There is no 'objective' realism.
For example, if the Nazis stayed in Germany (in the sense of not invading other countries), then would you say that no country should have invaded Germany to stop the Holocaust? — Bob Ross
No country did; most wouldn't even take in refugees.
Who "we"?
You read this in history, or tea leaves? How else do you get the majority of a people to volunteer for extreme hardship and danger, for the purpose of imposing one government's will on another?
He wasn't alone; the regime was brutal. He reported to Ferdinand II and had the use of soldiers, administrators, overseers and priests sent by the monarch. Is there any record of the common people of Spain or Portugal clamouring to bring civilization to the Americas? D you truly believe they would have voted for the conquests on moral grounds?
Again - both pre-WW2 Germany and today's North Korea have or had formidable militaries - North Korea has nuclear weapons.
Has a military intervention to protect tyrannized people ever worked?
He's a question for you. Now Trump is elected one could make an argument that the US poses a treat to the health of earth's biosphere, as it is one of the biggest polluters and under Trump it also has no intention of doing something about it. Are other countries morally obliged to attack the US in order to prevent further damage to earth's biosphere? — ChatteringMonkey
Besides avoiding WWII seems like another solid argument no to do it.
I don't think you have to invade them, no, if they have no intention of attacking you or your allies... there are other measures.
Now Trump is elected one could make an argument that the US poses a treat to the health of earth's biosphere, as it is one of the biggest polluters and under Trump it also has no intention of doing something about it
Are other countries morally obliged to attack the US in order to prevent further damage to earth's biosphere?
Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs,
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots,
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of gas-shells dropping softly behind.
Gas! GAS! Quick, boys!—An ecstasy of fumbling
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time,
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime.—
Dim through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.
In all my dreams before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.
If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,—
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.
No, a reality-check. It's the UN's mandate, not any self-appointed guardian's, to organize interventions against genocide, but those morally superior modern western nations are mighty slow to support UN initiatives.You didn’t answer the question; and provided, instead, a red herring. — Bob Ross
Or they're too sensible to die for your assessment of The Good.to your point, many people would be too cowardly to act. — Bob Ross
No empire conquers other peoples in order to help them.The way they handled the conquest of abhorrent; because they were not trying to help the people there: — Bob Ross
I get that. You're wrong, it's illegitimate, it kills more people than it saves and it doesn't work.What the OP is referring to by imperialism, is its simple form of a nation having a duty, under such-and-such circumstances, to conquer and impose their values onto another nation (without it being legitimate self-defense or something like that). — Bob Ross
For those who are upset at my rhetoric (and perhaps the lens by which I am analyzing this), I challenge you to try to justify, in your response to this OP, e.g., why Western, democratic values should not be forcibly imposed on obviously degenerate, inferior societies at least in principle—like Talibanian Afghanistan, North Korea, Iran, China, India, etc — Bob Ross
No, a reality-check. It's the UN's mandate, not any self-appointed guardian's, to organize interventions against genocide, but those morally superior modern western nations are mighty slow to support UN initiatives. — Vera Mont
UN peacekeeping operations are deployed with the consent of the main parties to the conflict. This requires a commitment by the parties to a political process. Their acceptance of a peacekeeping operation provides the UN with the necessary freedom of action, both political and physical, to carry out its mandated tasks.
In the absence of such consent, a peacekeeping operation risks becoming a party to the conflict; and being drawn towards enforcement action, and away from its fundamental role of keeping the peace.
The fact that the main parties have given their consent to the deployment of a United Nations peacekeeping operation does not necessarily imply or guarantee that there will also be consent at the local level, particularly if the main parties are internally divided or have weak command and control systems. Universality of consent becomes even less probable in volatile settings, characterized by the presence of armed groups not under the control of any of the parties, or by the presence of spoilers. — UN Principles of peacekeeping
But then you realized this is trouble: a core democratic value is tolerance.
Which is fine, you thought, except people take it too far, allow themselves to be paralyzed by a mamby-pamby cultural relativism. — Srap Tasmaner
Why would you not be a Western supremacist? — Bob Ross
1. How do you impose democracy upon a people by force? — Srap Tasmaner
And this is practicable in a nation of 50 million - how? I assume, first you asked each of the people in your own country whether they supported an intervention half-way around the world. Could take a while....You ask everyone what they prefer, without others knowing what they said, granting everyone an equal say. — jorndoe
like Talibanian Afghanistan
That’s true, but despite the point. — Bob Ross
Really? If you could invade and conquer North Korea with no casualties nor with starting any other wars (with other countries), you would choose to let the north korean people continue to be butchered and tortured? — Bob Ross
China is the biggest polluter; and renewable energy produces more pollution to manufacture and maintain than fossil fuels. — Bob Ross
If it actually were an existential-planet-threat and other countries actually had a way to significantly reduce pollution (other than population control), then yes. I can do you one better: what if the US decided that they were going to detonate a 1,000 nukes for fun—why wouldn’t other countries try to stop them? — Bob Ross
And why not?In western culture, it is exceedingly common to despise and oppose nationalism and imperialism — Bob Ross
So what's wrong with patriotism then? As I remarked, nationalism and especially jingoism have these negative sides to them, which is clear in their definitions.I submit to you, that you should accept a sense of nationalism in two respects. The first, in the sense that whatever nation you belong to you must have a vested interest in its flourishing and protection against other nations—or move to a different one (if you can). The second, in the sense that, if your country has substantially better politics than other ones, you should have a pride in it and want to expand its values to the more inferior ones (which leads to imperialism). — Bob Ross
Besides, the idea of superiority or inferiority of a country is imaginary. One bad event and your shiny image can be broken, even if all the people are still quite the same. — ssu
It's the UN's mandate, not any self-appointed guardian's, to organize interventions against genocide,
When the morally superior western nations finally did defeat Germany, they didn't prevent the next genocide; they didn't resettle the survivors in their own countries: they took the lands of people they had recruited to their cause and plunked a European population on it, which started 77 years of sporadic carnage.
This 'duty' to fix other peoples tends to be expensive and end very badly.
No empire conquers other peoples in order to help them.
I get that. You're wrong, it's illegitimate, it kills more people than it saves and it doesn't work.
Get involved in philosophical discussions about knowledge, truth, language, consciousness, science, politics, religion, logic and mathematics, art, history, and lots more. No ads, no clutter, and very little agreement — just fascinating conversations.