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Joined 3 months ago
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Cake day: April 23rd, 2026

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  • Apartheid in South Africa was ended because nations chose individually to apply sanctions to oppose the inhuman conditions in the country. You don’t need world police to enforce international law, it has meaning and substance through countries choosing to stand up for decency.

    Without international law, and rubbishing standards of decency as meaningless without a global world police, leads down a very dark path. The horrors of the mid 20th century, like the holocaust and atrocities committed by Japan, among many other examples, happened under a might makes right mentality. Many international laws about crimes against humanity were a response to this to prevent it being repeated, because it is utterly horrific



  • The League of Nations was a precursor to the UN which did include enforcement, it turns out that is really complicated. One description was that collective security:

    failed ultimately because of the reluctance of nearly all the nations in Europe to proceed to what I might call military sanctions … The real reason, or the main reason, was that we discovered in the process of weeks that there was no country except the aggressor country which was ready for war … [I]f collective action is to be a reality and not merely a thing to be talked about, it means not only that every country is to be ready for war; but must be ready to go to war at once. That is a terrible thing, but it is an essential part of collective security.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/League_of_Nations