Why Is North Korea Even in the United Nations?

Claudia Rosett asks some very relevant questions about North Koreans, who are very likely regime intelligence assets, being given the U.N. equivalent of civil service examinations.  Successful completion of those examination would bring them into the General Secretariat. 

I wonder what unsuccessful completion of those examinations would bring.  But I digress.

I suppose that spying on the U.N. would not make North Korea unique, but  giving the world’s most  tyrannical  and belligerent nation  a key to  the Secretariat … now that  would be unique.

As threats from North Korea go, potential infestation of the U.N. Secretariat may seem the least of our problems. More urgent is Kim’s trafficking and testing of missiles, his production of nuclear bombs, and the horrible reality that with the full knowledge of the world, his government, which let millions of its people starve to death in the last 15 years, also runs prison camps which for brutality rival Stalin’s gulag. The United States and some allies have also been trying to contend with evidence against Kim’s government that includes counterfeiting of U.S. currency, state peddling of narcotics, profiteering from forced labor, and a program in which Japanese citizens were kidnapped in the 1970s and 1980s. If any regime in the world qualifies as “rogue,” not to mention “monstrous,” this is it.

When I speak of the corruption of the U.N.’s standards, I often ask, “What unites these nations.”  Originally, it was a set of standards,  though they  look like a quaint anachronism today.  You would think that if those standards mean anything, they would mean that you can’t commit racial infanticide, run  gas chambers, keep a quarter of a million people in concentration camps, and still be a member in good standing.  At some point, either your standards are either meaningful or meaningless.  If everyone can be a member, it’s probably not something you want to join.

Separately,  Ms. Rosett  writes about someone I’ve discussed here frequently, the U.N. svengali Maurice Strong, and informs of Strong’s efforts to funnel more cash into North Korea through his U.N. “University of Peace” … home of Peaceology!   There are too many new facts and hypocrisies to summarize here; you’ll just have to read the whole thing.