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Comment by mxkopy | Hacker News Reader

Nation states generally do not have rights.

The hypothetical “right to exist” is typically juxtaposed against its adversaries’ rights/efforts/privilege to wipe them off the face of the earth.

If a nation-state, or ethnoreligious group, has rights, then efforts to destroy it would not gain popular support.

Do ethnoreligious groups have a right to survival without suffering genocide? Does the international community, or Security Council, have a duty to prevent genocide, or the extinction of any particular nation-state?

You confuse nation state and people in this question. Yes the international community has an obligation to prevent genocide, and the destruction of a nation state if that coincides with the destruction of its people, but these things are not necessarily the same. The Security Council has no obligation to prevent a peaceful union of two states that would make one or both of them cease to exist. Nation states do not have rights, people have rights.

> Yes the international community has an obligation to prevent genocide, and the destruction of a nation state if that coincides with the destruction of its people

No, it does not. That's not how sovereignty works. nation states' obligations are only towards their own nation. Even honoring of treaties is expected only in so far as it is in the best interest of their nation to do so. There is no grand human coalition that has an obligation to intervene on behalf of the innocent being harmed by wars and genocide. it's a nice idea, but consent of the governed and all. Those people would have to first get their government to consent to participating under organizations like the ICJ.

This viewpoint is basically that there is no international community at all, and that’s a broader argument

In the sense that humans as a species exist, and nation states exist on the same planet, I suppose there is. But sovereign nationhood means a nation isn't subject to any higher earthly organization. Each nation does whatever it wants more or less. A community implies participation in a shared social structure. Even the UN is at best a diplomatic organization, not an organization that is an extension of its member states. Typically, when you hear about the "international community" that means the US and certain western European nations using that diplomatic cover to justify something. It isn't Paraguay and south Sudan chipping in their troops to take some action, or funding some effort.

In simpler terms, for any supposed international community to be valid, similar to governments, it needs the threat of violence to enforce its will. That means you have to volunteer yourself or your children to enforce that community's will. The rest is just details, I'm sure you'd want to have a say in exactly what the agreement is over the specifics of the "international community's" will would be, and therein lies the obstacle.

In the 90's there was some post-soviet political capital and overall good will credited to the US and its allies as a result of a new era of hope and prosperity and all that soft power stuff. That's why bombing Serbia and things like war crimes for milosevich and his pals was a thing. It was NATO, not the international community then. same as Afghanistan. There has never been any actual "international community" that did anything but pass resolutions at the UN. There has never been even so much as a truly international peace keeping force deployed anywhere by the UN.

It all just comes down to whether this supposed community has the right to do anything over other non-participating nations' sovereign real while maintaining any semblance of legitimacy. interference is interference, whether the US is kidnapping a dictator, or bombing one, or assassinating another, it can be done, but not with any legitimacy, and it is usually the US that's the arm that swings the sword.

I’m not confused, but perhaps Zionists are.

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