We proudly proclaim that we've got sanctions on Sudan, but we exempt gum arabic. No one should do business with thugs. But if they control a product we can't seem to live without, the market will find a way to get it to our shelves and newsstands. A very precise outrage abounds in official Washington. Angry politicians stalk the halls of Congress, muttering darkly about the United Nations.
Powerful lights can hurt or help.
They are examples of what the Greek philosopher Plato would have called a pharmakon , something that can equally be a poison or a cure, depending on how it's used and by whom. But when it's used to illuminate a perimeter within which the desperate and the weak are held hostage to the powerful, as in every concentration camp and gulag ever constructed, it's a harm and a poison. In truth, our removal won't count against human rights here because, as is historically clear, the UN's influence in the US is so insignificant as to be indistinguishable from, say, none at all . The US has as little concern for the UN as it has for human rights in Sudan. Whether or not its citizens realize it, the US is, among the world's industrialized democracies, the place where the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is least well-known or practiced or enshrined in law.