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Commission for Social Development, 60th Session

25 February 2022
Peter Smith attended the 60th Session of the Commission for Social Development on behalf of CCI. Herewith his summary: This meeting was to discuss how the world is to recover from the COVID-19 pandemic. No-one mentioned that the cost of lock-down may have been greater than the benefit. There were many good references to the family, and the LGBTI agenda was not advanced at all at this meeting. Also, there was no abortion wording. There was the usual feminist perspective in the outcome document, no mention of men at all. Feminism is not Biblical complimentary between men and women. There was the usual grumbling about inequality, which is difficult to remedy. Climate change was mentioned as the greatest threat to the planet which is absurd. The Earth is the Lord’s, and He has given us a very resilient planet.

Please see the following nine small stories that I wrote about this meeting:

The proud United Nations

The theme for the UN’s Commission on Social development in 2022 is :

Inclusive and resilient recovery from COVID-19 for sustainable livelihoods, well-being and dignity for all: eradicating poverty and hunger in all its forms and dimensions to achieve the 2030 Agenda.

The wisest man in all the world said , “The poor you will always have with you, you can help them anytime you like.” Mark14:7

Now if the UN wanted to reduce the number of poor or hungry people by say 50% you might say that was reasonable, but to go for zero hunger and poverty is impossible. I am reminded of walking down a corridor at UN headquarters one time and saw a pull up poster saying , ban all nuclear weapons. Then I thought, you not only need to ban ALL the weapons but also destroy the knowledge of how to make them. So unfortunately, the theme is an impossibility, but that small trifle does not deter or slow down the proud UN juggernaut.

The meeting was chaired by the Ambassador from Argentina, she did not want to go back to pre-pandemic inequalities. Then the president of the General Assembly told us there were now 600 million people in poverty, amongst other things. The President of the Economic & Social Council ( ECOSOC) then said the COVID pandemic was four times worse than the 2008 financial crisis. A deputy Secretary General mentioned that 85 million more people are now in poverty. The undersecretary general of ECOSOC spoke of uneven access to vaccines.

A youth representative from the Philippines talked about the lockdowns causing more unemployment. She mentioned reproductive health in passing, perhaps not knowing about the abortion aspect.  The First Lady of Colombia seemed to be the patron of the meeting. She said we should be practical and optimistic, I liked her.

Then I had to endure 7-minute speeches by 94 countries, these were very repetitive, as I expect the bureaucrats in each poor country got a little help from UN officials in what to say.

Here is an example of the just awful wording jumbled up wording in the pre-amble

Noting that the promotion of well-being for all people over their life cycle should be at the core of any efforts to reduce poverty and hunger and is an essential component of inclusive and resilient recovery, and recognizing that building efficient, inclusive, resilient and sustainable food systems is critical for guaranteeing food security and ensuring access to safe, nutritious and sufficient food by all, while addressing other interlinked challenges such as eliminating hunger, food insecurity and malnutrition and increasing the resilience of livelihoods by further strengthening global partnership for sustainable development and leaving no one behind,

 

THE FAMILY

The document for Social Development in 2022 is quite good where is comes to references about family, with twelve references . Of these two mention family oriented policies , two with family oriented social protection systems. Then family farming gets two mentions. There are two references to work – family balance. There are a few other general mentions of family. Then there are six mentions of families.  These are all very good, and about the only thing I like in the document.

Many years ago the only reference we could get in a document was “ various form of the family exist”. This is true, but God honours a family with a married man and women with children and perhaps other people like grandparents. The various forms wording implied that any mix of people living together were all of equal value. The pro-family NGOs have worked very hard in the last 25 years to bring about this change.

 

The U.N. hates men

Ever since I started attending U.N. meetings back in 1995, I have noticed a large concentration of feminists there, as well as lesbians. The place is almost magnetic in attracting them. Their sad philosophy is that all of human history, until the advent of feminism in the 20th century, was just a constant case of patriarchal oppression and that men are by and large the cause of most of the problems in the world. I on the other hand believe that the relationship between husbands & wives has been more centred on co-operation. That’s how we survived.

Looking at this document, from Social Development, I did a word count to see if there were any biases. The number of quotes for man is zero, men zero and male zero. For women we have twenty two references , girls ten references, boys one and children seventeen. So, for the uninitiated at UN gatherings, you would think men did not exist.

Many years ago, I was in conference room one, trying to get a word with a delegate. On my way to get to this delegate I passed close to the British seat. This lovely British lady snorted some negative comment about “ men in grey suits”. I was in a rush to talk with this other delegate so could not respond which is just as well.  I was very tempted to say, “Well deary it is engineers like me who gave you the modern world, and it was my tax money that sent you here”. She would have had me flung out if I had said that, so it was quite providential that I was in a hurry.

It’s a very sad fact that these ladies will not even engage in polite conversation with me, and they have no sense of humour. I invited three ladies from Tennessee to come to the UN with me in the year 2000 one of these ladies being Rebecca. I was sitting up in the old gallery in conf room 1 and sitting the other side of my friend Rebecca was this Canadian feminist. She said to Rebecca , whom she had not met , “ I do not know how you can work with these men.” And she spat the word men out with such venom. Dear Rebecca was quite inspired by the Holy Spirit and said in a beautiful soft Southern accent, “Well we are not prejudiced , we like working with men.” The Canadian feminist stormed out of the gallery in a giant huff. The wonderful ladies who worked with us at the UN infuriated the feminists because of this beautiful co-operation. In fact, most good women like working with good men all around the world.

I can now announce that Canada has a “ feminist foreign policy”. I have known this for years, but it was strange to hear it spoken. They were also pushing “sexual & reproductive rights” but this did not get into the document.

My considered opinion, after 27 years at the UN, is that they do not want gender equity but matriarchy. Thy want women to be in charge of the world.

 

The blame game

We are all guilty of this one. We do something wrong, get caught and try to shift the blame to someone else, or some associated situation. The worst case of this was when I attended a Baptist Pastor’s conference in Scotland. One of the speakers was a Pastor from Jamaica. He claimed there was a problem with adultery in his Church due to the history of slavery. I tried to catch him after his talk to remind him that Britain set free all slaves in his region in 1833. I was unsuccessful.

At the UN an old favourite is the lingering effects of colonisation. This is not so common in central and south America as they got free of the Spanish over 200 years ago. But the Africans go on about it, they only got free about 60 years ago. There never is any mention of any positive effects of colonization, like the banning of burning widows in India, the use of English as a world -wide language , rule of law, Westminster democracy, new infrastructure , etc.

The Covid 19 pandemic is going to be blamed for many things. The main damage is from the lock downs, but not one country said, perhaps lock downs were not a good idea. If you would like to hear about this please see the interview of Dr. Jay Bhattacharya at :

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oIOGUYOPAsA

There was also no mention of the brave Canadian truckers who were protesting in Ottawa  against bad COVID policies, while this meeting was in session. And there was no discussion of a possible lab leak in Wuhan China which is right next to the infamous wet market. So, the UN is still operating in a surreal manner, not much contact with the real world.

 

Inequality

Below is an example of this problem taken from the 2022 Social Development meeting final document:

Expressing its deep concern that the progress in reducing poverty remains uneven, with 1.3 billion people still living in multidimensional poverty, and that this number continues to be significant and unacceptably high, whereas the levels of inequality in income, wealth and opportunities remain high or are increasing in a number of countries, and the non-income dimensions of poverty and deprivation, such as access to quality education or basic health services, and relative poverty remain major concerns, and stressing the importance of national and global efforts to create conditions for sustainable development, inclusive and sustained economic growth, shared prosperity and decent work for all in society, taking into account different levels of national development capacities,

Recently I discovered the Pareto principle. This is named after the Italian engineer, Vilfredo Pareto who discovered it. It is also called the 20:80 principle:20% of employees are responsible for 80% of results and 20% of criminals commit 80% of the crimes. On the criminal side the most prolific burglars commit massive numbers of crime. On the financial side you have Jeff Bezos making Billions with Amazon. Certain people are just exceptional at their speciality.

So, one country is richer than another, one individual is richer than his neighbour. The Marxists claim all these differences are due to exploitation. Poor countries certainly believe they are being exploited by the rich countries. There is therefore this insistence on the rich countries dishing out lots of money to poor countries. However, lots of this money just goes straight into the bank accounts of the elites in the poor countries.

South Korea is a great example of a poor country who in the 1950s decided not to accept aid but to put their house in order. They now have a booming country. Hard work and education transformed that country. The same thing happened in Japan, in the 1850s they decided to modernise, copy the best systems from the most successful countries. The British navy, the German army, US manufacturing etc. They also work very hard and are educated.

The best thing for poor countries to do would be to stop complaining about all the inequalities and injustices, work hard, get educated, reduce corruption , stop civil wars and things might improve.

One very helpful thing that Japan, the EU and the USA could do would be to abandon farming subsidies. The Ambassador from Benin once told me the subsidy for cotton in the USA was equal to the cost of production in his country. The farmers in poor countries would get an enormous boost if these subsidies were dropped. Of course there was no mention of any of this in the document.

 

LGBT core group

In 2008 a group of countries joined together to promote LGBT people at the UN, this group is co-chaired by Argentina and the Netherlands. There are now 27 counties in this group, but some 77 countries have laws against such people. The ambassador from Peru spoke for this group. He claimed there was much discrimination against these people which is probably true. There had been many attempts to get the term “sexual orientation & gender identity” into consensus documents at the UN. This has been very unsuccessful, and no such wording was included for Social Development in 2022. Apart from this group speaking there was very little mention of LGBTQI etc etc.

 In operative paragraphs 26 & 34 , in the final document,  there were  references to : multiple and intersecting forms of discrimination;   This was objected to by Libya, Hungary, Saudi Arabia, Yemen & Senegal who all made reservations on this wording. They suspected there was a hint of transgenderism in that wording although they never said so. The Holy See mentioned disputed terms but was not specific.

 

Climate change

The 2022 Social Development conference, in operative paragraph 30 stated :

               Reaffirms that climate change is one of the greatest challenges of our time, remains deeply concerned that all countries, particularly developing countries, are vulnerable to the adverse impacts of climate change and are already experiencing an increase in such impacts, including persistent drought and extreme weather events, biodiversity loss, land degradation, desertification, sea level rise, coastal erosion, ocean acidification and the retreat of mountain glaciers, further threatening food security, water availability and livelihoods, recognizes the substantial risks posed by climate change to health, and underlines the need to address the economic, social and environmental impacts of climate change, and emphasizes the need for action at all levels, including through mitigation and adaptation efforts, to build resilience that can contribute to eradicating poverty in all its forms and dimensions and ending hunger;

I disagree with just about every word in the paragraph above

Now I have followed this debate for many decades. In my last year doing an Engineering degree in Australia, in1972 , we had a visiting Professor from the University of Chicago. He spoke on global cooling and predicted that he would be getting an extra 20 ft of snow each winter. I remember the talk well as he was the only visiting speaker we had for the whole course.

I would recommend the following lecture by Professor Happer, the link is below, and there are Dutch sub-titles. This man has impeccable academic credentials. He was a physics professor at Princetown University, USA.  He was also born in Scotland.

CLINTEL lecture William Happer in Amsterdam

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PblYr-KjOVY

 

Youth representatives

Some of the richer countries had youth delegates and did small interventions at Social Development in 2022. The very best of these was a young man from Hungary.  He had helped set up a programme that took out of date food from bakeries and gave it to food banks for the poor. I have done a similar thing here in Scotland. Now this young man was standing in front of this very impressive river while giving his presentation. He said one country alone cannot guarantee a pollution free Danube as it flows through 15 countries. This was an excellent example where international co-operation is necessary. If you have heavy metal pollution upstream in this river it would be a disaster for everyone. This was an excellent and very useful and practical intervention.

For the worst presentation there was a young man, I cannot find in my notes where he was from, but he was European. He wanted a stable climate. I thought this was the most stupid thing anyone could say. Perhaps I missed something in the translation of his very poor intervention. The weather is unpredictable, not stable, please read John 3:8

Over the years I have had many students come and lobby with me at the UN. One group was the Teen Eagles from St. Louis, USA. They were 16 or 17 years old , Evangelicals , home-schooled and very capable. They used to hand out leaflets when we did that sort of thing. The delegates loved interacting with these young people, as long as there was proper supervision.

Latterly I would host law students for Prof. Teresa Collett, from St Thomas University. I would arrange meetings with countries like India, Iran, Nigeria, Indonesia to name a few. These students would analyse the final document and give me a summary of bad wording on family and life issues. One of Prof. Collet’s former students is Amy Coney Barrett, the latest addition to the US Supreme Court. Teresa told me she got straight As in all subjects at school except French, as she had a thick Louisiana accent, only got a B, even though she was fluent. Perhaps Justice Barrett will help overturn Roe V. Wade, the awful 1973 abortion case, which is under review just now.

There was once a student from China, whom I introduced to the Chinese delegate. To my surprise and shock, he came over to where we were sitting and gave this lady the third degree, wanted to see her passport etc. I had never seen such rough behaviour from a delegate. So, I made a point of getting to know this delegate and we eventually got on quite well. The delegate who replaced him was a little more difficult to deal with, he just could not work out what I did. I once asked him how old he was. When he told me I said I had been coming to the UN since he was 10 years old. This was not my most diplomatic intervention. We did however get the occasional nice chat together.

 

Presentation Skills

You would expect that Government Ministers, Ambassadors and diplomats would be able to give professional presentations. At Social Development in 2022, representatives were given 7 minutes to make a country specific intervention on the subject under review. Now 7 minutes should be 700 words. But because there is simultaneous translation you should speak slowly and say have 600 words, hardly any delegate can do this simple thing.

Now the winner from the 94 interventions I listened to was Colombia. Their minister gave a very good talk while in the background was a beautiful PowerPoint presentation with wonderful photos of his country. Pictures of the capital, mountains, forests, farms , houses, people with great smiles. It stands out as the very best 7-minute intervention for a country. Congratulations Colombia.

Peter Smith
19 Feb 2022
Ref : T068

Find here the final resolution: https://undocs.org/en/E/CN.5/2022/L.3

Link to the session: https://www.un.org/ecosoc/en/events/2022/commission-social-development-60th-session