This year’s United Nations General Assembly is over.
I once worked at the UN, and while my experience there was memorable, it did give me a jaundiced look at the workings of Earth’s most prestigious international gathering.
It wasn’t pretty.
Oh sure, there were some interesting moments, such as the sudden breakdown of the escalator leading up to the Assembly Hall as First Lady Melania and her husband, Donald, stepped on it. No doubt there were some very nervous Secret Service agents nearby when that happened. But Melania and then the president uneventfully began walking up the powerless escalator.
President Trump gave an off-the-cuff spanking to the UN itself, asking whether it continued to have a real function in today’s world.
Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech was passionate and powerful but delivered to a nearly empty assembly hall, as at least half the delegates staged a sustained walkout as he approached the podium.
The Iranian “president” delivered a recycled tirade against the U.S., Israel, and the West from last year and the many years before.
And “coverage” of the annual September free-for-all was muted to non-existent in most of the world’s press.
Which is and has been par for the course for many years.
I worked at the UN as a “conference typist” some years ago and my job was to listen and record (on a typewriter, wearing over-sized headphones) the simultaneous translation of speeches given by those whose palaver was delivered in a language other than one of the five official languages of English, Arabic, Chinese, French, or Russian. The speeches in Swahili, Portuguese, or any number of other tongues were almost always just boilerplate nonsense about why their country needed and deserved more from the UN.
The main function of the members of the UN, it seemed to this young intern, was to beseech the organization to allow for more of their countrymen to enter the U.S. They wanted larger representation, bigger offices, more subsidized delegations, etcetera. Private conversations among delegates usually revolved around complaints that their offices were too small, they needed more people, and why the French or British, or Russian, delegations should take up so much more space than theirs did.
Wait. What? World Peace? Yeah, right.
It was a nice place to work though.
A Serious Talk by a Serious Comedian
But sometimes great speeches are given. Not often, but sometimes.
This year, it was Javier Milei, a former comedian and recipient of two advanced degrees in economics, and now the elected President of Argentina – in the middle of a crusade to re-establish a stable currency and a prosperous citizenry – who receives my “Most Valuable Speech” award.
President Milei began by warning those present that his country, along with so many others, “has been infected with socialism for far too long.”
He claimed it is his and their “historical responsibility to dismantle the ideological edifice of sickly Wokeism… and once again embrace the ideas of liberty.”
Milei places the blame for his country’s often out-of-control inflation not only on socialism, but on the supposed “help” offered and received by various international agencies, whose demands, rather than led to prosperity but to widespread poverty.
He proclaimed that Socialism and what he calls “Wokeism” is the great epidemic of our time that must be cured. “This is the cancer we need to get rid of. This ideology has colonized the world’s most important institutions – from the political parties and governments of leading Western nations to global governance organizations, even NGOs, universities, and media outlets.”
Milei reflects that it was Classic Liberalism that inaugurated a new era in human existence when it placed individual liberty above the whims of tyrants. By doing so, he says, “the West was able to unleash man’s creative capacity, initiating an unprecedented process of wealth generation.”
The Unwarranted Accumulation of Power
That generated wealth, however, drew the attraction of “a new political class, driven by collectivist ideologies and taking advantage of times of crisis, [who] saw the perfect opportunity to accumulate power.” Their plan was to take the wealth created by capitalism until then and redistribute it through some scheme of centralized planning, “setting in motion a process whose disastrous consequences we are suffering today.”
Milei suggests that this new political class had used the coercive power of the state to redistribute the wealth created by capitalism.
“Their justification was the sinister, unjust, and abhorrent idea of social justice, complemented by theoretical Marxist frameworks. And at the core of this new value system lies the fundamental premise that equality before the law is not enough, as hidden systemic injustices exist which must be rectified, an idea that serves as a gold mine for bureaucrats who aspire to omnipotence.”
He noted that all of this was incubated and increasingly developed over the past decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and observed that “free nations began to self-destruct when they no longer had adversaries to defeat.
“Peace made us weak.
“We were defeated by our own complacency.”
Then, Milei took on the UN and its members:
“Unfortunately, these are the beliefs that institutions – like this one – have been promoting for forty years, and no one here can feign innocence. For decades, there has been a worship of a sinister and murderous ideology, as if it were a golden calf, moving heaven and Earth to impose it on humanity.
“And this organization, along with the most influential supranational bodies, have been the ideologues of this barbarity. Multilateral lending organizations have been instruments of extortion, while many national governments, and especially the European Union, have acted as their armed wing.”
Ouch!
Making the West Great Again
Wondering aloud what has been created, he answers his own question: “A society that replaced the free exchange of goods and services with the arbitrary distribution of wealth at gunpoint. One that replaced free communities with forced collectivization. One that replaced the creative chaos of the market with the sterile and sclerotic order of socialism. A society filled with resentment where there are only two types of people – those who are net taxpayers, on the one hand, and those who are beneficiaries of the state on the other.”
Milei concluded first by describing Wokeism as “nothing more than a systematic plan by the party of the state to justify state intervention and increase public spending. This means that our first and foremost mission – if we truly want to reclaim the West’s progress and build a new golden era – has to be the drastic reduction in the size of the state.
“Not only in each of our countries, but also the drastic reduction of all supranational organizations, as this is the only way to root out this perverse system, draining its resources in order to give back to taxpayers what belongs to them.”
“That’s what we’re doing in Argentina. That is what I trust President Trump will do in the new America. And this is what we invite all the great nations of the free world to do if they wish to halt in time what is clearly a path leading to catastrophe.
“So ultimately, what I’m proposing is that we make the West great again today. Today, just as 215 years ago, Argentina has broken its chains and invites us – as our national anthem declares – invites us, all mortals of the world to hear the sacred cry: ‘Freedom, freedom, freedom! May the forces of heaven be with us.’
“Thank you all very much and long live freedom, damn it.”
Paid Advertisement:
Please support Bob Smith’s campaign by Clicking here!
Community Calendar:
Seize Your Chance to Make a Difference!
We need 100 volunteers to reach 300 homes in Santa Barbara County by Nov 6th to distribute literature for the Special Election. Urge Registered Republicans to vote NO on Prop 50 to stop gerrymandering and protect fair elections!
Call Barbara Anne at 805-895-5545 to RSVP and learn more.
Training: Sat, Oct 4th, 9:00-10:30 AM
55S La Cumbre St, Suite 4
Your moment to act is NOW!
Got a Santa Barbara event for our community calendar? Fenkner@sbcurrent.com
Anyone in NYC voting for Mamdani should be transported back to John Lindsay's NYC where the garbage wasn't picked up, you'd get mugged with monotonous regularity and you didn't go to the cops for help because they were as bad as the criminals. Those movies that depicted NYC at that time as a Method Actor¡s dream of a nightmare - “Serpico,” “Where's Poppa?” And “Taxi Driver” were not fictional. They were portraying the city as it went down the hellhole of socialist “good” intentions. Don't cry for Argentina. Cry for New York City. And California if the Democrats get their way.
The bible says in many places and in many ways that if anyone is not willing to work, let him not eat. More generally the idea that to consume something it is necessary to produce something is lost in socialism. Rooted in academia, ideas that mere existence confers a right to others wealth is the surest path to universal poverty. Until the government stops subsidizing poverty through redistribution of wealth, socialism will continue to draw political support in America and world wide.