One of these days our grandchildren will ask us why we stood by while people were tortured, enslaved, starved to death, and used as guinea pigs in medical experiments.
What will we say? According to Henry Kissinger, the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia established the principle of non-intervention into the domestic relations of other states. Shall we tell our grandchildren that we exalt the principles of the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia over human rights?
The parties to that treaty agreed that within their respective territories, their people, if Roman Catholic, Calvinist, or Lutheran, would have freedom of worship and of conscience. The consequences of the treaty included the establishment of absolute monarchies, that is, absolute power of the state over its own citizens.
Isn't what's really going on that we don't intervene into the domestic affairs of other states because we don't want them intervening into our own? We acknowledge their right to torture their own people as they acknowledge our right to kill and enslave our own people? Nobody intervened in the 19th century to stop slavery or mistreatment of indigenous peoples and colonial subjects by anybody, and almost nobody intervened to stop genocide in the 20th century (the only ones I can think of are the Vietnamese, who intervened, finally, in Cambodia, to stop the Khmer Rouge.)
We console ourselves by moral relativism, telling ourselves, and each other, "who are we to judge?," and pointing out that they make the trains run on time. |
