Pope Francis calls for reforms to the United Nations in new book | Hacker News Reader

Pope Francis calls for reforms to the United Nations in new book

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14 pointshhs33 comments

Pope Francis would do well to focus away from the speck in the UNs eye and on the beam in his own.

The Roman Catholic Church is certainly and absolutely not in a position to lecture on good organisational practice.

The biggest reform is to dissolve the security council and make it truly democratic.

UN isn't like a court of justice, or parliament. It's more like a council of thieves. It's the only premise on which you can have US, France, Russia and North Korea at one table together.

So the the "chief thieves" run the show, not because it's fair but because they run the show, and other thieves play as these allow them.

The veto is just a formalization of the fact that these countries will happily stop your plans by force, even if they are legitimate plans.

I agree with this cynical take, but the OP is still correct.

The same process can be seen at work in the history of democracy and human rights within countries that transitioned from royalty and aristocracy.

Huh, not trying to be cynical, realist perhaps, but point taken.

I think a UN that takes the "chief thief" rights away from UN council members would be even more dysfunctional than status quo. The moment US, Russia or China are supposedly bound by a democratic vote of other countries, they are out.

The price for representation is impotence.

Then we need lobbysts and revolving doors with the government.

But it’s not democratic, it is for show. Just an abstraction that organizes diplomacy, a method for legitimizing and coming to agreements or having conflicts with less chaos.

Let us not give up our sovereignty to a small group of people very far from being accountable to the people they represent, let us not chase world government.

If you dissolve the security council., the important members just walk away.

The UN is a game played by major powers in order to achieve increased stability. It is not a world government and won’t be blind to the actual source and distribution of world power.

They have nuclear weapons. Nuclear weapons doesn't make their opinion right, but it's difficult to argue with them. Even if you are right, they have nuclear weapons.

I think we should add India and Pakistan instead.

I agree about India. Pakistan doesn’t make sense besides being a nuclear power.

50 years of begging to be let in only to have your worst enemy tailgate behind you. Poetically cruel

Germany and Japan as well. Notice how the UNSC was just the winners of WW-2.

How many divisions has the Pope? etc etc

A quote attributed to Stalin whose empire Pope John Paul II helped topple forty years later by inspiring the formation of the Polish Solidarity Movement. So, how many divisions has the Pope? How many ya got?

If we're going by chaos theory handwaving, i.e. IIRC, CIA funnelled cash via Vatican 40 years after Stalin's death, then still around zero, but on par with the power of a flapping butterfly. Vatican as an institution has instrumental power sure, but let's not confuse them for the actual great powers behind great power competition.

> let's not confuse them for the actual great powers behind great power competition.

Yes, let’s not. The Papacy is a 2000 year old institution and the current great powers are only a small fraction as mature. I’m betting the Papacy will outlive them all.

Long history with great ups and downs, institutions enduring doesn't equate to current relevance / power. Papal state is gone, so is the papal military and navy... back when Papacy had ACTUAL divisions. Modern papacy can't even substantively influence Italian politics anymore. I'm sure the papacy will be around for a long time, but I doubt they'll ever reach peak influence again.

Out living doesn't imply power though, it only means that it can survive.

How much real power do empires possess if they all die young? I’d argue the institutions that stick around and shape the centuries largely through influence have the real power.

If the Christian Church wants to influence politics, how about they pay taxes first?

Is it really a shock that an institution designed largely by Stalin (although FDR's idea) isn't fit for purpose? Time to hit restart, and perhaps not to include the autocracies and miscreants.

> Is it really a shock that an institution designed largely by Stalin (although FDR's idea) isn't fit for purpose?

It was an evolution of the league of nations actually.

Considering that during the last 77 years none of the 30 biggest economies in the world fought each other (I think there are minor exceptions like Argentina-Britain over Falklands/Malvinas), I think UN isn't that bad.

> Time to hit restart, and perhaps not to include the autocracies and miscreants.

And who gets to decide who those are? Also, what is the purpose of a club that doesn't include all the nations? It's just an alliance.

Russia and China fought - not a full war, but they fought. Iraq-Iran, very very bloody. And the list goes on and on. The cold war was an exceptionally bloody period with casualties not out of line with the WWII period, there were a **ton of proxy wars.

Casualties absolutely were out of line with WWII.

Go find a graph of war deaths divided by world population by year for the last two hundred years and make the comparison yourself.

The biggest loss of life during the Cold war occurred in Vietnam and Korea, a couple of million people dead each. The US wasn't very "proxy" about those wars, just bombed the shit out of both directly, civilians and all. So, how do you define a "miscreant" you would like to exclude? Based on number of people killed, or some other, more "democratic" criteria?

Add extensive air combat between Soviet pilots and American pilots in Vietnam, and Korea I believe.

As I said there are minor exceptions.

Iraq and Iran were not top 30 economies when they fought the war.

No, it was a successor to the League. The League had been an obvious catastrophe; not something you'd want to copy or merely revise.

A very big alliance beats a nothing burger - and remember that the United Nations did exclude Germany and Japan in the beginning, for obvious reasons. It was originally the instantiation of an alliance.

He shall start with his own garden.

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