05.14a Piercing the Veil of Stated Purpose To Find Meaning in Power Allocation; The U.S. Supreme Court; The UN Human Rights Commission; Does Kerry Favor the Destruction of Israel?; The UN-Iraq Food For Oil Scam. A procedure I have found very useful when somebody proposes a rule for some good purpose is to ask who gets to enforce the rule and what would happen if they chose to follow their own purposes instead of the stated purpose. Thus, liberal professors say it is good to give immense power to the U.S. Supreme Court, and never to impeach any Justice for making a wrong decision, so that they will make deicsions independent of politics. Piercing the veil, this means giving absolute power to a majority of five out of nine judges to impose any policies they want; e.g., if they rule that the 1st Amendment means we are all to worship statues of judges, the rule of law requires that we obey, rather than impeach them.

Often, people who fail to pierce the veil are naive rather than evil. It simply does not occur to many liberals that an activist Supreme Court might set up judge statues, or even, as I discuss in my May 15 post, make conservative decisions. I have just been reading William Manchester's biography of Churchill, and see that Neville Chamberlain was like this. He knew his Munich Agreement with Hitler gave Hitler big concessions, in the form of the Sudetenland and all the Czech border defenses, but those were in German-speaking areas of Czechoslovakia anyway, and in return he got a promise that the rest of Czechoslovakia would remain independent. A few months later he found that the true meaning of the agreement was that the German army would not have to knock out any border fortresses if it chose to invade Czechoslovakia.

The idea works with campaign finance laws (what happens if the Clinton campaign violates them? Small fines after they win the election), occupational regulation (supposedly high standards really mean that a board composed of people already in the industry can make it hard for competitors to enter and can make sure their friends aren't punished for misbehavior), and lots of other regulatory bodies.

The United Nations is a source of many examples. The UN- Iraq Oil for Food Scam is one example. It was supposedly a way to feed hungry Iraqi's, but it really said that the adminsitrative executives of the U.N and Saddam Hussein would be given joint control over billions of dollars, with the requirement that they pretend to spend it on food. The U.N. Human Rights Commission is another example. Notoriously, it is made up of the worst human rights violators, since they have much more incentive to run such an organization than other countries. Thus, what Anne Bayefsky reports is predictable:

The annual six-week ritual of the U.N. Human Rights Commission in Geneva, which ended on Friday, makes the point all too clearly.
After more than a month of negotiations, the commission on its final day could no longer avoid the ethnic cleansing in Sudan, which has left 30,000 dead and 900,000 in deplorable conditions. The U.S. proposal to condemn "the grave violations of human rights and international humanitarian law in Darfur," and to call on the government of Sudan "to ensure all attacks against civilians are stopped" was defeated. Instead, the resolution announced: "the Commission expresses its solidarity with the Sudan in overcoming the current situation."

Just a little while ago, Sudan was elected to membership in the Commission, again illustrating that the people with the most interest in controlling the police are the criminals.

What, then, does the U.N. Human Rights Commission do? Go after Israel, of course, like the rest of the United Nations:

Not only were five resolutions adopted condemning Israel, but the commission took three hours out of its schedule to mourn the death of Hamas terrorist leader Sheikh Ahmad Yassin. Yassin personally instigated and authorized suicide bombing and exhorted his followers to "armed struggle" against Israelis and Jews "everywhere."
...
What makes the U.N.'s professed interest in the subject even more unconvincing was the commission's total lack of response to a simultaneous report on recent extrajudicial killings in Brazil. The U.N. Rapporteur on Extrajudicial, Summary or Arbitrary Executions attempted to raise the alarm on more than 3,000 civilians murdered in Brazil at the hands of military and civil police. Details of "poorly disguised extrajudicial executions...[in which] the lethal shots had been fired from behind and at close range" were provided. Two people brave enough to talk to the rapporteur were shot and killed shortly after the U.N. representative left the country. No mention was made by the Human Rights Commission of Brazil.

This is another illustration of the folly of listening to "world opinion": it is created not by actual events, but by press and government manipulation of them, so to get favorable world opinion requires not a change in the criticized policy, but propaganda of our own. (See my May 13 post on misconduct by soldiers in Iraq, Okinawa, and Somalia.) Again, from reading about Hitler: What was the best way for Poland and Czechoslovakia to deal with Nazi criticism of the Polish policy of attacking German customs stations and committing sundry atrocities against Germans? Not by changing the policy, since in fact the policy didn't exist, and Germany would always find something to criticize, making it up if nothing real existed. Rather, by doing one's own marketing.

And now we reach Senator Kerry, and others who favor multilateralism, and, in particular, a strong United Nations. The meaning of a strong United Nations is that the United Nations makes decisions that override the desires of any one country such as the United States. It says that we in our country must subject ourselves to the wishes of a majority of other countries, in exchange for having our own desires imposed on them when we are in the majority. This sounds bad enough by itself, even without thinking about the moral and intellectual superiority of the United States over most of the rest of the world. But let's think about the most obvious implication: if it were up the United Nations, Israel would cease to exist and the Jews there would be dispersed to the rest of the world. To be sure, there has been no formal U.N. resolution yet to that effect, but can anyone doubt that that would be the desire of the majority of members unless the U.S. started doing some heavy-duty bribery? Thus, the clearest thing anyone who favors a strong U.N. is saying is that he favors the destruction of Israel. It may well be that he doesn't like the destruction of Israel in itself, but he believes that he will get something more important in return (I've never figured out what benefit is even claimed, actually-- I'll have to ask someone). Chamberlain did not favor Germany's 1938 annexation of the Sudetenland in itself, but he was willing to sacrifice that in exchange for "peace in our time", as he put it until 1939. [in full at 04.05.14a.htm]

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