I hate the relatively recent trend to discredit all efforts aimed at establishing some sort of global legislation.
Like everything the UN and WHO and ICC did since WW2 is “woke”.
It’s worse than being conservative (which, literally, means you want to preserve the status quo). They want to undo things. They want to go back 100 years.
Regressives
This sounds good. They’re something worse than reactionaries.
Yeah it does sound better, I feel like too many people think reactionary means reactive, when its really closer to regressive.
It’s mostly just a trend in the USA and Russia. Other than these two no country really sabotages the UN to a major degree. It’s a sad state of affairs that they hold veto power. It’s generally a silly concept in an institution that aims to create a fair and peaceful global society. However, stripping just these two hellholes of their veto power would go a long way.
WHO and ICC are a bit different. WHO doesn’t have any actual power, so it cannot do anything by itself. Only suggest actions based on their data.
The ICC is problematic, because the major global powers - the countries, who are the most likely to commit crimes and be prosecuted for them - aren’t even a part of it. Both China and the USA voted against the establishment of the ICC (note that not even Russia voted against). If they’re not members of the ICC, they don’t have to cooperate with it. As clearly displayed by the USA putting sanctions on ICC prosecutors for targetting Israel (that also voted against its creation).
Furthermore, even some countries that have legal obligations to the ICC simply ignore them. Hungary and Mongolia both ignored the arrest warrant for Vladimir Putin when he visited them personally, due to close ties to Russia. Poland was perfectly willing and prepared to host Benjamin Netanyahu, despite being legally bound by his arrest warrant too. Similar incidents all over Northern Africa, too many to list individually.
It’s by no means a perfect institution. There seems to be a clear focus on African and Asian countries when it comes to pursuing responsibility for potential crimes. So perhaps China had a good reason to vote against. Or perhaps, as a then emerging global superpower, they didn’t want to be held accountable by anyone. In any case, the vast majority of the world seems to be cooperating in good faith. This is not a widespread issue.
I was speaking in broad strokes, maybe too broad. Of course there are nuances. But there’s an undeniable and relatively new trend, beyond USA and Russia, in both public and political opinion, to redefine such treaties as mere suggestions (“invented by the leftists”); and that’s just wrong and blinkered. Short-sighted.
They’re reactionaries.
They’re profiteers.
They want it so there’s no rules to prevent you from taking advantage of situations, especially poorer countries that can’t fight back or have no bigger gangster country extracting protection resources from them, and no consequences. Basically the colonialist attitudes and banana republics of the late 18- early 1900s.
Oh sure.
It’s largely reactionary resentment about loss of cultural supremacy stirred up by the ultra-wealthy as a way to get the government to let them do whatever they want in exchange for letting the lower-status conservatives take out their anger against people they hate.
…while simultaneously getting screwed by those same ultra wealthy.
Lower-status conservatives: “Yeah, we’re good with that.”
Corey Robin has a very insightful observation about this. From his book The Reactionary Mind:
But to appreciate fully the inventiveness of right- wing populism, we have to turn to the master class of the Old South. The slaveholder created a quintessential form of democratic feudalism, turning the white majority into a lordly class, sharing in the privileges and prerogatives of governing the slave class. Though the members of this ruling class knew that they were not equal to each other, they were compensated by the illusion of superiority— and the reality of rule— over the black population beneath them.
One school of thought— call it the equal opportunity school— located the democratic promise of slavery in the fact that it put the possibility of personal mastery within the reach of every white man. The genius of the slaveholders, wrote Daniel Hundley in his Social Relations in Our Southern States, is that they are “not an exclusive aristocracy. Every free white man in the whole Union has just as much right to become an Oligarch.” This was not just propaganda: by 1860, there were 400,000 slaveholders in the South, making the American master class one of the most democratic in the world. The slaveholders repeatedly attempted to pass laws encouraging whites to own at least one slave and even considered granting tax breaks to facilitate such ownership. Their thinking, in the words of one Tennessee farmer, was that “the minute you put it out of the power of common farmers to purchase a Negro man or woman . . . you make him an abolitionist at once.”
That school of thought contended with a second, arguably more influential, school. American slavery was not democratic, according to this line of thinking, because it offered the opportunity for personal mastery to white men. Instead, American slavery was democratic because it made every white man, slaveholder or not, a member of the ruling class by virtue of the color of his skin. In the words of Calhoun: “With us the two great divisions of society are not the rich and poor, but white and black; and all the former, the poor as well as the rich, belong to the upper class, and are respected and treated as equals.” Or as his junior colleague James Henry Hammond put it, “In a slave country every freeman is an aristocrat.” Even without slaves or the material prerequisites for freedom, a poor white man could style himself a member of the nobility and thus be relied upon to take the necessary measures in its defense.
Looking at recent events, let’s start calling it geneva suggestion
a strongly worded suggestion
Anyone who is capable of getting themslves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job.
Vote Zaphod Beeblebrox.
If you weren’t dragged kicking and screaming into the oval office, you’re probably too full of yourself to be good at it.
I might make an exception for Carter, though his unwillingness to be a bastard was problematic in its own way.
I’m sorry, but Americans need to confront the reality of their presidency. And as an Australian we are still seeing the effects of Carters horrible policies play out in our region.
Carter was responsible for funding and doubling the amount of weapons sold to Indonesia during the genocide in East Timor. And his administration enabled the ongoing human rights abuses of many SEA US funded dictatorships.
yeah, unfortunately the answer that feels morally correct is often not the politically correct one.
Do we have a term for people who violate the Geneva Conventions in times of peace? Some new “twelfth circle of hell” type of moniker.
anti-antifa
