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[Quiksilver]

I guess in my books, voting to initiate an offensive war is a moral crime and should not go unpunished.

re barbarians

gangs still kill millions of people. as you said, the ability to do violence has scaled upward in recent centuries.

mao, pol pot, stalin, hitler ... china (twice), rwanda, sudan, russia (twice), germany, croatia, india, north korea, laos, afghanistan, tibet, somalia, sri lanka, armenia, turkey, the list goes on...

^ all of those are where a gang killed thousands, hundreds of thousands, or millions, even tens of millions.



again, in my books only, as evidenced above, the age of the barbarian is not over. you can argue the technicality of the term 'barbarian' all you like...

 

[Quiksilver]

Well if you want to put it that way, then you can add another hundred people onto your list: Winston Churchill, FD Roosevelt, General Montgomery, General Erwin Rommel, Mussolini, etc etc. There will always be evil people out there committing atrocious crimes. These men were technically not barbarian hordes, and besides the whole purpose of my argument is that the world is moving toward putting an end to this violence.

But your theory would continue the works of these diabolical killers.

I suppose you could argue that.

But my 'theory' is that those who start transnational violence should be punished.

I am very much against initiating violence, as those people above have done.

So I don't see quite how my stance can be taken as a carte blanche to kill whomever.


I am not against violence/war itself, since it can be defensive or to remove an oppressor. I am certainly not against self-defense or violent rebellion against oppression. In that respect, I don't see how 1776 is any different from 2012.

 

[Quiksilver]

Quiksilver, I've already explained this, and this thread is becoming very repetitive.

While I get what you're saying and you bring up some really good points, this is the bottom line:

It's ok to defend yourself against a country's attack. But when you mount a counteroffensive and attack the other country's people then you risk setting off a wider, more destructive war. Like our vicious dog example, you risk bringing in neighbours who will make matters worse. And in today's day and age, when some of these neighbours are equipped with nuclear weapons, such methods of military escalation can result in a global nuclear holocaust.

That's why we've tried to get together and create universal rules, laws, and norms that avoid such a scenario.

Yeah I've already admitted you are probably right.


What I am stuck on though, is what recourse is there for the victim nation, to prevent the aggressor nation from voting for war again in the future?


And while universal/global laws and structures are good in theory, in practice it just becomes another source of power and control which inevitably will be corrupted, abused and reshaped.

Take a case in point... Hitler had control of Germany. Imagine if he was voted to control the entire world through this structure of enforceable universal laws/courts/etc. What a nightmare that would be, and no one to mount an external resistance. anyone who isnt master race gets purged, and since its global in scope, nowhere to hide.

^ That alone is reason enough to oppose any set of global enforceable laws, which requires a global bureaucracy and governance structure to police and enforce.