Professional wrestling is the soap opera farce of sports. From the official bouts to the backroom posturing, all disputes and relationships are staged and meaningless. One can say almost the same for the United Nations, and particularly its recent Millennial Meeting, described ambitiously by one delegate as “the mother of all summits.” The essential difference between professional wrestling and the UN, however, is that the United Nations really hurts people.
This Millennial Meeting, held in New York last week (9/6-9/9), was little different from any other United Nations meeting except, perhaps, in its size and pomposity. All of the UN’s leading thugs attended, including Jiang Zemin and Fidel Castro, and many of the world’s leading villains made declarations of their own moral superiority and sovereignty, by which they meant their inalienable right to subjugate their citizens.
Professional wrestlers make bold statements of their intentions but it is difficult to imagine the wrestler with enough audacity to utter a statement as bold and hollow as the UN’s “Millennium Declaration on Fundamental Values.” The statement concluded with resolutions to raise income, provide safe drinking water, reduce maternal mortality and cure H.I.V./AIDS–all within the next 20 years.
More importantly, the statement began with an outline of six abstract moral values to which all UN members claim to be committed: freedom, equality, solidarity, tolerance, respect for nature, and shared responsibility. Leaving aside the invalid definitions of these values–and the outright immorality of some of them–for America to join countries such as Iran, China and Cuba in a statement proclaiming freedom as a “fundamental value” means an implicit endorsement of those nations’ conception and implementation of freedom, and the implicit view that the value of freedom is merely relative.
When free countries morally endorse dictatorship, and all manner of political systems pledge allegiance to common “values,” the only absolute is that people will be taxed, enslaved and/or killed to achieve those values.
As with professional wrestling, few people–including the member nations–take the UN seriously, and that is the danger. The UN is a stage where government officials play at being statesmen for the benefit of electoral public relations. The UN’s impossible agenda, however, will be fertilized by the UN’s real moral values: duty and sacrifice to the collective. Although everyone knows the UN’s stated goals will never be achieved, the signatory governments will continue to enslave people in their name. It is nothing more than a charade under the pretense at morality.
Professional wrestlers may fly through the air, fling themselves on and off the ropes, and throw each other out of the ring, but it is all staged, and injuries are really accidents. Unfortunately, the United Nations farce causes injury by design.
It is ironic, is it not, that we are warned about the potential dangers of exposing ourselves to the fake violence of professional wrestling, but no one warns us of the real danger from pretended morality among politicians.
