Gutteres trip.... UN ‘unfit’ for purpose

Dear Editor, UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres’ pointless pleading with an avowed despotic aggressor brings only shame to the emasculated institution he purports to represent. Whatever about diplomatically engaging Vladimir Putin during the blaringly blatant build-up to war with the euphemistically called Russian ‘military manoeuvres’,

doing so now is patently tantamount to vacuous obsequiousness which the Russian premier will undoubtedly savour and arrogantly dismiss.

With the war in Eastern Ukraine smouldering viciously along since 2014, having been fanned and fed by Putin’s propaganda machine, surely there was ample time for Gutteres to engage meaningfully, long before now. What practical use is a UN quango which can have one of its permanent Security Council members ruthlessly sally forth to war, power-grabbing states and statelets at will every few years?

Of course so many of the UN’s ‘ esteemed’ members (in Europe especially!) have been shipping military armaments to Russia for years, in conjunction with paying it handsomely for oil and gas fuel supplies, thus arming and funding their warring adventurism. Filthy lucre and power rule o.k., it seems. Only now, when it is all too late, and poor Ukraine has to bravely step up to defend itself against ruthless aggression, is there a belated twinge of empathic solidarity forthcoming, which may have more to do with eventual self-preservation rather than unadulterated sympathy for the victimised state.

One can only, and forlornly, question what is the UN there for at all, if it can be so easily given the run-around by the ‘big-boys’ who sit perennially and permanently on its ‘governing’ board. Recalling the manipulated corruptive fiasco of its acquiescing part in the erstwhile invasion of Iraq, which was also perpetrated by sitting permanent Security Council members (i.e. the US and UK), one has to lament and despair of its efficacy and influence.

Sadly, the fallacy of its fallow utterances leave the UN damaged way below the plimsoll line of respect and honour, with moral indignation worth nothing in the absence of ethical enforcement. Finger-wagging and paltry appeasement pleas don’t cut the mustard, and surely by now the UN is a busted flush.

With calamitous climate challenges, multifarious wars of inhumanity and grotesque inequity entrenchment all currently and urgently festering apace, what hope global security, collective sanity and basic human survival?

Is hope still a viable proposition at all during this corrupt era of gross hypocritical tolerance of greed, abuse of power and dire ‘democratic pretence’?

Hope seems more and more a mere withered, busted flush.

Yours etc., Jim Cosgrove, Chapel Street,

Lismore, Co. Waterford.