We have entered the age of open thuggery, as the brutality Israel tested on Palestinians is now being normalised elsewhere

For months, many warned that Israel’s unrestrained assault on Gaza was not merely a crime against Palestinians, but a fatal blow to the very idea of international law.

What was being tested was not only the scale of Israeli violence, but whether rules still applied at all; whether power would remain constrained by law, or whether law would give way to brute force.

Few articulated the stakes more clearly than Colombia’s president, Gustavo Petro, who cautioned that the choice before the world was “stark and unforgiving”: either defend the legal principles designed to prevent war, or watch the international system collapse under the weight of unchecked power politics.

For billions of people in the Global South, Petro warned, international law is not an abstraction, but a shield. Remove it, and only predators remain.

This was not done in secret, but in full view of the world. Germany armed it. Britain justified it. France equivocated. Others offered silence dressed up as “complexity”. The institutions meant to prevent such crimes stood aside or actively enabled them.

The world persuaded itself that the collapse of law and the devaluation of human life could be contained; that Gaza could be treated as an exception without consequence. It could not.

    • BrainInABox@lemmy.mlEnglish
      172·
      18 hours ago

      I don’t know how you can look at the Holocaust in Gaza and think “we need to restore the system that enabled this!”

      “Liberal Democracy” has been a disaster

        • BrainInABox@lemmy.mlEnglish
          142·
          17 hours ago

          Representative government is not to blame for imperialism. Getting rid of representative government will make abuses worse not better

          Who said anything about representative government? We were talking about the authoritarian dogshit that western “liberal democracy” has always been. Stop trying to Motte and Baily

          the worse countries like Israel have gotten

          This is borderline genocide apologia. Israel has always been this bad. It’s just that you, the privileged western liberal, didn’t give a shit before

          killing Americans with impunity, cancelling our freedom of speech, and now our politicians importing their politics, and now the feds trying to import their occupation into american cities.

          None of this shit is new. Again, you just didn’t care about it until now. And stoping acting like it’s so much worse to have the shit that “liberal democracies” have enthusiasticly supported in Palestine for decades happen to white westerners, is fucking blatant racism.

          The Imperial Boomerang was always going to happen.

          Yes, which is why it’s insane to want to “restore” the system that threw that boomerang.

          That is rather seperate from the ideals of the enlightenment when the west threw off the shackels of the church and state and investigated the natural world and learned how everything works, obtaining the freedom of speech and publication, of association, and eventually of electing our leaders.

          Uhuh. You also committed mass colonial genocide, killing and enslaving billions. But oh you “learned how everything worked”, so I guess you’re now omnipotent ubermensch who are just better than those uncivilised barbarians.

          A relic of the classical era defunct from the late empire, when Rome suffered it’s own imperial boomerang now that you mention it, and everyone was walking from their jobs as they would not pay for taxes let alone life, and they bound everyone to to their jobs for life and made feudalism, an evil that would last the better part of two thousand years.

          This would get an F in middle school history class.

          Nevermind every government has done this type of thing as they are able

          Typical Western liberal, always assuming everyone else is as evil as you and then using that as a justification for your evil. “It’s ok for us to kill hundreds of millions! Everyone else is doing it (I assume)” literal Nazi shit

          Ironically putting the very people responsible for those abuses as much as any in permanent uncontested control of the government, to visit the same horrors on their own people, and every other country weaker than them.

          You’re just making up bullshit now.

          Not very enlightened if you ask me.

          Oh forgive me oh enlightened white man! This poor savage just can’t match your civilized ways. With your “representative government” where you get represented and we just get carpet bombed.

        • ZeroHora@lemmy.mlEnglish
          7·
          17 hours ago

          to the point of almost openly flaunting they have blackmail of politicians fucking children with epstein

          Imagine if Americans was capable of electing politicians that don’t fuck children, that could prevent that.