Wasteful Stupidity At The United Nations
In a move that has outraged a lot of people, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) destroyed about 100,000 books rather than move them. While UNESCO contends that a large percentage of those now-pulped books were obsolete, many of them were books on history, art, poetry and the like.
PARIS — For more than two decades, 250 historians and specialists labored to produce the first six volumes of the General History of Latin America, an exhaustive work financed by UNESCO, the United Nations organization created to preserve global culture and heritage.
Then, over the course of two years, UNESCO paid to destroy many of those books and nearly 100,000 others by turning them to pulp, according to an external audit.
"This is the intellectual organization of the United Nations system," Aziza Bennani, Morocco's ambassador to UNESCO, said in an interview. "How could an employee of UNESCO make a decision to destroy these books?"
Homero Aridjis, Mexico's ambassador, said at the organization's executive council meeting this week, "This is not only a blow to the culture and knowledge of entire populations and nations, it contradicts the mandate entrusted to UNESCO." He demanded an internal investigation.
UNESCO Director General Koichiro Matsuura said it was "completely incomprehensible and inappropriate" that some of the organization's "most important and successful collections" were ordered destroyed, including histories of humanity and Africa, and surveys of ancient monuments.
They could have donated the books - and representatives of many countries are furious that UNESCO did not. Modern day "green" book burning or simply bureaucratic ineptitude and waste? Oh, most definitely the latter. The dual waste of both the initial investment in producing too many of the books and then merely pulping them rather than putting them to some good use speaks volumes (pun intended) about the United Nations in general. I have praised some of UNESCO's work in the past. Things like this tend to tarnish the good they do.
Civilization, World news | Gaius Sunday, 13 April , 2008
By kidrob, Sunday, 13 April , 2008 @ 6:01 am
mmm. nice warm toasty far! marshmallow anyone?
By Bleepless, Sunday, 13 April , 2008 @ 11:58 am
Like everything else of consequence from the UN, this is disgusting but not surprising.
By martian, Sunday, 13 April , 2008 @ 1:05 pm
The books probably didn’t have anything in them about "global warming" or "climate change" so they had to be done away with.
By Mockinbird, Monday, 14 April , 2008 @ 3:57 pm
And, so, collectivism marches on. Sad.