> After a while, one of the head Gurus decided that if the way to do God's work was to live a good life, and there were oppressors who were committed to prevent

> After a while, one of the head Gurus decided that if the way to do God's work was to live a good life, and there were oppressors who were committed to preventing you from doing so, then a necessary part of God's work would require, er, helping those oppressors to reincarnate as quickly as possible. That is a viewpoint that I believe was ... either missed, ignored or deemed to collide too much with back-then views on national sovereignty after the world wars. Humanity decided to give itself at least a basic set of rules of civilized behavior - think of stuff like the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948 or the Hague and Geneva accords on waging war. But what good are these rules, when there was and is barely any enforcement of them, especially against large/hegemonial powers? The utter majority of war crime tribunals were against African warlords and a couple of the worst actors in Yugoslavia during the 90s collapse/independence wars. Meanwhile, all of the permanent UNSC member countries (especially the US, Russia and China, but also France and the UK) have faced a host of credible war crime or general human rights violation accusations, and so did and do many of their protege countries - in the Western sphere, Turkey is accused of a genocide against the Kurds, Israel with the Palestinians, and on the other side we got accusations of a physical and cultural genocide of Russia against Ukraine, of China against Tibetans and Uyghurs, or Syria's falln regime against everyone but Alawites.