Time to celebrate. Break out your blue helmet, translate everything you say into Arabic, Chinese, French, Russian and Spanish, and politely ask the USA to pay its bills.
United Nations Day, proclaimed in 1948 by the United Nations General Assembly, is held annually on 24 October, the anniversary of the coming into force of the UN Charter on 24 October 1945.
A few days ago I had dinner at Entebbe's Chinese restaurant with an American PhD student from the London School of Tropical Medicine and a Brit working for the tuberculosis dept at WHO (a UN org). He informed us (although we should have guessed) that the U.S. routinely neglects to pay its membership dues to be a part of the UN. One could make a strong argument that the UN is the most powerful war-prevention organization in the world. And we don't support it. Not only do we not support it, we actively campaign against it. Why should we have to listen to what the rest of the world has to say?
Next I propose that we take on the International Red Cross. They hurt our military efficiency by working to cure terrorists that we have partially blown away. Furthermore, the organization's full name is International Red Cross and Red Crescent. The crescent, of course, is a symbol for "terrorist vacation spot."
The UVRI neighborhood
Yankee soldier
He wanna shoot some skag
He met it in cambodia
But now he cant afford a bag
Yankee dollar talk
To the dictators of the world
In fact its giving orders
An they cant afford to miss a word
Im so bored with the u...s...a...
But what can I do?
Yankee detectives
Are always on the tv
cos killers in america
Work seven days a week
Never mind the stars and stripes
Lets print the watergate tapes
Ill salute the new wave
And I hope nobody escapes
Im so bored with the u...s...a...
But what can I do?
Move up starsky
For the c.i.a.
Suck on kojak
For the usa
Lake Victoria from the lab
The first to have the courage to advance purely ethical arguments against war and to stress the necessity for reason governed by an ethical will was the great humanist Erasmus of Rotterdam in his Querela pacis (The Complaint of Peace) which appeared in 1517. In this book he depicts Peace on stage seeking an audience.
ReplyDeleteErasmus found few adherents to his way of thinking. To expect the affirmation of an ethical necessity to point the way to peace was considered a utopian ideal. Kant shared this opinion. In his essay on "Perpetual Peace", which appeared in 1795, and in other publications in which he touches upon the problem of peace, he states his belief that peace will come only with the increasing authority of an international code of law, in accordance with which an international court of arbitration would settle disputes between nations. This authority, he maintains, should be based entirely on the increasing respect which in time, and for purely practical motives, men will hold for the law as such. Kant is unremitting in his insistence that the idea of a league of nations cannot be hoped for as the outcome of ethical argument, but only as the result of the perfecting of law.
...Today we can judge the efficacy of international institutions by the experience we have had with the League of Nations in Geneva and with the United Nations.
- Nobel lecture, 1954