Sensitivity Training

Semester break just started for me a few days ago, and I'm spending it in California with my family. Today I was glancing through the Saturday, Jan. 8 issue of the Los Angeles Times (yes, I know, I know) when I came across this astounding paragraph in an article about the continuing U.N. sex abuses in the Congo:

Many of the allegations are difficult to prove and the U.N. is powerless to discipline perpetrators, so abuse continues despite sensitivity training for troops and multiple investigations, the report says.

Can anything serve to better capture all that is wrong about the U.N.? These "peacekeepers" are abusing 12-year-old girls in exchange for "a dollar or two eggs" or similar pittances, taking full advantage of the starvation and poverty of the region, and the official response is to provide sensitivity training?

To be fair, those pedophiles who were identified were sent back to their own countries and turned over to the authorities; yet in many such cases the matter is dropped by the authorities in question. And even if that were not true, even if every criminal to ever serve under the U.N. colors were sent back to a hangman's noose in his native land, it would still be a disgrace to the United Nations that repatriation would even be necessary.

The United Nations was founded ostensibly to serve as the international arbiter of geopolitics, and has since taken on the supposed role of guardian of human rights. Yet how can the U.N. do either, how can it dare to appoint itself as judge over the world, when it does not even have the institutional checks and balances with which to judge itself? What kind of justice can be meted out by an organization whose secretary-general can peremptorily end a sexual abuse investigation into a high-ranking official, who just happens to be a close personal friend? What kind of justice can one expect when the U.N. cannot even enforce discipline among the soldiers wearing blue helmets? What kind of justice can be had from an organization whose highest-level officials in Turtle Bay delight in violating New York laws, hiding smug and secure behind their diplomatic immunity?

None. None at all.

What can we expect? Why, sensitivity training, of course! Everyone just has to be a little more sensitive, that's all! You just need to understand that it's not really nice to coerce young girls into having sex, and then we can all live happily ever after. After all, we're sure that you are really a nice person, and never intended to hurt anybody, so once we explain everything to you we know that you'll behave yourself from now on. Big smiles, everybody!

What surprises me is how many people continue to think of the U.N. as it was intended to be, and not as it actually is. So many people associate the United Nations with the dreams of mankind to eradicate war and suffering and to make the world a better place, and they cannot bear to see the twisted, evil, corrupt mass of disease that actually sits in Turtle Bay. They simply stop listening, holding firmly to their dreams and refusing to call the sickness by name.

I have no such associations. Whatever the United Nations was at its beginnings, by the time of my birth it had come down firmly on the side of despotism and tyranny masquerading as international consensus, like the proverbial two wolves and a sheep deciding what's for dinner. I shall not shrink from saying what should have been obvious to everyone long ago, and is only now finding the support that the idea merits:

United Nations Delenda Est. The United Nations must be destroyed.