Written by Bob Adelmann
Ami Horowitz, the producer and director of the movie U.N. Me, was motivated by the way Michael Moore interwove humor into his 2002 “documentary” Bowling for Columbine to do something similar with the United Nations. “Say what you will about Michael Moore, the guy knows how to make an entertaining and powerful film,” Horowitz told The Daily Caller.
Horowitz added:
We are dealing with very difficult issues ultimately — very heavy stuff — and to do it without levity, I thought, would be a recipe for disaster. Nobody wants to sit there for 90 minutes ... watching terrible images cross the screen, so I knew humor had to be a part of it.
In his film, Horowitz does an expert job presenting the "very heavy stuff" exposing the corruption of the widely revered UN institution — so expert in fact that his exposure swamps the levity. But it is the information and not the humor that's important, and Horowitz cannot be blamed for the fact that his information is shocking not humorous. What he has wrought is one of the most terrifyingly horrific presentations of the truth about the United Nations ever captured on celluloid.
U.N. Me, which opened Friday in 11 cities, starts out almost apologetically, pointing out some small amount of good the UN has performed over the years. But this was done clearly to set up the viewer for what’s to come, including:
• The Cote d’Ivoire incident where UN peacekeeping troops fired on innocent civilians.
• The Oil for Food scam where Saddam Hussein’s oil vouchers that were supposed be used to feed his people were instead used to build his personal wealth and buy influence from top officials around the world, including the United Nations.
• The genocides in Rwanda and Darfur, which were aided and abetted by top people in the UN.
• A Nobel Prize winner’s warnings of corruption that were disregarded by the UN as flawed and irrelevant
The English language is insufficiently stocked with words to express adequately here the degree of evil involved in the fraud, deceit, and deliberate murder of hundreds of thousands of people that the film exposes. It’s almost like lifting a rug and finding whole colonies of cockroaches nesting there. The the horror documented by the film is just plain brutal and revolting. When it ends, the final frames remind those in the audience that the U.S. government has been funding this horror to the tune of $8 billion annually.
Even reviewers favorably inclined to the UN have trouble answering the charges of corruption laid out by Horowitz. Mindy Farabee, writing for the Los Angeles Times, said the United Nations is a “once noble enterprise” that has been rendered “dangerously absurd by corruption, poor oversight of troops and self-preservation for its own sake.” A reviewer with the Hollywood Reporter weakly admitted that the film exposes the UN’s “institutional dysfunction” and offers “interesting perspectives” on its well-documented travesties.
Though Horowitz’s film captures the horror of the real United Nations, his solution, sadly, comes up grievously short:
What I would recommend for this organization [is] to give it one last try — I would say … to create some kind of accountability and transparency. I think you have to immediately reform the Human Rights Council … and toss out a couple of bad actors.
Art Thompson, chief executive officer of The John Birch Society, an organization widely known for its long history of exposing and opposing the United Nations, has a much more direct solution: Terminate immediately any and all relationships the United States has with the UN. For half a century the Society has promoted its action program entitled “Get US out!” — an educational effort to get the United States out of the United Nations, and the United Nations out of the United States. Thompson put the matter succinctly: “The world leaders need to be reformed before they can reform the UN.”
Activists outraged at Horowitz’s findings are encouraged to hand out flyers that further expose the real purposes of the UN to viewers leaving the theater, and to get involved in the “Get US out!” program. They are also encouraged to support Texas Congressman Ron Paul’s bill H.R. 1146, which clearly illumines the path to extraction from this toxic organism, including:
• Repealing the original 1945 United Nations Participation Act
• Terminating all participation in the UN
• Closing the United States Mission to the UN
• Repealing the UN Headquarters Agreement Act
• Terminating all funds supporting the UN
• Terminating all funding of any “peacekeeping” operations of the UN
• Terminating the UN’s use of any property or facility of the United States
• Terminating the granting of diplomatic immunity to any member of the UN
• Ending the U.S. government’s participation in UNESCO
• Ending the U.S. government’s participation in the World Health Organization (WHO), and
• Ending all participation by the United States in any and all conventions and other agreements that may exist with the UN.
For its opening weekend, U.N. Me is showing in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Dallas, Washington, D.C., Houston, Phoenix, Denver, San Diego, West Palm, and Colorado Springs. It is also available nationwide via Video on Demand (VOD) from major cable networks. This reviewer urges everyone to see the movie — though when you do so, don't expect to be entertained. Instead, hopefully you will be motivated to go beyond the film's suggestion for "reform" (it would no more sense to try to "reform" the UN than it would to "reform" cancer) and instead help to Get US out!
Link:
http://thenewamerican.com/reviews/movies/item/11587-review-of-the-movie-%E2%80%9Cun-me%E2%80%9D
No comments:
Post a Comment