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UNITED NATIONS - / www.MaximsNews.com@
U.N./
- 19
June 2007 –
In general, the big powers want a safe,
anything-but-boat-rocking bureaucrat to head the United Nations. Their perfect
choice would be Pontius Pilate, but he did not apply, so they got Kurt Waldheim,
one of the greyest eminences ever to grace the world stage.
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It would be a
stretch to believe that the various permanent members had not had their
spooks do due diligence on him and discovered his war record with the Nazi
military. The thought that they all had this eminently suitable blackmail
material to hang over his head could have been very reassuring for them.
The process of
appointing Secretaries General is so mysterious that one cannot resist
speculation.
For example,
almost certainly the first one elected, Trygve Lie, was acceptable to the
Soviets because in 1936, as Norwegian justice minister, he had given the
exiled Leon Trotsky the bum's rush from Oslo and so sent him to Mexico for
his date with destiny and the sharp end of an ice pick. The honeymoon did
not last.
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Joseph McCarthy
denounced Lie for hiring "disloyal" Americans while the Soviets
refused to recognise him because he supported the Korean war.
In contrast, the dapper
Waldheim managed two terms, from 1972 to 1982, without ruffling anyone's
feathers, and would have made a third were it not that the Chinese were in a
third-world-ist phase and told him - nothing personal - that they wanted a
diplomat from the developing world to get the job.
The UN veteran Sir
Brian Urquhart, who worked with him, confirms that no boats were rocked during
his tenure. He was a hard-working bureaucrat who kept the ship afloat and
avoided waves.
In fact, Sir Brian
recalls a classic bureaucratic moment after an interminable meeting on whether
to issue a statement about the American bombing of North Vietnam. Waldheim,
challenged to make a decision, declared: "There will be no decision. That
is the decision."
He scarcely deserves
the infamy that has been heaped on him since. Even in his criminality he was not
outstanding. Firstly, he was economical with the truth. His first autobiography
was going to skip blithely from 1938, when the Nazis took over, to 1945, when he
joined the foreign service.
In anticipation of
Basil Fawlty, he
did not mention the conflict at all, telling Sir Brian that "no one is
interested in the War".
Of course everyone was,
and he continued skimping veracity by only describing his war career up the
gates of Moscow.
Afterwards, during the
election campaign for the Austrian presidency, his service in the Balkans - for
which his commanding officer was later executed - was revealed, not to mention
his membership in the Brownshirts.
But it probably helped
him win the presidency, since Waldheim was the Ur-Austrian. Despite some very
honourable armed resistance against Engelbert Dollfuss and the homegrown Nazis
in 1934, most Austrians were not happy with the Versailles-enforced
independence. Even the Nazis' enemies supported
Anschluss in 1938, and while Hitler, the local boy made good, was winning
there was no great independence movement.
In 1945, it suited the
Allies to go along with the newly assumed Austrian posture of aggrieved
innocence. They were the first victims of German expansionism and occupation,
and so they never really bothered with de-Nazification, war crime trials and all
the German sort of stuff. No wonder Austrians supported Waldheim in an act of
collectively self-absolving amnesia.
As a gesture, a lot of
fair weather friends took him off their invite lists - except the Vatican, which
made him a papal knight. Presumably he had confessed and been absolved.
But you can see why no
one really pursued the former Nazi officer on a global scale. A commission of
inquiry decided that he had not committed war crimes, but had only witnessed
them and done nothing to prevent them.
No one was going to get
too excited about that, since almost every statesman in the world shares some
similar guilt. Just look at Iraq, Darfur, Gaza, Lebanon, Rwanda, and many more
instances of ineffectual clucking while pretending not to see.
There are a lot of
politicians who firmly decide not to make decisions in the face of barbarity,
and almost as many deciding to commit crimes, so it seems unfair to single out
Waldheim just because he was on the losing side.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Labels: United
Nations, U.N., Kurtwaldheim
leontrotsky
trygvelie
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Dhanapala (Sri Lanka), Amb. Pierre Schori
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