POWERLINE 3/27/2026
The incredible shrinking United Nations was once considered an important player in international relations. It peaked, I suppose, during the Korean War, but continued to be treated as a significant institution for quite a few years thereafter. No longer. War has been raging in Ukraine for four years, and Iran has been under bombardment for nearly a month. At no time has anyone expected the U.N. to be relevant to either of these conflicts.
But the U.N. still exists and sucks up a considerable amount of money, so what is it doing? The Telegraph headlines: “UK should pay slavery reparations, says UN.”
The United Nations has voted to insist that Britain and other former colonial powers should pay reparations for slavery.
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The non-binding resolution passed by 124 to three, with the UK among 52 abstentions.
So the British didn’t even have the courage to vote in their own self-interest, against the most grotesquely unfair money grab imaginable. Britain did, indeed, play an important role with regard to African slavery: it stamped it out. It was in Great Britain that the abolitionist movement was born, and it was the British Navy that suppressed the world-wide slave trade, to the great consternation of Africans. In the late 19th Century, the British Foreign Office issued a warning to its citizens not to travel in Africa. Englishmen in Africa were being murdered by tribesmen who were enraged that the British were ending their trade in slaves.
Africans exported most of their slaves not across the Atlantic, but East to the Islamic world. For a millennium or more, Muslim countries were always the largest consumers of slaves. So where do they figure in the U.N. resolution?
African sources, speaking to The Telegraph, said the transatlantic trade was considered more grave than the 1,300-year-long Arab trade in African slaves because of its “scale, duration, and enduring impacts”.
More:
https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2026/03/civilizational-suicide.php
