The United Nations is a grotesque bureaucracy that peddles the propaganda of the world’s worst authoritarians. So naturally, Secretary of State Antony Blinken wants it to judge the United States.
Blinken extended an invitation to the U.N.’s special rapporteur on contemporary racism to visit the U.S. “Responsible nations must not shrink from scrutiny of their human rights record,” Blinken said, handing China and other adversarial countries a prime propaganda opportunity once again.
Responsible nations must not shrink from scrutiny of their human rights record. Rather, they should be transparent with the intent to grow and do better. That is why I’m announcing a formal invitation for @UN Special Rapporteur on contemporary forms of racism to visit the U.S.
— Secretary Antony Blinken (@SecBlinken) July 14, 2021
We have a good idea of what the U.N. will conclude. The special rapporteur on contemporary racism works for the U.N. high commissioner for human rights, Michelle Bachelet. What are Bachelet’s views on human rights? She accused Israel of war crimes for defending itself against Hamas terrorists, but she had no time to attend an event regarding China’s genocide against its Uyghur minority. Her office also previously accused the U.S. of potential human rights abuses when federal law enforcement was trying to prevent rioters from burning down buildings in Portland.
That view is the norm at the U.N. China, Russia, North Korea, Venezuela, Cuba, Iran, and other human rights abusers get a free pass. The U.S., meanwhile, gets lectured about racism. The U.N. is an anti-American, anti-freedom, pro-tyranny body, thanks in part to the fact that it gives authoritarian nations the same amount of say as liberal democracies.
But Blinken, like President Joe Biden, buys into the liberal view that international organizations are good just by virtue of existing. Blinken, like Biden, pretends that vague notions of global cooperation are more important than the reality — the cesspool of authoritarianism and cooperation that truly is the U.N.
Whether Blinken actually believes this or is simply pandering to left-wing activists (as the Biden administration regularly does), he is feeding into the false idea that the U.S. has a uniquely awful racism problem in a global context. Worse, he is humoring the U.N. as some neutral arbiter when it has shown that it harbors the biases of its worst members.
By asking the U.N. to investigate the U.S., Blinken is, at best, equating America with the world’s worst human rights abusers. When the U.N. comes back with its inevitable condemnation, it will have determined that the U.S. is worse than countries like China, which it goes out of its way not to criticize. And Blinken will have given that condemnation legitimacy by pretending that the U.N. is actually qualified to issue that judgment.
This is not “responsible,” as Blinken asserts. It’s performative, progressive anti-Americanism, with a predictable outcome. It does not make the global fight for human rights easier to submit to bad-faith investigations from corrupt organizations such as the U.N. Its only purpose is to embarrass the U.S., to appease the left-wing crazies to whom this administration answers.
