Byzantine Europe vs Roman America --the latest episode....
wsws.org
Excerpt:
First there were the US-based human rights organizations, including Amnesty International USA, which claimed that the removal of the US was “part of an effort by nations that routinely violate human rights to escape scrutiny.” A representative of Human Rights Watch said the UN commission was becoming “a rogues' gallery of human rights abusers.” But she added: “It wasn't just enemies. It was friends as well who voted the US out of the commission.”
[US] Media commentators were in full cry against the UN, with some denouncing China and Cuba in strident anticommunist terms, and others focusing on the European countries.
New York Times columnist William Safire attacked the UN commission for blocking a resolution criticizing China and supporting one criticizing Israel, saying they were “a pack of hypocrites in approving a dictatorship's offense and condemning a democracy's self-defense.” He called for the CIA to find out which countries had signed pledges to support the US and then voted differently, so that the US could punish them. So much for the secret ballot!
The Wall Street Journal called for abolishing secret ballots outright, noting that the purpose of the secret ballot was to protect voters from “tyranny,” and this did not apply to countries voting at the UN. The newspaper was apparently unwilling to admit that any nation could want the protection of secrecy from retaliation by the world's only superpower, the United States of America.
Perhaps the most remarkably strident tone was set by the Washington Post, the major daily in the US capital, which targeted the European countries for its vitriol. Columnist Al Kamen wrote: “France, home to the glorious Vichy Regime, got 52 votes; Austria, grand masters of historical denial and boasting a foreign minister from neo-fascist Joerg Haider's party, got 41; Sweden, which conveniently sat out the Big One [ie the Security Council], got 32, beating the United States by three votes in the secret balloting.”
Another Post columnist, conservative Michael Kelly, declared that the US was being punished “because Europe's ruling classes will never forgive us for constructing a world in which they no longer rule over anything except artisan cheeses.... It is gratifying for our European friends to enjoy the full and unbridled expression of their contempt, and it is gratifying for us to know that our European friends are, as they have been for—why, it's going on to a full century, isn't it?—still clueless.”
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