Flame on!

Gerald Warner vents his spleen in The Scotsman:

When that question is posed to bien-pensant commentators, their knee-jerk reaction is to babble about the United Nations, international development, the European Union, NGOs and all the usual suspects whose kleptomaniac instincts dwarf their philanthropic grandstanding. Only mal-pensant commentators, such as you are currently reading, are prepared to proclaim that the enduring motor of world diplomacy is realpolitik and that all institutions of a supranational character are either tyrannical or effete.

This reality is gaining currency. The American conservatives - and not just of the ‘neo’ variety - have the United Nations in their sights. It is even rumoured that the G8 nations, when they gather at Gleneagles Hotel this summer, intend to cut the UN down to size, perhaps even to emasculate it completely. That would be a welcome development. The UN is a gross excrescence. The efficiency of its response to the tsunami disaster is a question on which the jury is still out; but no serious observer would dispute that its creaking, top-heavy bureaucracy is a totally unsuitable mechanism for organising emergency relief work.

Yet such is the deference paid by liberals to this totem that, when the United States, Australia, India and Japan decided to coordinate their aid efforts, Clare Short denounced this pragmatic move because it would "undermine" the UN. Behind this mentality lies the progressive lobby’s detestation of nationhood and Orwellian aspiration to world government. Leftists have made a fetish of ‘internationalism’ (a great Soviet mantra in its day); hence their conversion to the European Union, since it became the Western Soviet Empire and heir to Brezhnev’s fallen Byzantium.
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Sometimes the UN seems to take a deliberately perverse stance, as when Iran was appointed to preside over its disarmament committee. Would coalition troops in Iraq have felt more morally justified if the President of Equatorial Guinea had paused in masticating what is said to be his favourite delicacy (executed prisoners’ testicles) to give them the thumbs-up? How much longer is this organised hypocrisy to be tolerated and subsidised?
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Nor can we look to the European Union - the UN’s twin kleptocracy - as the foundation of a New World Order. When Jacques Chirac praised Kofi Annan last week as "a man of integrity", it was like the Artful Dodger acting as a character witness in a pick-pocketing case. The EU is a sclerotic, dirigiste, anti-free market cartel that increasingly threatens to subvert Europe’s ability to catch up with America. The G8 nations, too, are a cartel; but their union is pragmatic, rather than institutionalised, and they represent real power.

That'll get your heart started in the morning.