Stephen Gowans’, Faith in UN intervention in Darfur Misplaced, explains well why demanding supposedly humanitarian interventions from one’s own imperialist country is a real loser.

Often times the people doing this, do not directly call for their own government to directly intervene but rather for it to use the United Nations to do so. They think that by doing this, it will somehow change the whole character of what is going on when Great Powers boss weaker countries around! They refuse to acknowledge that the United Nations is strictly a tool controlled by the US and the Western European powers to legitimize their own colonial-imperialism.

Activists in World Powers, such as the US is, should not demand that their governments intervene in the affairs of weaker nations, even when the reasons to do so might seem totally compelling. Instead they should be trying to disassemble the militaries used by their own reactionary governments, rather than trying to find reasons to mobilize them.

It is pure pretense to believe that our corporate governments will ever do ‘relief’ projects ‘right’, whether it be in Darfur, or in New Orleans. Surely, calling for one’s own government to rebuild New Orleans ‘right’ should come well before trying to convince our own failed government to take their profit-making mayhem into another spot on the globe. The Army Corps of Engineers couldn’t even build the levee system right in New Orleans, let alone be relied upon to save people in Darfur.

The United Nations is totally an imperial Frankenstein at this point. We should have no faith that it will do anything other than do as its masters will have it do. The UN record at guaranteeing world peace is quite appalling. It is a totally failed institution.