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CounterPunch
October
9, 2002
American Journal
Dwarf-Throwing and the UN:
The Shape of Things To Come
by ALEXANDER COCKBURN
Here's why I'm against the UN as promoter of federalism
and world guv'mint. This just in from Geneva, Switzerland, via
Reuter's wire: "U.N. upholds French ban on 'dwarf throwing'."
It turns out that a diminutive stuntman who had protested against
a French ban on the practice of "dwarf throwing" has
lost his case before some sort of a U.N. human rights judicial
body. The tribunal issued some typically pious UN claptrap about
the need to protect human dignity being paramount.
The dwarf, a fellow called Manuel Wackenheim,
argued that a 1995 ban by France's highest administrative court
was discriminatory and deprived him of a job being tossed around
discos and similar venues.
The U.N. Human Rights Committee said
it was satisfied
"the ban on dwarf-tossing was not abusive but necessary
in order to protect public order, including considerations of
human dignity". It also said the ban "did not amount
to prohibited discrimination".
Dwarfs and their throwers will have to
search out venues, like prize fighters in eighteenth century
England. Soon some place like Iceland will be the only venue.
No doubt a UN embargo will then ensue, with draconian sanctions,
appointment of inspector/spies, followed by the inevitable intervention
and occupation.
So here's a bunch of UN administrators,
each of them probably hauling down an annual salary hefty enough
to keep a troupe of dwarfs in caviare for life, dooming poor
little Wackenheim to the unemployment lines, before going home
to scream at their underpaid Rumanian maidservants or to get
a blowjob from a 13-year girl from Kiev in the local whorehouse.
(UN guys would do that, you ask? Oh yes they would, remember
the nasty little sex scandal about UN observers in Kosovo?)
In the old days dwarfs could stand proud,
strutting down the boulevards, around circus rings, or forming
part of some amusing display, or matching themselves against
pitbulls (a popular nineteenth-century English pastime). I can
remember plenty of dwarfs from my childhood in Ireland, along
with other bodies remote from conventional anatomy. Walking down
the mainstreet of any Irish town reminded one of Breughel. Not
any more. I guess even in Catholic Ireland the doc takes a look
and chokes nature's sports before they've got out of the starting
gate.
If the UN had been around at the time,
the hunchbacks of Philip IV of Spain would have been forbidden
to pose for Velazquez, and Jeffrey Hudson (18 inches at the age
of nine, albeit gracefully proportioned) would never have been
permitted to step out of a pie on the dining room table of his
boss, George Villiers, the first duke of Buckingham. Having emerged
from the pastry, Hudson saluted Villiers' guests, King Charles
I and his Queen, Henrietta Maria who promptly adopted him.
Spared a UN sponsored abortion to save
him from an existence incompatible with human dignity, Hudson
led an adventurous life and survived two duels, one against a
turkey cock and the other in combat with a certain Mr Crofts.
The arrogant Crofts turned up for the duel with a water pistol,
but Hudson stood on his dignity and insisted that the engagement
be for real. They put Hudson up on a horse to get him level with
Crofts and he promptly shot the man dead. Captured by Turkish
pirates, Hudson said his tribulations made him grow and having
held steady at 18 inches from nine to 30, he shot up to 3' 9".
Another dwarf, Charles Stratton (aka
General Tom Thumb) killed one of my favorite painters, Benjamin
Haydon, who was exhibiting his vast work "The Banishment
of Aristides", in the Egyptian Hall in London. But the crowds
preferred to gawp at General Thumb, on display in the same Hall.
Thumb drew six hundred pounds sterling in his first week, while
Haydon got only a measly seven pounds, 13 shillings. Haydon went
off home to his studio and killed himself.
Dwarf tossing? The job came with the
stature. William Beckford, the eccentric millionaire who wrote
Vathek and built the famous folly at Fonthill, was one of the
last to have a dwarf in private service, though E.J Woods, author
of the useful "Giants and Dwarfs" (1860) says Beckford's
dwarf was "rather too big to be flung from one guest to
another, as was the custom at dinners in earlier days."
The "Ark of Hope" and the Earth
Charter
As the repellent harbinger of world guv'mint
the UN holds scant allure. Its kangaroo tribunal, the International
Criminal Court (rightly denounced by the Bush administration)
bears all the same features as the International Criminal Tribunals
on Yugoslavia and Rwanda (heartily endorsed by the Bush administration).
To quote a fine, recent piece on the CounterPunch site by George
Szamuely, addressing US hypocrisy on this issue, "The prosecutor
is out of control. Prosecutor and court are one and the same.
Appellate court and trial court are also one and the same. The
court is answerable to no one. There is no jury. Prosecutors
may appeal an acquittal and insist on continued detention of
a defendant."
Perhaps the most grotesque recent display
of UN Kulchur at full stretch was the carrying of a cheesy "Ark
of Hope", containing the Earth Charter from the US to the
Earth Summit in Johannesberg last month. This same charter is
the spawn of Steven C. Rockefeller, Canadian eco-mogul Maurice
Strong and Mikhail Gorbachev who has said of it, "My hope
is that this charter will be a kind of Ten Commandments, a Sermon
on the Mount, that provides a guide for human behavior toward
the environment in the next century and beyond."
The portage of the Charter at the end
of last year began at an Earth Ceremony in Vermont, where Rockefeller
(chairman of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund and the Earth Charter
International Drafting Committee,) is professor emeritus of religion
at Middlebury College. Present was Jane Goodall, of chimpanzee
fame, one of whose thumbtips was once nipped off by a chimp asserting
its dignity when Goodall tried to cosy up to it at the Laboratory
for Experimental Medicine and Surgery in Primates, part of NYU
and located in Sterling Forest. (Goodall tried to cover up by
saying she's caught her thumb in a car door.)
The Charter, which finally puffed into Johannesburg in time for
last month's Earth Summit, is housed and transported in the cheesy
Ark of Hope, furiously described on the New American Patriot
website as "a blasphemous mimicry of the biblical Ark of
the Covenant, which held the two tablets containing the Ten Commandments
that God gave to Moses." Accompanying the Charter and the
Ark are the "Temenos Books", containing aboriginal
Earth Masks and "visual prayers/affirmations for global
healing, peace, and gratitude," created by 3,000 artists,
teachers, students, and mystics.
"Temenos" is the word for the
precincts of a temple, and accurately reflects the erzatz religiosity
of UN ritualism.
According to the Charter, we must: "Recognize
that all beings are interdependent and every form of life has
value..." ( except of course for human foetuses, which are
not included in the UN's definition of "every form of life",
merely as disposable protoplasm). There's the predictable affirmation
of faith in the "inherent dignity of all human beings",
excluding those who are finished off by euthanasia or haled before
the ICC or required to give blowjobs or clean the bathrooms of
overpaid UN bureaucrats.
Now comes the jackboot: The earth must
"adopt at all levels sustainable development plans and regulations
Prevent pollution of any part of the environment Internalize
the full environmental and social costs of goods and services
in the selling priceEnsure universal access to health care that
fosters reproductive health and responsible reproduction."
In other words, population control, as promoted through the century
by the Rockefellers, who of course assigned the Manhattan real
estate to the UN for its hq.
Yesterday's
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Here
We Go Again:
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Ann Pettifer
Brainwashing
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Anita Ramasatry
Airline Security Run Amok
Josh Frank
Iraq: It's
About Globalization
Rep. Cynthia McKinney
Iraq:
the Double Standard
Robert Jensen
Bush's
Illogical War Speech
David Vest
Dylan in
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New
Print Edition of CounterPunch Available Exclusively
to Subscribers:
- How to Change the Subject: Corporate Scandal and Pension
Reform as Weapons Against Warmongering;
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