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Comment by GigabyteCoin | Hacker News Reader

Can somebody explain why authoritarian governments are even allowed a vote or membership in the UN?

What does it matter what a few elites at the top want for "their" country, when millions of their citizens usually want the exact opposite?

I doubt that many citizens in the 15 countries that voted against would agree with their leadership on this matter, for example.

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The UN exists as a forum for all governments to come together. It would have a different purpose altogether if there were some democratic bar that would have to be met to join. Also, who would decide what that bar is? There's quite a lot of grey here, and it would be very very easy for certain very powerful countries to set the bar where it was politically convenient for them rather than at some place that actually makes sense. This already happens a bit, hence why the Republic of China (aka Taiwan) is excluded, and it is almost certainly to the detriment of the people of those countries as well as their governments, imo.

It's also not a world government. It's a treaty organization designed to prevent another world war. Member nations can come and organize and say whatever they like. These things have no binding effect.

So in a way, this is akin to a "strongly worded letter"

Please keep in mind that the UN is an arena for international cooperation. A lot of organizations fit under their umbrella, which does everything from coordinating the global mail system (UTU), international telecommunications (ITU), maritime safety (IMO), international civil air travel (ICAO).

Any country can join these charters as long as they follow the rules agreed upon. What good would it do if you couldn't send a letter to someone in a country under dictatorship? Or if we stopped eradicating polio because the remaining countries are deemed unworthy?

The UN is not this singular place, where you can get "a vote". That is true of the general assembly, but they presumably had nothing to do with this report.

You're totally wrong about the second part. India--a democracy--voted the same way as China. People there have very different beliefs than people in the West are used to. E.g. In my home country, the original constitution declared a secular democracy in the 1970s. In the 1990s, Islam was made the state religion, with strong popular support. In that country, if the UN delegation voted in favor of protecting freedom of expression on the Internet, they would do so against the will of the people.

The UN was founded after WW2 to bring the main world powers together to try to foster peace. The main powers included China and Russia so you couldn't have really set the thing up if you had excluded authoritarians.

People have an unalienable natural right to vote with violence and force. If people do not like their government and the government does not provide peaceful ways for the people to get their way then the people can always take power by force.

So if millions of people want the opposite, they would enact it but force of they want it enough.

>If people do not like their government and the government does not provide peaceful ways for the people to get their way then the people can always take power by force.

Alas, that is not true. The government always has a military with weapons far more powerful than the public (and the public in a dictatorship is usually forbidden from owning guns). Furthermore, in a dictatorship there is usually a significant minority that is given money and other privileges to support it. So the government usually can simply crush any rebellion in a very bloody manner.

You'd have to throw out two members of the security council, if your criteria is that you can't be a authoritarian government controlled by the elites.

I'm not sure you could get a majority of US citizens to agree with what their government does in the UN.

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