By Jim Whitt Contributing Editor
The League of Nations was created in 1920 at the Paris Peace Conference that ended World War I. It was formed to maintain world peace, but obviously that didn’t work out. After World War II, the United Nations (UN) was formed to achieve what the League of Nations failed to do with the stated objectives of maintaining international peace and security, protecting human rights, delivering humanitarian aid, promoting sustainable development and upholding international law.
With a membership of 51 nations, the UN Charter was ratified in 1945. It created a Security Council with five permanent members — the United States, the United Kingdom, France, the Soviet Union and China. The Republic of China (Taiwan) was eventually replaced on the Security Council by The Peoples Republic of China, and when the USSR collapsed, it was replaced by Russia. So, what’s wrong with this picture? There are two communist countries on the council that are more interested in world domination than world peace.
How should the UN be graded in the 78 years since its creation? They have failed miserably by every measure of their original objectives. What they have accomplished is creating a bloated international bureaucracy seeking justification for its existence. The organization that was supposed to achieve world peace has assumed the role of world dictator. They want to control every aspect of the lives of the world’s population.
Case in point is the annual UN Climate Change Conferences, which are officially named Conference of the Parties (COP) to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). You can determine how dysfunctional an organization is by the number of acronyms they use. According to the UN Climate Change website, “The COP is where the world comes together to agree on ways to address the climate crisis, such as limiting global temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius, helping vulnerable communities adapt to the effects of climate change and achieving net-zero emissions by 2050. Business leaders, young people, climate scientists, Indigenous Peoples, journalists, and various other experts and stakeholders are also among the participants.”
Those “experts” include people like Al Gore, John Kerry, Bill Gates and King Charles, each of whom flew on private jets to Dubai for COP28 (the 28th meeting of these elitists) and are whisked to the conference’s many events in limousines powered by the very fossil fuels they claim are destroying the world.
But COP28 introduced an even more laughable level of hypocrisy. Prior to the conference, the UN called on Western countries to reduce their meat consumption. Then they served the 84,000 registered participants menus that included juicy beef, slabs of succulent meat, smoked Wagyu burgers, Philly cheesesteaks, and African street BBQ. I guess since Dubai isn’t a Western country, they can consume all the meat we aren’t supposed to eat.
This is a 21st century variation of Hans Christian Anderson’s The Emperor’s New Clothes. In this version, the emperors (Al Gore, et. Al.) suffer from collective cognitive dissonance – a mental conflict that occurs when your actions don’t line up with your professed beliefs. The emperors are convinced we are too stupid to see they are spoiled elitists who are unwilling to do what they demand of us. They don’t realize we are laughing at them while they pompously parade around the world in their glorious, naked narcissism. Meanwhile, we peasants continue to consume fossil fuels and meat, which their governments tax to fund their global warming fairy tale.
The good news is the UN’s directive to curb our carnivore cravings is falling on deaf ears. Technavio, a global market research firm, reports that Wagyu beef, which was one of the featured items on COP28 menus, is growing. Technavio projects Wagyu’s compound annual growth rate will be around 7.04 percent, bringing in more than $3.59 billion in value from 2022 to 2027.
The UN gave the meat industry an inadvertent endorsement by serving their products so generously to the 84,000 COP28 attendees.
“I no longer listen to what people say,” Winston Churchill said. “I just watch what they do.” The UN can lecture us about the evils of eating meat, but at COP28, the emperors revealed what they really believe – Beef, It’s What’s for Dinner!