Fellow blogger Michael Brandon McClellan, a SoCal attorney and writer, had another piece in The Weekly Standard recently, and it's well worth reading: "Lincoln, Calhoun And The U.N.'s Dilemma: Why The Americans Reflexively Reject The Values Of The United Nations." He writes:

Prior to the American Civil War, John Calhoun and Abraham Lincoln articulated two very different ideas of equality. Each idea was powerful, and if followed, would lead to radically different outcomes. Calhoun's organizing principle can be boiled down to two words: state sovereignty. He believed in the equality of sovereign political states. In contrast, Lincoln's organizing principle of equality was the idea of individual natural rights. While Lincoln's idea of individual rights triumphed in the United States with the passage of the 13th, 14th, and 15th Constitutional Amendments and the success of the civil rights movement a century later, the Calhoun/Lincoln debate is, in a sense, still blazing in the arena of international law and in the dilemma of the United Nations.....

Perhaps because Lincoln's ideas have prevailed so emphatically in the United States, it is difficult for Americans to embrace a U.N. system that is moored so securely to the "entity equality" logic of John Calhoun. Just as the moral bankruptcy of Calhoun's political philosophy is so apparent when placed in the natural rights framework of Lincoln, so too is the U.N. framework undermined when viewed in the context of individual human freedom.

The U.N. framework is also undermined by the plain fact of a unipolar power (the U.S.) and the buffoonish anti-U.S. hyperbole at a U.N. world hunger forum Monday in Rome from Zimbabwe's leader Robert Mugabe and Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez. They drew applause with these remarks, which capture well the Calhoun ethos of insular moral relativity:

The leaders of Zimbabwe and Venezuela teamed up at a U.N. hunger forum Monday to blame the United States and other wealthy nations for famine, war and pollution, with the African leader calling President Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair "unholy men." Zimbabwe President Robert Mugabe described Blair and Bush as "two unholy men of our millennium," comparing their alliance in the Iraq war to that of Adolf Hitler and Italian dictator Benito Mussolini in World War II.

"Countries such as the U.S. and Britain have taken it upon themselves to decide for us in the developing world, even to interfere in our domestic affairs and to bring about what they call regime change," Mugabe said. Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, a fierce critic of U.S. foreign policy, accused "the North American empire" of threatening "all life on the planet."

Read the whole thing in The Weekly Standard, by McClellan and make sure you bookmark his excellent blog, Port McClellan. Some reactions to the piece there, too.

TECHNORATI TAGS: UNITED NATIONS

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Posted by Matt Rosenberg at October 20, 2005 10:51 PM