UN The Geneva Conventions — the world’s rules of war — are 75 years old and ignored nearly everywhere - The Geneva Conventions, which have been adopted by nearly all the world’s countries since they were finalized on Aug. 12, 1949, are back on their heels as armed militia groups and national forces regularly disregard the rules of war.

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At its 75th anniversary, the world’s best-known rulebook on the protection of civilians, detainees and wounded soldiers in war has been widely ignored — from Gaza to Syria to Ukraine to Myanmar and beyond — and its defenders are calling for a new commitment to international humanitarian law.

The Geneva Conventions, which have been adopted by nearly all the world’s countries since they were finalized on Aug. 12, 1949, are back on their heels as armed militia groups and national forces regularly disregard the rules of war.

“International humanitarian law is under strain, disregarded, undermined to justify violence,” President Mirjana Spoljaric of the International Committee of the Red Cross, which oversees the conventions, said Monday.

“The world must recommit to this robust protective framework for armed conflict, one that follows the premise of protecting life instead of justifying death,” she said.

The conventions, with roots dating to the 19th century, aims to set rules around the conduct of war: They ban torture and sexual violence, require humane treatment of detainees and mandate searches for missing persons.

The conventions “reflect a global consensus that all wars have limits,” Spoljaric told reporters at ICRC headquarters in Geneva. “The dehumanization of both enemy fighters and civilian populations is a path to ruin and disaster.”

The Red Cross says the conventions are needed now more than ever: It has counted more than 120 active conflicts around the world, a six-fold increase from the half-century anniversary in 1999.

These days, many countries and combatants exploit loopholes in international humanitarian law or interpret it as they see fit. Hospitals, schools and ambulances have come under fire, aid workers and civilians are killed, and countries refuse access to detainees.

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The "rules of war" are such a laughable idea. Win and you followed all the "rules of war", you can't even break them if you win.

Maybe if civilians regularly saw the costs of war hitting them personally and killing and maiming themselves, they'd be less likely to be all rah-rah sending men to die for nothing. Easy to fight a war when you never feel its impacts.
 
Hitler respected and followed the Geneva conventions and then he gets criticized for it (for caring about the lives of his soldiers who were captured) literally criticized for the Golden Rule
 
i think all these laws of war are a joke since they typically dont apply to powerful countries which win. look at ww2, did the soviet union ever get charged for all those civilians who were raped, tortured, and killed at teh hands of their soldiers? so far these rules are nothing more than a way to further punish the losers of a war. ill take them seriously when they also apply to the winners.
 
Hot take: "Rules of War" have always been retarded.

War, real war, is about survival and winning at all costs. If you're fighting "by the rules" you're not trying to survive or win at all costs. Because if you lose, everything you hold dear is destroyed.

Eurofags came up with "rules of war" so they can feel better about smashing their peasant armies against each other over bullshit. The first step to sanitizing war, to make going to war more palatable to the masses.

The biggest issue of the "rules of war" is the question of what happens when you fight someone who doesn't "follow the rules"?

Well, you get Afghanistan. 20 years of wasted blood and trillions of dollars only for the guys we kicked out to casually stroll back into power, but now with all the sweet new gear we left them in the hasty pull out. Good thing we "followed the rules" or else we may have actually "won"!

If you don't have the stomach for genocide, you don't have the stomach for war, and governments should act accordingly. Either go all the way, or don't go at all.
 
laws are ineffectual without enforcement. you can't expect an honor system to work because there are always bad actors. if you want people to respect international law, somebody has to drag the violators to the ICC and lay down the fucking law with real and lasting consequence.

unfortunately, the country most eligible to act as that enforcer ('murica) is also one of the biggest violators. but also, the Geneva Conventions and the ICC were only created to enforce America's global hegemony after WWII anyway, so the system is more or less working as intended. owned.
 
"NOOO Third World Warlords, You can't ignore our Conventionarino that you never agreed to!"
 
The harsh reality of war is that people will do anything to win. Rules are regularly broken and anyone can easily lie and say it was the other side that did it first and justify why they used the method that they did.

Also, the UN is a joke. They just make things worse.

Dagoth AMOGUS said:
Sun Tzu kind of already wrote the rules of war, and they are pretty basic.

If you enter a conflict, be sure to win it, but not in such a way that the lingering effects may spark another war.

I am abbreviating a lot of his work, but you can find it for free anywhere. Go read it. Very good book.
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Here's an audio book read by Joshua Graham.


I'd also recommend Book Of The 5 Rings as well and 21 Stratagems. Also read by Joshua Graham.
 
Agamemnon Busmalis said:
The "rules of war" are such a laughable idea.
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Maybe. But if I was drafted and then captured by the enemy, I don't want to be tortured and/or executed for no other reason than I opposed them. Like many others, I had no other choice. The treatment of POWs and civilians in war areas should be regulated, at the very least. It's interesting how that mostly only ever worked with white countries. The second niggers, chinks or mudslimes are involved, chivalry and clemency goes out the window.
 
ArthuriusMartyrius said:
The only use you can claim for them is punishing the guilty party for violations but that's only really possible if said guilty party are also the losers. If the guilty party are also the clear victors then who the hell is gonna punish them for violating these rules?
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Neo-Nazi Rich Evans said:
i think all these laws of war are a joke since they typically dont apply to powerful countries which win. look at ww2, did the soviet union ever get charged for all those civilians who were raped, tortured, and killed at teh hands of their soldiers? so far these rules are nothing more than a way to further punish the losers of a war. ill take them seriously when they also apply to the winners.
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There was a particularly clear example of this with Doenitz being charged at Nuremberg of conducting unrestricted submarine warfare. He was convicted but his sentence was not assessed for this. The problem was that the British had done the same (to an extent) and the Americans did it systematically. I'm sure it will come as no surprise that those responsible on the allied side were not charged.

The only rule that matters is, might is right. Always has been, always will be.
 
I mean, even if they were being universally enforced, all you'd really need is a secret atrocity unit made up of men that can only be executed once. Just have people like that dynamiting churches and burying prisoners in landfills.
War crimes often being "unfair" ways to fight that are mostly meant to end the conflict more quickly, rather than things along the lines of "don't rape and kill prisoners" are what made the concept dumb and a blunt instrument only meant to humiliate the losing side.
I understand the point of the latter is you don't want to unnaturally lengthen a conflict by making the losers escalate into a total war situation where you have to start killing civilians or putting them in camps. This is more likely to happen when you commit atrocities like wanton rape and murder.
White phosphorous bombardment is a war crime because agonizing excruciating death makes the enemy hate you more and commit to more desperate actions. Things like blowing up a bridge for its strategic value shouldn't be because the bridge may have cultural/historical significance. The greyest I would go with a bloodless war crime is making one out of falsely accusing the enemy of committing atrocities.
 
I'll add that another issue with media based war crimes is that only westernized countries allow journalists and citizens to report them, leading to the insane result the worse the country is, the less accusations that would be levied against it (crimes against humanity though are the opposite way).
 
I wonder which country ignores the genova convention the most. Is it the one that used agent orange, depleted uranium in two conflicts, napalm, nuclear weapons, torture, extraordinary rendition, destroyed civilian infrastructure, used cluster mines, performed experiments on civilians, prisoners and POW, to name just a few things...
 
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