re: #2 LudwigVanQuixote

Never Again should mean Never Again, but all too often it gets little more than shrugged shoulders and “what can we do?”. It’s BS. The Genocide Convention has no meaning without the ability to take the fight to those who are carrying out those genocides and war crimes.

The world watched with horror as the body count rose in Rwanda but did nothing to stop the butcher’s bill - and it was literally a butchering of hundreds of thousands. Those killed were often done so at the blade of a knife or sword - not gunfire or explosives or gas.

The world watched and did nothing for years as Saddam murdered Marsh Arabs and Kurds - hundreds of thousands of them.

The world did nothing in Congo.
The world did nothing in Darfur (or Sudan at large).
The world did nothing in more instances of ethnic cleansing than should have ever been considered acceptable.

But they are acceptable because who exactly is going to step in to demand an end to the violence?

We can barely get anyone to lift a finger to stop Assad in Syria, but managed to cobble something together to deal with Khadafi in Libya, even though both autocrats are doing the same thing (murdering their own citizenry, but in Khadafi’s case, there’s a tangible opposition formed but no such leadership has emerged from Assad’s crackdown).

All too often this would fall on the US to act since we’ve got the force capable of taking action. Yet the US doesn’t want to do this because we aren’t the world’s policemen and many here are naturally predisposed to be isolationist. Defending human rights is seen through political prisms and nation-building is given short shrift even though both would help these regions in the long run. Instead, we get failed states, autocrats, and enhanced body counts.