Sunday, September 17, 2006

Cuba, Venezuela call for democratization of the UN

Tell me, why am I laughing so hard that I'm in danger of falling out of my chair right about now?

There's all kinds of hilariousness going on right now at the summit of the so-called Non-Aligned Movement in Havana this week. First, as linked above, the world's dictatorships are calling to make the United Nations more democratic. As long as they don't have to do the same for their people, why not, right? One nation, one vote, no matter how authoritarian that nation may be internally, sure sounds great to them, I have to imagine.

In other news at the summit, North Korea blamed the United States for the lack of world peace yesterday, a truly hilarious proposition coming from a nation that refuses to formally end it's state of war with the United States even though the armistice that ended the fighting of the Korean War was signed in 1953. It has been over 50 years and there's still no peace treaty. Talk about your barriers to world peace.

But the best of all, I think, is when the summit declared that democracy is a universal value, but also stated that "no one country or region should define it for the world." So yeah, a republican form of government is great, as long as we get to employ Newspeak to redefine the term.

Here's a crazy idea: Let's democratize the UN. We can go about it like this: When a nation is democratized, they get to sit on UN councils and have a vote in the General Assembly. Until then, they get to have all the voting and participation rights their citizens have. How's that for a proposal, Fidel?