“Abandon United Nations like your economy abandoned the gold standard” recommends Gewindeberg. “It did not mean that the gold would have been abandoned. Quite the contrary, it was done to stop the oil flood from washing away the gold reserves. From thereon the central banks made their own mistakes instead of these of the gold miners. It meant that gold was upgraded from a standard bearer to a standard item. So is United Nations. They make a lot of mistakes concerning expectations raised. The point is that the European diplomacy on Ukraine is like a lead standard, you cannot upgrade but only replace it. And common sense does not speculate on the future invention of a reactor achieving the task for a ridiculous price.”

“From its first generation, when United Nations was a dumping ground for surplus bureaucrats that would not be satisfied with state television jobs, there is a note in the janitor´s log concerning the handling of the building. It says when there was uncertainty whether the Secretary General was taking a nap or in need of a defibrillator, the present janitor decided, instead of banging the office door, to talk to himself in front of the door, weighing the decision to open it after having respectfully knocked it without response. Today it is such a dump with a little idealism grown over from a multiplied generation. We need to treat it in a way that preserves the surface without the legacy.”

Asked for an example, he said: “If I was in that position and someone would be banging on my door, I would echo the rhythm on my desk, just to let you know that you can carry the health emergency response kit back to its place. But although at the time this code of conduct was published by the janitors´ labour unions as United Nations Resolution 0, because of its universal nature, and to use an unused number with apt significance, most diplomats are not aware of it. Which really is to their detriment, because of the opportunities missed for constructive diplomacy. Not just at the top echelon but at the very base of it. And here we come to the desired example.”

“I found the wife of the Ukrainian ambassador sitting in the lobby lamenting how painful her suffering from shadow deficit disorder was. First I thought she was talking to someone but there was not even a phone. Obviously she was talking to herself. So I took a seat a little nearby, and just when it fitted into her rhythm, I dropped in a strong lament how ungrateful many patients whom I successfully treated from shadow deficit were. I could go on like that for ages, but I said it only once. She was baffled for a while, but then she fell back to her lament as if she was not interested in receiving healing. Yes, I made her an offer of treatment specifically tailored to her current wavelength, but she liked her disorder more.”

“So what was missed in her discarding of this unique opportunity? You can imagine that she would not receive such an offer too often, especially since she did not quite invite kindness. We can begin that answer with everyday banalities such as how my son, who is home-schooled, could pick up her son, who does not feel safe to make the way alone, from kindergarten and take him home on the bus. I mean besides overcoming the shadow deficit in her life, which is only the first thing to do. I have to reiterate that most patients are ungrateful. This is understandable, as it is part of the healing to forget how bad it was. But here she was in front of my door, and here I was echoing her signal.”

“We could also have had political discourse on Ukraine. Have you heard of the innovations climate change brought about in the Ukrainian economy? In these parts of the country neither affected by radiation nor by separatists, members of the oligarchy have their log cabins. And with climate change killing the jobs of both local skiing operators and snow-gunners, there now is a green economy campaign to re-school them as decorative raftsmen, which is advertised as an especially climate-friendly job. When the oligarchs leave the cities for their rural retreats, they want to link up with what they perceive as local tradition, such as heating their chimneys with wood collected with their own hands.”

“But if they were to cut trees for it then they would not be able to invite their international friends for sustainable energy parties, where the men exhaust themselves with the wood and their wives prepare the barbecue. It is here where the decorative raftsman fills a gap. He orders a pile of wood from the internet, wraps it into carbon credits, and has it trucked into the area, where it is being dropped into the valley creek upstream to be floated the last mile to the customer´s home. The guy and his friends have fun picking it out of the water, while drinking a lot of alcohol. There is an entire set of water management devices to be rented out as not to miss one single log meandering by. It is really very much like a few centuries ago, except that the raftsman is no longer the backbone of the economy but now does it for decoration.”

“So much for the business model, which has become extraordinarily popular after the colour revolution linked up the oligarchies with central Europe. The only downside is once you bring the decorative raftsman into a nature reserve, there comes the pickpocket and the helicopter pilot as well. There have been diplomatic reverberations because some foreign guests fired handguns they apparently brought in without civilian customs officers taking notice at a television team doing a report on the newly arisen job profile. But the oligarchs blocked all investigations and dismissed the workers who had made the appointment. The Ukrainian military hastily cleaned up the downed helicopter without a diplomatic aftermath.”

“Had she joined me on the diplomatic protocol then we could have discussed the irritations caused by the involvement of Americans in the shooting. There is a potential rift that could cast a chill upon the Paris warming treaty. If the two oligarchies split over the climate issue, the incident paradoxically would bear the potential for a better deal. So there´s a lot we could have talked about. But she has not read and not understood Resolution Zero. She was stuck on lamenting her own incompetence.”

“Then the appointment for which I had come was next on schedule, so I never learned whether she got her problem solved, but as you now know Ukraine as a nation up to this point did not. If you like to see it positive, just think that it probably would have involved a lot of fruitless haggling over whether these Ukrainian camera journalists in the helicopter survived the crash and were shot dead only with their feet on the ground, as the Russians alleged. But now we have news that the Russian source of that allegation damaged its reputation with a Persian burqa misuse.”

“This is the result of having the Russians at the negotiation table but not the Americans, although it is their involvement there that is to be talked about as in the case of the Yatseniuk naming wire-tap, which was probably a false flag attack produced by the Americans, though they blamed it on the Russians as in earlier instances of private war crime contractors bragging about their views of themselves, in this case as perceived king-makers. The lamenting Lady did not know a lot about Iran, and how the deadlock in which the Americans evaded negotiating by sending these whose lands they occupy as human shields into diplomatic talks was finally broken.”

“But there you go, as she failed the honesty check, I can only mention her as a negative example to explain what went wrong with Ukraine. United Nations is still full of throw-away diplomats. Despite of all the time passed since, the sheer dimension of the Chernobyl incident in a political sense is minor compared to Three Mile Island, because of the role the Americans like to take in the rest of the world. If the two countries were honest with regard to their nuclear catastrophes and the causes and consequences thereof, there would not be such a thing as the helicopter affair with its paralytic implications upon the international organisation.”

That´s the point where I could not but ask Gewindeberg what´s wrong with the damned thing. “What you see in depth of this is an effect of the fundamental contradiction between the human being and the nation state. Philosophically, the nation state is a derivative of the individual, namely many individuals putting their efforts together under a shared interest. But due to the haughtiness and moral imbecility of its inventors it mandates itself to infringe upon internal affairs of the individual. Either none of the many pre-historic empires was that bad that its own colonialists broke off from it, or it happened without any impact on a permanent record. Nation states see themselves as one of many, unlike empires, but when they behave like empires they tend to bite each other over it.”

“As a result, when a nation state abuses the internal affairs of an individual, other nation states will notice and at the same time either complain against meddling in internal affairs or do alike against an individual who looks up to the other nation state, or all of the above. In other words, every nationalist malfunction propagates throughout the international system. If you see United Nations as a derivative of the nation state with shared interests and efforts, then you have to see most of the diplomacy as an expensive variety of the broken window phenomenon. If you see international law as the primary derivative of the individual, and the nation state only comes thereafter, then it also appears as ridiculous.”

“It is Paragraph 0 of all international law that conspiracy is absolutely forbidden to nation states, because otherwise it would not make any sense to have international law in the first place. Yet while the broken analogue clock was still correct once in a while, the broken digital device is just totally defunct. We know that conspiracies have addresses, barbecues and chain-gangs. Hence by means of Dialectic Materialism we can conclude that they have some measurable impact on the economy, such as the occurrence of the decorative raftsmen. Whether you want to believe that Poroshenko has a squirrel-sized replica of Saint Peter´s Square Balcony on the wall of his veranda or not, it seems as if a Russian-flagged propagandist had made a video clip of Friedrich Engel´s timeless essays on land administration and forestry management.”