8 ms·

Maybe to spark curious conversation, when a world power seems to be supportive of actions that an international body considers negative, what structure can help

Maybe to spark curious conversation, when a world power seems to be supportive of actions that an international body considers negative, what structure can help resolve these? It does seem like UN is unable to really make a dent here.

utirrjrk 3mo ago
Many countries have strict laws how to deal with genocide, genocide support, and genocide deniers! So just enforce local laws, report supporters of genocide to police.
- isgb 3mo ago
  Pro-tip (observe what the UK does closely): Don't call it a genocide and then you don't need to do anything about it.
  - spwa4 3mo ago
    Indeed. It has to be a particular kind of recognized genocide, and then people just don't agree on what is and isn't a genocide. Turkey is the worst offender there, but it's quite a widespread problem. And, of course, the problem is people don't agree. Turkey refuses to accept many of it's actions as genocidal (because that's how Turkey was created: when the last islamic state ("the Ottoman empire") got destroyed by Turks (who at that point were the ottoman army), they massacred a LOT of population groups, famously the Armenians but academics name more than a dozen separate genocides: Greeks, Kurds, Azeri, Jews, ...) Oh and of course they kept doing it. Technically what Turkey did in Cyprus is also a genocide, and they have an active policy of replacing Kurd population groups but that's, if that's even possible, an even worse sore point. The sad fact is that these genocides happened to gain territory. And, most of that territory, go look at Google Maps. This was mostly deep inland Turkey. And ... Turks obviously don't want it. There's no big cities there, and the more east you go, the less little towns, the less people, the less everything (except on the border). After the genocides what was a European landscape, a village every 5km or so is now empty. Hundreds of kilometers of nothing. Names on a map , with nothing or ruins below them. You don't really need a line to find the Armenian or Georgian border: where the farms begin, the rectangular fields, the villages, you've crossed the Turkish border. In other words: what repopulation the Turks did ... is a failure. And what little remains, mostly near the black sea, is losing young people at an astonishing rate. This is huge empty space, mostly ecologically destroyed land, not productive farmland. Not nature preserves. Nothing. Also the reverse also doesn't apply. The UN may have trouble with Israeli actions, but where the UN took control to resolve the situation, where the UN took action, most famously southern Lebanon, it has not just failed but it systematically kept getting worse for 50+ years now. Whereas at least for Israel you can say: look at Tel Aviv. Look at Jerusalem. Look at Haifa. They really built something. Where the UN "helped" ... there's nothing.
  - JumpCrisscross 3mo ago
    > Don't call it a genocide and then you don't need to do anything about it Personally speaking, the is-it-a-genocide debate makes me tune out. It’s hyperlegal, clearly a moving target and selectively prosecuted by each side to the point of, often, absurdity. If two people want to debate it, fine, but I have no obligation to pay attention. If we want to talk about harms and harm reduction, that feels more concrete and relatable.
    - gershy 3mo ago
      I love this point, invoking "genocide" will only derail you. The conversation benefits by being framed simply in terms of ethical validity / harm.
- HeavyStorm 3mo ago
  This doesn't seem to even relate to the question. How am I suppose to out the Israeli government to my local police? Or the miriad entities that support it?
p-e-w 3mo ago
What kind of answer are you expecting? The only “structure” that matters is power, and the only power that matters is the power to force and destroy. Everything else is derived from that, not the other way round.
- binary132 3mo ago
  Perhaps it was a rhetorical question.
SanjayMehta 3mo ago
The UN is stuck in 1945. The UNSC needs to throw out the UK, France, and bring in Brazil, India, South Africa and Germany. And this veto nonsense needs to go away.
- cicko 3mo ago
  And how do you suggest they do that?
  - SanjayMehta 3mo ago
    By defunding the UN until it falls apart and is rebuilt from scratch. Right now it's a dysfunctional joke. As are most "international" bodies created just after 1945. "Rules based order" when it suits you, "preemptive strikes" when it doesn't.
    - KingMob 3mo ago
      This is ironic, because the UN itself was already a rebuilt version of the League of Nations.
      - SanjayMehta 3mo ago
        It's not ironic, it's just a fact. The only thing which counts is raw power and the means to deliver it. The US just got a lesson in its limits from the Iranian regime. Countries with natural resources need their own defense against thieves like the US and its vassals. Libya, Iraq, Syria. Oil and no nukes. Fat use the UN was for them. (Forget about the UN. Take a home owners' association. In due course a clique will take it over and corrupt it.)
        KingMob 3mo ago
        Uhhh, irony and facts are not mutually exclusive categories. And advocating for the dissolution and replacement of the UN due to it being ineffective is deeply ironic, because that's exactly what happened with the League of Nations, which led to the later formation of the UN. You seem to be in an argumentative mood, but nothing I said is disagreeing with you about the ineffectuality of the UN.
ignoramous 3mo ago
> when a world power seems to be supportive of actions that an international body considers negative, what structure can help resolve these If recent history is any indicator, UN isn't that structure; probably EU / G7 / BRICS & other such blocs are: ... we construct a new dataset covering all 43 very large mass atrocities perpetrated by governments or non-state actors since 1945 with at least 50,000 civilian fatalities. This article introduces and summarizes these data, including an inductively generated typology of three major ending types: those in which (i) violence is carried out to its intended conclusion (37%); (ii) the perpetrator is driven out of power militarily (26%); or (iii) the perpetrator shifts to a different strategy no longer involving mass atrocities against civilians (37%). We find that international actors play a range of important roles in endings, often involving encouragement and support for policy changes that reduce mass killings. Endings could be attributed principally to armed foreign interventions in only four cases, three of which involved regime change. Within the cases we study, no ending was attributable to a neutral peacekeeping mission. How very massive atrocities end: A dataset and typology (2020), https://doi.org/10.1177/0022343319900912 https://doi.org/10.1177/0022343319900912
HeavyStorm 3mo ago
If the latest Gaza war taught us anything, is that UN is powerless. And, unfortunately, it is the highest entity that could apply leverage here, so... Not much we can do. In the long term I hope other nations realize they are very vulnerable and begin to invest more in defense, but that escalation can have other downsides.
- spwa4 3mo ago
  [flagged]
  - ebbi 3mo ago
    "Every attack has to end with occupation, destruction and expulsion." - David Ben-Gurion. Pretty sure he died well before Oct 7.
    - spwa4 3mo ago
      [flagged]
      - lorecore 3mo ago
        Actually it was the Zionists that worked with the Nazis: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haavara_Agreement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haavara_Agreement
        Sabinus 3mo ago
        While we're posting Wikipedia links about Nazi collaboration: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amin_al-Husseini https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amin_al-Husseini
        spwa4 3mo ago
        I'd like to add, dragging in Hitler because none of WW2 can be explained without him, and the parent poster posted details about the conflict that immediately preceded the independence of the state of Israel. Right before that, WW2 happened and so what happened in the 2 cannot be seen separate from each other. Hence both sides' behavior during WW2 should be seen as part of the context of what David Ben-Gurion was doing, and Palestinians ... chose a side, let's put it that way.
fergie 3mo ago
Boycott. Divestment. Sanctions.
- tonks 3mo ago
  Do you plan to do that to any other Countries in the Middle East? Saudi Arabia's human rights record all good for you? Pakistan? China and the Uyghurs - mass internment camps and sterilisation of female prisoners. They get a complete pass? Antizionism is Bondi Beach. Antizionism is a hate movement.
  - archdang 3mo ago
    When one is out of real arguments one resorts to mere whataboutism.
    - tonks 3mo ago
      [flagged]
- flossly 3mo ago
  Agreed. But to do so at govt level, those govts first need to free themselves from the infiltration of lobbyists that make these kinds of policies "unthinkable" for their coward politicians. This is, IMHO, the big difference with enacting these kinds of policies to apartheid South Africa (mentioned a lot in this discussion). Lobbyism is very effective in this specific case.
daft_pink 3mo ago
The UN is really just meant to prevent World War 3 and nuclear war. It has succeeded in this for the last 70 years. The structure of the UN is basically unanimous consensus between the major world powers with each power getting a veto. There is no unanimous consensus on this issue at all.
- spwa4 3mo ago
  Did it? Because this was also always the argument for the "League of Nations" that came before it. If you read 1930s newspapers that's what they give as a reason for the organization's existence ... Now after WW2, consensus is that the League of Nations may have outright caused WW2, and certainly contributed more than any other individual factor. The League of Nations was the embodiment of the treaty of Versailles. As if that wasn't bad enough, the League of Nations was also the league of nations that stopped most reactions against Hitler immediately before the war. I'm not even going to bother drawing the obvious parallel with how the UN is treating nuclear powers, and people defending themselves against attacks by a nuclear (or trying-to-be-nuclear) power.
  - daft_pink 3mo ago
    It did because world war 3 hasn’t happened and it’s been about 80 years vs the short time between world war 2 and world war 1.
    - spwa4 3mo ago
      I'll just ask the forbidden question: and did WW3 not happen because of the UN ... or because of MAD? (VERY importantly, combined with a fundamental agreement on the value of human life, at least to some extent, between the 2 dominant powers Russia and the US and now China) Not saying that a meeting room where nuclear powers have permanent presence isn't useful. But to say it is responsible for peace somehow is just crazy.
saturn8601 3mo ago
We kinda went through this with South Africa. The only thing saving Israel is the US protection and the nukes. US protection can change. Nukes are harder. South Africa successfully utilized "strategic ambiguity". They never explicitly acknowledged they had the weapons, while making sure world leaders knew they were a credible threat. during South Africa's border wars (specifically against the Cubans in Angola), there were internal discussions about deploying tactical nuclear weapons. Because world leaders viewed that threat as entirely credible, it gave South Africa massive leverage. Feels like world leaders view modern Israeli threats through the exact same lens and i'd agree given recent covert operations like the beeper bombings hence this UN posture. Could we replicate the SA situation? probably not but maybe partially? When the Soviet Union collapsed and the Cold War ended, South Africa’s strategic leverage evaporated overnight. The US and UK no longer had a reason to shield them from crippling global economic sanctions. Feels like we are watching this in real time with Israel post Iran war. If the US entirely removed its diplomatic shield and allowed full global economic isolation to set in, the economic cost of maintaining a pariah state might eventually outweigh the perceived security benefit of the weapons. ('might' doing a lot of heavy lifting there) Also SA was also motivated by fear of the nukes getting in the hands of the incoming leftist government, Israel does not have that fear.
- xg15 3mo ago
  Not sure if it used to be the case with South Africa too, but I'm baffled how much ideological support Israel still has, in various population groups. There are at least two religious groups who seem to view it as integral part of a divine plan that trumps all other considerations. ("mainstream" Orthodox Jews and Evangelical Christians) Then there various secular narratives around the Jewish homeland, the rebirth (and Germany's redemption) after the Holocaust etc. For western politicians, it seems far easier to chime in to the dehumanization of Palestinians and either paint the daily suffering there as "tragic but necessary", make fun of it or dismiss it completely - than to object to those stories. This seems to work on a different layer than geopolitics, so I have doubts that a shift in geopolitics alone would change this. (I may be wrong) Though maybe the changed perception of Israel after the Gaza war might change it.
  - 3mo ago
Qem 3mo ago
> when a world power seems to be supportive of actions that an international body considers negative, what structure can help resolve these? Apply the Apartheid South Africa treatament. Gather the larger number possible of complying members, and apply a coordinated boycott, divestment and sanctions campaign to put pressure in the party engaged in genocide, ethnic cleansing or other abhorrent actions.
xg15 3mo ago
I think this is a good argument why a singular world power is actually a bad thing - because no matter how much it will promote itself as the "good guys" (and of course it will), at the end of the day, it will push through its own interests by that dominance - whereas if power is more evenly distributed, countries might be more willing to agree to common, formalized rules and a "neutral" body to evaluate them. I think the emergence of nation states with democratic institutions and a strong system of law is actually a hopeful precedent here. Somehow we got from a world of fiefdoms and lords that literally stood above the law to states with checks and balances. (Yes, we're sliding back towards the "fiefdoms" situation right now, but we're still far better than things used to be) So I'm gonna be a starry-eyed idealist and keep the hope up that we might archive the same on a global level at some point.
- mech998877 3mo ago
  History has shown that having a multitude of roughly-equal competing powers results in more per-capita death from war than when there is 1 or two dominant nations. The 1800's and early 1900's were bloody. Post WWII has had less death from war.
  - xg15 3mo ago
    True, though post-WWII was not a single power either until the 90s. We've had several decades of Cold War in which there were at least two great powers.
  - chistev 3mo ago
    Maybe because of nukes now.
    - flossly 3mo ago
      Or mass media.
  - JumpCrisscross 3mo ago
    Bilateral is stable. Multilateral is not. We have limited evidence nukes change that. Currently, with the implosion of Pax Americana, we’re hearing words a multi-lateral theatre in the Middle East and Asia. Hence the heightened risk of nuclear power in one of those settings. (Europe remains a bilateral theatre.)
jameshilliard 3mo ago
[flagged]
skybrian 3mo ago
Maybe it would help if other countries focused on the immediate problem: rescuing people from a dangerous situation. They should be volunteering to take refugees. Sadly, it's unlikely because they care more about keeping immigrants out.
- lorecore 3mo ago
  Unless you're talking about Zionists returning to their homeland, you're advocating for ethnic cleansing. Palestinians should not be refugees from their own land.
  - skybrian 3mo ago
    No, I'm not talking about forcing anyone to leave. There are likely people who do want to leave who are trapped there.
  - tonks 3mo ago
    [flagged]
    - lorecore 3mo ago
      I shouldn't even engage with this since you've been spamming the entire thread with pro-Israel hasbara, but Ashkenazis are native to Europe not the Middle East, and yes they should return to their homeland -- mainly Eastern and Central Europe.
      - throw853367 3mo ago
        [flagged]
        lorecore 3mo ago
        No, why would I? Also, mods: what's up with all these brand new accounts spamming this thread with pro-Israel propaganda?
tonks 3mo ago
[flagged]

utirrjrk 3mo ago

Many countries have strict laws how to deal with genocide, genocide support, and genocide deniers! So just enforce local laws, report supporters of genocide to police.

isgb 3mo ago
Pro-tip (observe what the UK does closely): Don't call it a genocide and then you don't need to do anything about it.
- spwa4 3mo ago
  Indeed. It has to be a particular kind of recognized genocide, and then people just don't agree on what is and isn't a genocide. Turkey is the worst offender there, but it's quite a widespread problem. And, of course, the problem is people don't agree. Turkey refuses to accept many of it's actions as genocidal (because that's how Turkey was created: when the last islamic state ("the Ottoman empire") got destroyed by Turks (who at that point were the ottoman army), they massacred a LOT of population groups, famously the Armenians but academics name more than a dozen separate genocides: Greeks, Kurds, Azeri, Jews, ...) Oh and of course they kept doing it. Technically what Turkey did in Cyprus is also a genocide, and they have an active policy of replacing Kurd population groups but that's, if that's even possible, an even worse sore point. The sad fact is that these genocides happened to gain territory. And, most of that territory, go look at Google Maps. This was mostly deep inland Turkey. And ... Turks obviously don't want it. There's no big cities there, and the more east you go, the less little towns, the less people, the less everything (except on the border). After the genocides what was a European landscape, a village every 5km or so is now empty. Hundreds of kilometers of nothing. Names on a map , with nothing or ruins below them. You don't really need a line to find the Armenian or Georgian border: where the farms begin, the rectangular fields, the villages, you've crossed the Turkish border. In other words: what repopulation the Turks did ... is a failure. And what little remains, mostly near the black sea, is losing young people at an astonishing rate. This is huge empty space, mostly ecologically destroyed land, not productive farmland. Not nature preserves. Nothing. Also the reverse also doesn't apply. The UN may have trouble with Israeli actions, but where the UN took control to resolve the situation, where the UN took action, most famously southern Lebanon, it has not just failed but it systematically kept getting worse for 50+ years now. Whereas at least for Israel you can say: look at Tel Aviv. Look at Jerusalem. Look at Haifa. They really built something. Where the UN "helped" ... there's nothing.
- JumpCrisscross 3mo ago
  > Don't call it a genocide and then you don't need to do anything about it Personally speaking, the is-it-a-genocide debate makes me tune out. It’s hyperlegal, clearly a moving target and selectively prosecuted by each side to the point of, often, absurdity. If two people want to debate it, fine, but I have no obligation to pay attention. If we want to talk about harms and harm reduction, that feels more concrete and relatable.
  - gershy 3mo ago
    I love this point, invoking "genocide" will only derail you. The conversation benefits by being framed simply in terms of ethical validity / harm.
HeavyStorm 3mo ago
This doesn't seem to even relate to the question. How am I suppose to out the Israeli government to my local police? Or the miriad entities that support it?

p-e-w 3mo ago

What kind of answer are you expecting? The only “structure” that matters is power, and the only power that matters is the power to force and destroy. Everything else is derived from that, not the other way round.

binary132 3mo ago
Perhaps it was a rhetorical question.

SanjayMehta 3mo ago

The UN is stuck in 1945. The UNSC needs to throw out the UK, France, and bring in Brazil, India, South Africa and Germany. And this veto nonsense needs to go away.

cicko 3mo ago
And how do you suggest they do that?
- SanjayMehta 3mo ago
  By defunding the UN until it falls apart and is rebuilt from scratch. Right now it's a dysfunctional joke. As are most "international" bodies created just after 1945. "Rules based order" when it suits you, "preemptive strikes" when it doesn't.
  - KingMob 3mo ago
    This is ironic, because the UN itself was already a rebuilt version of the League of Nations.
    - SanjayMehta 3mo ago
      It's not ironic, it's just a fact. The only thing which counts is raw power and the means to deliver it. The US just got a lesson in its limits from the Iranian regime. Countries with natural resources need their own defense against thieves like the US and its vassals. Libya, Iraq, Syria. Oil and no nukes. Fat use the UN was for them. (Forget about the UN. Take a home owners' association. In due course a clique will take it over and corrupt it.)
      - KingMob 3mo ago
        Uhhh, irony and facts are not mutually exclusive categories. And advocating for the dissolution and replacement of the UN due to it being ineffective is deeply ironic, because that's exactly what happened with the League of Nations, which led to the later formation of the UN. You seem to be in an argumentative mood, but nothing I said is disagreeing with you about the ineffectuality of the UN.

ignoramous 3mo ago

> when a world power seems to be supportive of actions that an international body considers negative, what structure can help resolve these If recent history is any indicator, UN isn't that structure; probably EU / G7 / BRICS & other such blocs are: ... we construct a new dataset covering all 43 very large mass atrocities perpetrated by governments or non-state actors since 1945 with at least 50,000 civilian fatalities. This article introduces and summarizes these data, including an inductively generated typology of three major ending types: those in which (i) violence is carried out to its intended conclusion (37%); (ii) the perpetrator is driven out of power militarily (26%); or (iii) the perpetrator shifts to a different strategy no longer involving mass atrocities against civilians (37%). We find that international actors play a range of important roles in endings, often involving encouragement and support for policy changes that reduce mass killings. Endings could be attributed principally to armed foreign interventions in only four cases, three of which involved regime change. Within the cases we study, no ending was attributable to a neutral peacekeeping mission. How very massive atrocities end: A dataset and typology (2020), https://doi.org/10.1177/0022343319900912 https://doi.org/10.1177/0022343319900912

HeavyStorm 3mo ago

If the latest Gaza war taught us anything, is that UN is powerless. And, unfortunately, it is the highest entity that could apply leverage here, so... Not much we can do. In the long term I hope other nations realize they are very vulnerable and begin to invest more in defense, but that escalation can have other downsides.

spwa4 3mo ago
[flagged]
- ebbi 3mo ago
  "Every attack has to end with occupation, destruction and expulsion." - David Ben-Gurion. Pretty sure he died well before Oct 7.
  - spwa4 3mo ago
    [flagged]
    - lorecore 3mo ago
      Actually it was the Zionists that worked with the Nazis: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haavara_Agreement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haavara_Agreement
      - Sabinus 3mo ago
        While we're posting Wikipedia links about Nazi collaboration: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amin_al-Husseini https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amin_al-Husseini
        spwa4 3mo ago
        I'd like to add, dragging in Hitler because none of WW2 can be explained without him, and the parent poster posted details about the conflict that immediately preceded the independence of the state of Israel. Right before that, WW2 happened and so what happened in the 2 cannot be seen separate from each other. Hence both sides' behavior during WW2 should be seen as part of the context of what David Ben-Gurion was doing, and Palestinians ... chose a side, let's put it that way.

fergie 3mo ago

Boycott. Divestment. Sanctions.

tonks 3mo ago
Do you plan to do that to any other Countries in the Middle East? Saudi Arabia's human rights record all good for you? Pakistan? China and the Uyghurs - mass internment camps and sterilisation of female prisoners. They get a complete pass? Antizionism is Bondi Beach. Antizionism is a hate movement.
- archdang 3mo ago
  When one is out of real arguments one resorts to mere whataboutism.
  - tonks 3mo ago
    [flagged]
flossly 3mo ago
Agreed. But to do so at govt level, those govts first need to free themselves from the infiltration of lobbyists that make these kinds of policies "unthinkable" for their coward politicians. This is, IMHO, the big difference with enacting these kinds of policies to apartheid South Africa (mentioned a lot in this discussion). Lobbyism is very effective in this specific case.

daft_pink 3mo ago

The UN is really just meant to prevent World War 3 and nuclear war. It has succeeded in this for the last 70 years. The structure of the UN is basically unanimous consensus between the major world powers with each power getting a veto. There is no unanimous consensus on this issue at all.

spwa4 3mo ago
Did it? Because this was also always the argument for the "League of Nations" that came before it. If you read 1930s newspapers that's what they give as a reason for the organization's existence ... Now after WW2, consensus is that the League of Nations may have outright caused WW2, and certainly contributed more than any other individual factor. The League of Nations was the embodiment of the treaty of Versailles. As if that wasn't bad enough, the League of Nations was also the league of nations that stopped most reactions against Hitler immediately before the war. I'm not even going to bother drawing the obvious parallel with how the UN is treating nuclear powers, and people defending themselves against attacks by a nuclear (or trying-to-be-nuclear) power.
- daft_pink 3mo ago
  It did because world war 3 hasn’t happened and it’s been about 80 years vs the short time between world war 2 and world war 1.
  - spwa4 3mo ago
    I'll just ask the forbidden question: and did WW3 not happen because of the UN ... or because of MAD? (VERY importantly, combined with a fundamental agreement on the value of human life, at least to some extent, between the 2 dominant powers Russia and the US and now China) Not saying that a meeting room where nuclear powers have permanent presence isn't useful. But to say it is responsible for peace somehow is just crazy.

saturn8601 3mo ago

We kinda went through this with South Africa. The only thing saving Israel is the US protection and the nukes. US protection can change. Nukes are harder. South Africa successfully utilized "strategic ambiguity". They never explicitly acknowledged they had the weapons, while making sure world leaders knew they were a credible threat. during South Africa's border wars (specifically against the Cubans in Angola), there were internal discussions about deploying tactical nuclear weapons. Because world leaders viewed that threat as entirely credible, it gave South Africa massive leverage. Feels like world leaders view modern Israeli threats through the exact same lens and i'd agree given recent covert operations like the beeper bombings hence this UN posture. Could we replicate the SA situation? probably not but maybe partially? When the Soviet Union collapsed and the Cold War ended, South Africa’s strategic leverage evaporated overnight. The US and UK no longer had a reason to shield them from crippling global economic sanctions. Feels like we are watching this in real time with Israel post Iran war. If the US entirely removed its diplomatic shield and allowed full global economic isolation to set in, the economic cost of maintaining a pariah state might eventually outweigh the perceived security benefit of the weapons. ('might' doing a lot of heavy lifting there) Also SA was also motivated by fear of the nukes getting in the hands of the incoming leftist government, Israel does not have that fear.

xg15 3mo ago
Not sure if it used to be the case with South Africa too, but I'm baffled how much ideological support Israel still has, in various population groups. There are at least two religious groups who seem to view it as integral part of a divine plan that trumps all other considerations. ("mainstream" Orthodox Jews and Evangelical Christians) Then there various secular narratives around the Jewish homeland, the rebirth (and Germany's redemption) after the Holocaust etc. For western politicians, it seems far easier to chime in to the dehumanization of Palestinians and either paint the daily suffering there as "tragic but necessary", make fun of it or dismiss it completely - than to object to those stories. This seems to work on a different layer than geopolitics, so I have doubts that a shift in geopolitics alone would change this. (I may be wrong) Though maybe the changed perception of Israel after the Gaza war might change it.
- 3mo ago

Qem 3mo ago

> when a world power seems to be supportive of actions that an international body considers negative, what structure can help resolve these? Apply the Apartheid South Africa treatament. Gather the larger number possible of complying members, and apply a coordinated boycott, divestment and sanctions campaign to put pressure in the party engaged in genocide, ethnic cleansing or other abhorrent actions.

xg15 3mo ago

I think this is a good argument why a singular world power is actually a bad thing - because no matter how much it will promote itself as the "good guys" (and of course it will), at the end of the day, it will push through its own interests by that dominance - whereas if power is more evenly distributed, countries might be more willing to agree to common, formalized rules and a "neutral" body to evaluate them. I think the emergence of nation states with democratic institutions and a strong system of law is actually a hopeful precedent here. Somehow we got from a world of fiefdoms and lords that literally stood above the law to states with checks and balances. (Yes, we're sliding back towards the "fiefdoms" situation right now, but we're still far better than things used to be) So I'm gonna be a starry-eyed idealist and keep the hope up that we might archive the same on a global level at some point.

mech998877 3mo ago
History has shown that having a multitude of roughly-equal competing powers results in more per-capita death from war than when there is 1 or two dominant nations. The 1800's and early 1900's were bloody. Post WWII has had less death from war.
- xg15 3mo ago
  True, though post-WWII was not a single power either until the 90s. We've had several decades of Cold War in which there were at least two great powers.
- chistev 3mo ago
  Maybe because of nukes now.
  - flossly 3mo ago
    Or mass media.
- JumpCrisscross 3mo ago
  Bilateral is stable. Multilateral is not. We have limited evidence nukes change that. Currently, with the implosion of Pax Americana, we’re hearing words a multi-lateral theatre in the Middle East and Asia. Hence the heightened risk of nuclear power in one of those settings. (Europe remains a bilateral theatre.)

jameshilliard 3mo ago

[flagged]

skybrian 3mo ago

Maybe it would help if other countries focused on the immediate problem: rescuing people from a dangerous situation. They should be volunteering to take refugees. Sadly, it's unlikely because they care more about keeping immigrants out.

lorecore 3mo ago
Unless you're talking about Zionists returning to their homeland, you're advocating for ethnic cleansing. Palestinians should not be refugees from their own land.
- skybrian 3mo ago
  No, I'm not talking about forcing anyone to leave. There are likely people who do want to leave who are trapped there.
- tonks 3mo ago
  [flagged]
  - lorecore 3mo ago
    I shouldn't even engage with this since you've been spamming the entire thread with pro-Israel hasbara, but Ashkenazis are native to Europe not the Middle East, and yes they should return to their homeland -- mainly Eastern and Central Europe.
    - throw853367 3mo ago
      [flagged]
      - lorecore 3mo ago
        No, why would I? Also, mods: what's up with all these brand new accounts spamming this thread with pro-Israel propaganda?

tonks 3mo ago

[flagged]