Well, yeah. The forces for good have been perverted or distracted, leaving the venal and the angry to act unopposed. Of course the world is ignoring genocide. Everyone is overwhelmed by the pace...
Well, yeah. The forces for good have been perverted or distracted, leaving the venal and the angry to act unopposed. Of course the world is ignoring genocide. Everyone is overwhelmed by the pace of world events and doesn't want to dedicate forces to years of peacekeeper actions to keep people from killing each other in places and ways that dont fundamentally disrupt the world. There are other disasters more relevant to the voters in developed countries than this one. It's incredibly shitty, but unsurprising.
I don’t think you can find a single decade between 1940 and 2020 where there wasn’t a large scale ethnic cleaning that was ignored or went unopposed by major powers. Humans are just that kind of...
The forces for good have been perverted or distracted
I don’t think you can find a single decade between 1940 and 2020 where there wasn’t a large scale ethnic cleaning that was ignored or went unopposed by major powers.
Humans are just that kind of creature, for better or for worse.
I think the UN was much more proactive about attempting to prevent them in the 90s and the earlier part of the 2000s. It may not have been perfect, but it's not even that now.
I think the UN was much more proactive about attempting to prevent them in the 90s and the earlier part of the 2000s. It may not have been perfect, but it's not even that now.
They paid some lip service, but the 90s were also when the Rwandan genocide occurred, one of the worst by the sheer speed at which it occurred in human history, where famously UN peacekeepers...
They paid some lip service, but the 90s were also when the Rwandan genocide occurred, one of the worst by the sheer speed at which it occurred in human history, where famously UN peacekeepers could do nothing but watch.
Is there an example of a case where UN peacekeepers, without the real backing of a major power, prevented a genocide?
There are a few that can be argued with major powers backing - US intervention in Kosovo arguably prevented what had happened with Bosnia but that was also part of Cold War chess, not just humanitarian good will.
I mean what do you even do? Send a few thousand more troops to die on foreign soil after spending billions? People who want to do things about this don’t actually know what to do. And that’s...
I mean what do you even do? Send a few thousand more troops to die on foreign soil after spending billions? People who want to do things about this don’t actually know what to do.
And that’s before you get to the political problems of “okay you stopped it by killing a bunch of people…now what”. Run the country? Leave a vacuum with a “do a genocide and we’ll be back” note?
We just don’t have good answers for this even if you magically get buy in from everyone for generous reasons.
Humans are incredibly adept at making in groups and out groups and of being suspicious and hostile to out groups. This is instinctual - likely honed from millions of years of surviving (and...
Humans are incredibly adept at making in groups and out groups and of being suspicious and hostile to out groups. This is instinctual - likely honed from millions of years of surviving (and evolving) in a hostile world, where our ancestors competed with not just themselves, but other hominids.
Without the tribal instincts that are so destructive in a human-dominated modern world, would Neanderthals have been the ones that outcompeted us rather than vice versa?
Well, yeah. The forces for good have been perverted or distracted, leaving the venal and the angry to act unopposed. Of course the world is ignoring genocide. Everyone is overwhelmed by the pace of world events and doesn't want to dedicate forces to years of peacekeeper actions to keep people from killing each other in places and ways that dont fundamentally disrupt the world. There are other disasters more relevant to the voters in developed countries than this one. It's incredibly shitty, but unsurprising.
I don’t think you can find a single decade between 1940 and 2020 where there wasn’t a large scale ethnic cleaning that was ignored or went unopposed by major powers.
Humans are just that kind of creature, for better or for worse.
I think the UN was much more proactive about attempting to prevent them in the 90s and the earlier part of the 2000s. It may not have been perfect, but it's not even that now.
They paid some lip service, but the 90s were also when the Rwandan genocide occurred, one of the worst by the sheer speed at which it occurred in human history, where famously UN peacekeepers could do nothing but watch.
Is there an example of a case where UN peacekeepers, without the real backing of a major power, prevented a genocide?
There are a few that can be argued with major powers backing - US intervention in Kosovo arguably prevented what had happened with Bosnia but that was also part of Cold War chess, not just humanitarian good will.
This was never the point of the UN, nor would most countries sign off on agreeing to it
I mean what do you even do? Send a few thousand more troops to die on foreign soil after spending billions? People who want to do things about this don’t actually know what to do.
And that’s before you get to the political problems of “okay you stopped it by killing a bunch of people…now what”. Run the country? Leave a vacuum with a “do a genocide and we’ll be back” note?
We just don’t have good answers for this even if you magically get buy in from everyone for generous reasons.
What could possibly be the "for better" in that take?
Humans are incredibly adept at making in groups and out groups and of being suspicious and hostile to out groups. This is instinctual - likely honed from millions of years of surviving (and evolving) in a hostile world, where our ancestors competed with not just themselves, but other hominids.
Without the tribal instincts that are so destructive in a human-dominated modern world, would Neanderthals have been the ones that outcompeted us rather than vice versa?