Trying out their new Vainglory

Since when is it that an a UN type like Manfred Nowak, albeit a political beast of a UN type, would need to throw red meat at an ugly mob?

It did not take long. On January 20, the very day of the swearing-in of Barack Obama as the new president of the United States, Germany’s ZDF public television broadcast a report in which UN “torture rapporteur” Manfred Nowak called for the new American administration to prosecute outgoing President Bush and former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld on torture charges.

Assmonkey. When have you ever once tried to get even so much as an "operational pause" out of Mobutu, Mugabe, or a genuine despot torturing to maintain a grip on unelected power?

Nowak, you might recall, was a perennial fixture on the UN missing persons/human rights racket in the former Yugoslavia where a suspiciously small to non-existent number of actual genocidal murderers were detained. He at once called human rights in Bosnia “a local matter” and calling for this silly bit of super-national overreach by which to masturbate.

That said, let’s have a look at the man’s intentions: to make people parrot a few words that reassure him on the subjects of human rights – I assume by this he means to say that this is the leaving unabused the innocent, but I haven’t found his definition of it.

To Prof. Nowak, human rights in general is a worldwide issue and not a western society issue. There have been many positive changes in the last 20 years, especially concerning the widespread public awareness of and respect for human rights. It is important to promote the dissemination of human rights standards and democratic values in order to create a basic human rights culture which involves all people and cultures around the world.

So go ahead, world: be primitive and savage. Just say the magic words and you can get away with it. In the mean time, we’ll go after the government that says what they’re doing, who they’re doing it to, and isn’t by any normal definition of torture doing anything those blessed, angelic, Europeans aren’t doing.