United Nations: Book Burners?

They may not have set fire to thousands of books, but destroying them by shredding them accomplishes the same mission. The worst part is that these books were originally commissioned by the UN and UNESCO to detail the history of Latin America:

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," Morocco's ambassador to UNESCO, Aziza Bennani, said in an interview. "How could an employee of UNESCO make a decision to destroy these books?"

Mexico's ambassador, Homero Aridjis, said at the organization's executive council meeting this past 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.

The director general of UNESCO, 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.

It was unclear who was responsible, he said. "We have launched an inquiry, consulting publications officers of the period, now retired, in order to discover the reasons which led them to take this decision and not to consider other options," the audit report quotes him as saying.

Yet another sign of the moral bankruptcy at the UN, to say nothing of the waste of money that goes on there day in and day out. How much money was spent to create those books, and how much money spent to destroy them?

The books were apparently destroyed rather than spending the additional money to ship them to a new warehouse in Brussels from Paris. Never mind that those books and records could have been useful to researchers or impoverished schools and individuals in Latin America. They simply shredded them instead.