• eyesaremosaics@lemmy.zip
    20·
    2 days ago

    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

  • Uriel238 [all pronouns]@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
    18·
    2 days ago

    The UN has a long history of having this complaint and no-one being willing to enforce international law. It turns out the US (allegedly the world police) doesn’t actually engage in military adventurism for humanitarian reasons, but for colonial ones (which it then tries to justify by pointing to humanitarian crises.)

    In the 1980s, GURPS Supers (the superhero supplement to the Generic Universal Role-Playing Game) offered an alternative reality in which high-powered superheroes worked for the United Nations and gave them actual teeth.

    It was before the internet and we didn’t have as much cause to be so cynical then.

  • ViatorOmnium@piefed.socialEnglish
    832·
    3 days ago

    Considering the 5 countries that were supposed to coordinate in enforcing the rules immediately went for each others throats and that two of them have a competition on who can accumulate more violations of international law, the UN is actually going an amazing job at preventing the world from going up in flames.

    • Tiresia@slrpnk.net
      171·
      2 days ago

      I mean, the world is going up in flames. That is a pretty big thing that is happening. Those 5 countries and their mutual defensive pact allies are responsible for a majority of global emissions that are heating the planet to the point of uninhabitability.

      Billions of people will die violently, for a large part because if the UN-mediated stability of capitalist global trade and its unlimited industrial capacity to make the planet uninhabitable.

      The UN with its veto system has effectively prevented non-permanent UNSC member nations from coming to binding agreements and pushing them on the privileged few. 6 billion people from across the world matter less than 70 million British people, even though India and Pakistan both have nukes too.

      • M137@lemmy.today
        71·
        2 days ago

        It’s not going up in flames specifically because of that and not as quickly as it would without the UN. I’m not saying you’re incorrect and that the UN is without fault, just that your reply isn’t really about the point that was made.

        • Tiresia@slrpnk.net
          2·
          1 day ago

          I doubt a nuclear war would have killed as many people as the mass extinction event will. Hiroshima was rebuilt and repopulated in decades, while the entire tropics will become uninhabitable for millions of years.

          Plus there’s a good chance we’ll have climate crisis and nuclear war.

          If you hold the UN responsible for the stability of the past 80 years, you must therefore hold them responsible for its consequence of global industrialization and therefore you must blame them its consequence, the mass extinction of most life on earth, including a majority of humanity.

  • ChicoSuave@lemmy.world
    26·
    2 days ago

    All it took to dismantle global peace was the children of the original peacemakers asking “but does this serve me?” War was too profitable for the rich to abandon.

    • FiniteBanjo@feddit.onlineEnglish
      46·
      3 days ago

      Well they have options, they coul…

      RUSSIA: VETOED

      Oh, well, I guess they could als…

      CHINA: VETOED

      I guess as a last resort they can at leas…

      USA: VETOED

      Jokes aside, I strongly believe spreading the unbiased truth has massive power, so I wouldn’t want to be on the badside of an organization with the singular largest investigative capability on earth.

  • db2@lemmy.world
    35·
    3 days ago

    When the stupids figured out nobody would enforce consequences shit took a noise dive. It wasn’t good before but there was slow progress, now they’re just wrecking shit with impunity because the cowards who have the authority to take action say shit like “how could this happen” instead of finding their balls and doing something about it.