leftist parties.

The ideological identity of both parties has however been very fluid -- almost reversing itself over time. In the mid 19th century, the GOP was the party of big government and concern for minorities while the Democrats advertised themselves as "The party of the white man" -- an orientation that lasted into the mid 20th century in the South. The Democrats are still obsessed with race but have now flipped into support for discrimination AGAINST whites.

Was Pope Urban VIII the first Warmist? Below we see him refusing to look through Galileo's telescope. People tend to refuse to consider evidence— if what they might discover contradicts what they believe.

Global warming

Calibrated in whole degrees. Larger graph here

Climate scientist Lennart Bengtsson said. “The warming we have had the last 100 years is so small that if we didn’t have meteorologists and climatologists to measure it we wouldn’t have noticed it at all.”

The term "Fascism" is mostly used by the Left as a brainless term of abuse. But when they do make a serious attempt to define it, they produce very complex and elaborate definitions -- e.g. here and here. In fact, Fascism is simply extreme socialism plus nationalism. But great gyrations are needed to avoid mentioning the first part of that recipe, of course.

Two examples of Leftist racism below (much more here and here):

Beatrice Webb, a founder of the London School of Economics and the Fabian Society, and married to a Labour MP, mused in 1922 on whether when English children were "dying from lack of milk", one should extend "the charitable impulse" to Russian and Chinese children who, if saved this year, might anyway die next. Besides, she continued, there was "the larger question of whether those races are desirable inhabitants" and "obviously" one wouldn't "spend one's available income" on "a Central African negro".

Hugh Dalton, offered the Colonial Office during Attlee's 1945-51 Labour government, turned it down because "I had a horrid vision of pullulating, poverty stricken, diseased nigger communities, for whom one can do nothing in the short run and who, the more one tries to help them, are querulous and ungrateful."

Defensible and indefensible usages of the term "racism"

The book, The authoritarian personality, authored by T.W. Adorno et al. in 1950, has been massively popular among psychologists. It claims that a set of ideas that were popular in the "Progressive"-dominated America of the prewar era were "authoritarian". Leftist regimes always are authoritarian so that claim was not a big problem. What was quite amazing however is that Adorno et al. identified such ideas as "conservative". They were in fact simply popular ideas of the day but ones that had been most heavily promoted by the Left right up until the then-recent WWII. See here for details of prewar "Progressive" thinking.

R.I.P. Augusto Pinochet. Pinochet deposed a law-defying Marxist President at the express and desperate invitation of the Chilean parliament. He pioneered the free-market reforms which Reagan and Thatcher later unleashed to world-changing effect. That he used far-Leftist methods to suppress far-Leftist violence is reasonable if not ideal. The Leftist view that they should have a monopoly of violence and that others should follow the law is a total absurdity which shows only that their hate overcomes their reason

Franklin Delano Roosevelt was a war criminal. Both British and American codebreakers had cracked the Japanese naval code so FDR knew what was coming at Pearl Harbor. But for his own political reasons he warned no-one there. So responsibility for the civilian and military deaths at Pearl Harbor lies with FDR as well as with the Japanese. The huge firepower available at Pearl Harbor, both aboard ship and on land, could have largely neutered the attack. Can you imagine 8 battleships and various lesser craft firing all their AA batteries as the Japanese came in? The Japanese naval airforce would have been annihilated and the war would have been over before it began.

FDR prolonged the Depression. He certainly didn't cure it.

WWII did NOT end the Great Depression. It just concealed it. It in fact made living standards worse

Joe McCarthy was eventually proved right after the fall of the Soviet Union. To accuse anyone of McCarthyism is to accuse them of accuracy!

The KKK was intimately associated with the Democratic party. They ATTACKED Republicans!

People who mention differences in black vs. white IQ are these days almost universally howled down and subjected to the most extreme abuse. I am a psychometrician, however, so I feel obliged to defend the scientific truth of the matter:

The average African adult has about the same IQ as an average white 11-year-old and African Americans (who are partly white in ancestry) average out at a mental age of 14. The American Psychological Association is generally Left-leaning but it is the world's most prestigious body of academic psychologists. And even they have had to concede that sort of gap (one SD) in black vs. white average IQ. 11-year olds can do a lot of things but they also have their limits and there are times when such limits need to be allowed for.

America's uncivil war was caused by trade protectionism. The slavery issue was just camouflage, as Abraham Lincoln himself admitted. See also here

Did William Zantzinger kill poor Hattie Carroll?

Did Bismarck predict where WWI would start or was it just a "free" translation by Churchill?

Leftist psychologists have an amusingly simplistic conception of military organizations and military men. They seem to base it on occasions they have seen troops marching together on parade rather than any real knowledge of military men and the military life. They think that military men are "rigid" -- automatons who are unable to adjust to new challenges or think for themselves. What is incomprehensible to them is that being kadaver gehorsam (to use the extreme Prussian term for following orders) actually requires great flexibility -- enough flexibility to put your own ideas and wishes aside and do something very difficult. Ask any soldier if all commands are easy to obey.

A good article on Leftist hate

The real history of social Darwinism

Some personal memoirs

Memoir highlights

THE PSYCHOLOGIST

As vital to humanity as nuclear war

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