In my original post on The Danger of Fantasy in International Affairs I offered a definition of "fantasy" and described how it interferes with our ability to accurately perceive and respond to reality:
All people understand the world through various templates or paradigms. Most of the time, we fit new data into our existing templates until the model breaks down in the face of reality. In Psychoanalysis, much of the work involves exposing and delineating the unconscious paradigms and templates through which our patients view the world. Psychoanalysts refer to such templates as "fantasies" and transference, and by exposing such fantasies, we help our patients make a closer approximation to reality and change their dysfunctional behavior, if they so desire.
Unfortunately our reliance on such fantasies has a major impact on our understanding of the world. Since our perceptions of the world are filtered by the Media, the problem is compounded when inappropriate and dangerous fantasies affect how news from the outside world is filtered by our Media. While the MSM has been accused of conscious bias, and often gives evidence to support such conclusions, their unconscious bias, based on their fantasies, is more often the problem.
One of the great fantasy enabling structures in the International arena is in the news this week. The gap between the fantasy of the UN and the dysfunctional actuality of the UN is so great that it can no longer be bridged by the usual psychological defenses.
Cinnamon Stillwell, a columnist for SFGate.com, the online arm of the San Francisco Chronicle, recently attended a conference, The UN and Beyond: United Democratic Nations, sponsored by the Hudson Institute, and filed her report yesterday, Getting Beyond the UN:
For the first half of the day, speaker after speaker recounted the UN’s incredible corruption, mismanagement and blatant bias, as well as its abject failure to address any of the aims for which it was ostensibly created. Not only has the UN floundered as a protector of human rights around the world, but it has also been complicit in perpetuating human rights abuses. It doesn’t help that most of the UN’s forays into so-called peacekeeping have only led to further bloodshed.
The following are just a few highlights of the UN’s checkered past alluded to by speakers at the conference:
The Iraq Oil-for-Food scandal.
Failure to stop the genocide in Rwanda and the one currently underway in Darfur.
Sexual abuse by UN employees in the Congo and elsewhere.
The 2001 Durban “World Conference Against Racism” in which Israel and Jews were vilified and Palestinian terrorism exonerated (a frequent UN activity).
The exclusion of Israel from full UN participation.
The UN’s inaction in combating terrorism and its lack of an internationally agreed upon definition of terrorism.
The glorification of terrorism via UN-sponsored NGOs.
The failure of UNIFIL to disarm Hezbollah in Lebanon with Security Council resolution 1559 and the likelihood of that continuing failure with the current resolution 1701.
After cataloging such a paradigmatic list of UN sponsored atrocities and corrupt practices, the conferees addressed the question of reform. There were varying degrees of concern, culminating in the suggestion that ultimately it will be the American people who will determine the outcome:
Pollster Frank Luntz posited that should withholding U.S. funding for the UN become a future campaign issue, the possibility of real change could be on the horizon. According to Luntz’ polling for the Hudson Institute, 57% of Americans realize that the UN is no longer effective and should be replaced if it cannot be reformed. As is often the case, it may very well be the American people, not its politicians, who end up leading the way.
Her entire report should be read. It may be familiar to many but the catalog of UN failures is striking and seeing the list, which includes only those failures that are public knowledge, is sadly impressive.
I very much doubt that the UN can be reformed. The corruption which is endemic to the UN, along with its tendency to facilitate the worst elements in the world at the expense of the true innocents, is problematic. There is a tremendous constituency of tyrants, thugs, and kleptocrats who gain tremendous legitimacy from the UN's imprimatur. Reform will never come from the members of the General Assembly or the permanent bureaucracy.
The venality of many in the West, where the only hope for reform lies, is yet another impediment.
However, the greatest impediment to reform is our fantasy that the UN is the basis for a world government, based on social justice and protection of the weak. Our need to see the UN as a bulwark against the Hobbesian world "out there" is so powerful that even when its failures have caused so much misery, we can not easily consider giving up the fantasy. After all, we were all taught that World War II was, in part, caused by the failure of the League of Nations, that without a place for all the world's governments to meet and talk, violence and war would be inevitable. Sadly, people have forgotten or denied that wars and violence have always been inevitable and talking has never been enough to prevent them.
Giving up the fantasy that the UN, diplomacy and talk, can protect us from the worst impulses of the human spirit, is disorienting and frightening. In order to avoid the anxiety that the failure of the UN would evoke, too many have tended to minimize its failures. In many ways the last Presidential election was a contest between a party that desperately wanted to hold onto the protective fantasy that the UN and the International Community would prevent war, and those who realized that the UN was part of the problem, not part of the solution.
The stories we read from time to time of Bill Clinton becoming the Secretary General of the UN, as if that would rescue such a dysfunctional organization, is yet another incarnation of the need to preserve the fantasy of the UN as a good and valued structure that effectively ensures peace. Sadly, mankind has not yet progressed to the point where talk can ensure peace.
"People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf." George Orwell
Recent Comments