Mare's nest in Durban
William F. Buckley, Jr.
townhall.com
The tangle in Durban, South Africa,
reflects the centripetalization of
problems and sorrows and
dilemmas in faraway places when the
United Nations comes to town.
The problem of U.S. involvement:
In 1973, I was a delegate to the United
Nations and wrote a book about my
experiences there, remarking that the
General Assembly had developed into the
most concentrated font of anti-Semitism in
the world.
In 1975, the U.S. ambassador to the U.N.
defied the vote equating Zionism with
racism by large histrionic gestures, but the
vote carried and wasn't diluted until years
later; now it's up for reissuance.
In 1977, philosopher/strategist James
Burnham, writing in National Review,
proposed that President Carter instruct his
delegate to the United Nations to suspend
voting on any motion by the General
Assembly. The American representative,
Burnham counseled, should continue to
argue in the Assembly, to cajole, to wage
diplomacy, to exhort. Just don't vote.
Why? Because if you do vote, you become
a constituent part of the plebiscitary
mechanism. If the vote, Zionism equals
racism, is passed 99-to-1, the lone
dissenter has vested a greater authority in
the vote than if it passed 99-to-0, the
dissenter declining to participate in the
vote.
The administration's decision not to send
Secretary of State Colin Powell to Durban
was an attempt precisely to diminish the parliamentary
leverage of the impending negative vote. The ensuing
decision, to withdraw even our second-level representatives,
reaffirmed that withdrawal from the scene, but only after
clumsy footwork.
The Israelis may not be vulnerable to the charge of racism,
but are certainly vulnerable to the charge of apartheid. The
aggressive maintenance of their settlements in the West
Bank, which are the cause of suppurating collisions with the
Palestinian world, such as it is, day after day, cannot be
defended. They are arrant ventures in a kind of Israeli
irredentism that fractures arrangements and
accommodations, after wars and diplomacy dating back to
1948. The United States is better off not voting on the
apartheid issue, reserving its strength and prestige for
renewed efforts aimed at settlement.
The introduction into the Durban scene of demands by
blacks, including American blacks, for reparations heightens
the noncredibility of a conference ostensibly designed to
mitigate racial problems:
In an ideal world, differences in race or ethnic background
would nowhere be remarked. Such differences are less now
than when the United Nations was founded, but progress is
slowed when surrealistic claims are asserted. The idea that
the United States, 2001, should affirm its attachment to racial
equality by "compensating" blacks for slavery that ended 150
years ago is will-o'-the-wisp stuff: ideological candy, it could
be dismissed as, but this candy is spiked.
Any American who has one toe in the door of reality knows
that the $10 trillion (that is one figure that has been
suggested as appropriate) is not going to be appropriated by
Congress to make up for the sins of "Uncle Tom's Cabin."
Ten trillion is a nice round figure, equal, incidentally, to the
value of everything produced in America in one year. The
point here is less that reparations, so called, are not going to
be made, as that to admit oratory calling for such reparations
has the effect of consigning the work of the United Nations at
its Durban meeting into utter irrelevance.
Now there is a sense in which this suits the purposes of an
administration that signified its attitude toward what
impended at Durban by announcing that Colin Powell would
not go there. If this was to be a conference of nations
committed to declaring that there was no difference between
Zionism and racism, let their irresponsibility be dramatized
even further by providing hospitality to people declaring that
the United States has to compensate for
great-great-grandparents who bought slaves, leaving moot
who is supposed to compensate for the sins of those who
sold the slaves.
The Cold War is over, and for that reason the United Nations
poses less of a threat than it once did. But we are a member
of a Security Council in which the People's Republic of China
exercises veto power over major enterprises. The fiasco in
Durban reminds us, or should remind us, that the
administration should give something more than merely ad
hoc thought to the matter of our dealings with the United
Nations. A major contribution to this would be to adopt the
Burnham reform: I.e, we will do everything to help the U.N.,
participating fully in its parliamentary life, but will decline to
cast votes. Or be bound by them. |
