by Reverse Engineer, Doomstead Diner
Appeared at Doomstead Diner 02 March 2016.
Recent events such as a variety of War Atrocities being committed by just about everybody on all sides of the ongoing wars, as well as the calamitous mishandling of the European Refugee crisis led me to do some investigation and RANT on a hallowed idea/ set of protocols, the Geneva Conventions. There are 4 of them, covering Land Soldiers, Sailors, Prisoners of War and Civilians caught in a War Zone.
Transcript:
Greetings Doomfans, and welcome to another edition of the Frostbite Falls Daily Rant, here on the Doomstead Diner.
For today's rant, I am going to venture off specific nonsense occuring as a result of ongoing collapse, like the bullshit of NIRP to duct tape together a collapsing monetary system, the piano wire being used to hold together the EU and the hollow verbiage being pitched out by His Popeness, the Vicar of Christ on Earth on how to solve our Climate problems, not to mention the Clown Parade currently running for POTUS here in the FsoA.
Instead, I'm going to look at something theoretical and philosophically grand that is often held up as a roadmap for behavior in times of War (which is just about all the time somewhere), the Geneva Convention.
Actually, the Geneva Convention is a series of conventions going back as far as 1864, and there are now 4 of them, with the most recent stuff coming after WWII apllying to civilians in a war zone, adopted in 1949 and updated periodically since. These documents cover 4 basic categories now:
The first Geneva Convention protects wounded and sick soldiers on land during war.
The second Geneva Convention protects wounded, sick and shipwrecked military personnel at sea during war.
The third Geneva Convention applies to prisoners of war.
The fourth Geneva Convention affords protection to civilians, including in occupied territory.
So, the folks in Geneva got everybody covered here now with rules for wartime behavior, the land soldiers are covered, the sailors are covered, the POWs are covered and the Civilians too! Everybody has a set of regulations that spell out how they are supposed to be treated in time of war (aka all the time). For those of you wishing to explore precisely what these conventions do spell out, I am providing the links in the article accompanying this rant, but just about nothing in there will surprise you much if you hear "Geneva Convention" trotted out in the press when discussing one sort of War Crime or another. In fact War itself is a Crime, but does the Geneva Convention spell that out? Nowhere that I can see on that one.
In formal language drafted up by politicians and lawyers, what the Geneva Conventions basically say is "be nice to wounded and sick people, give prisoners enough to eat and be nice to the local population of civilians while you shoot each other." lol. Anybody who signs up for the Geneva Conventions (and that is just about all nation-states that consider themselves "civilized") agrees to these rules of behavior, in theory anyhow.
It is no coinkidink I suspect that the first set of Geneva War Rules was drafted up in 1864. Why 1864? Well if you recall, this is just when the War of Northern Agression, aka the Civil War in the FsoA was in full swing in all its glory here in the FsoA. Over in Europe, they had been fighting non-stop wars since the 16th Century at least and the folks running those wars had long since developed their own "Code of Conduct" for "Civilized Warfare". Generally this meant that "officers" from the opposing side were treated a whole lot better than the average J6P grunt, enlisted or conscripted if captured.
Reason for this? The "officers" generally came from the class running the society, and eventually when the war ran its course these were the folks you would need to make "peace" with. So you want to make their lives relatively comfortable while they are interned in your prison camp so the negotiations go easier later after the war is over (until the next one starts of course).
Here in the FSoA at the time, nobody was following any fucking Marquis de Queensbury stinkin' RULES when it came to warfare and killing people, the FSoA Cavalry was out on the Frontier massacring just as many First Nations people as they could to clear the land for European Settlement, and the Natives themselves certainly followed no such rules either. If you were male and old enough to be deemed a threat an untrainable as a slave, you were killed. If you were a child who might be trained as a slave, you got to live. If you were female and could be used to breed more warriors, you got to live. That was the Geneva Convention here at the time, but it wasn't the Convention the Europeans had developed, so they put it down on paper how good civilized European White People behave in a War situation. Nowadays, if you don't sign off on the Geneva Conventions at least on paper, you're not "Civilized".
So, here you have a major war going on in the FSoA, and across the pond in the Swiss Alps the illuminati hand down a rule book for behavior, first covering the foot soldiers, then the sailors, then POWs and finally in 1949 they get around to the civilians. Pretty much every "civilized" nation on Earth signs off on these documents, but does anybody really adhere to them in time of war? Of course not. What they do is wave the documents around at the other side and say how THEY are violating the Geneva Convention.
There is also of course all the stuff the Geneva Convention does not cover, like dropping Death from Above from 30,000 feet. You're not supposed to bomb hospitals of course, but nobody ever gets punished when this happens by "accident", and if one side does bomb the other's hospitals, they just claim it was being used as a military installation and the patients were being used as human shields. Churches of course get leveled along with everything else in any decent sized bombing campaign, and the idea you can take "sanctuary" in a Church, Mosque or Synagogue nowadays is pretty ludicrous, these are among the first targets of attack for folks who don't have bombers to deliver the Death from Above, so instead they strap the explosives on themselves or load them into the trunk of an SUV and go blow up the nearest house of worship of the other guy's religion. The folks fighting asymmetric warfare aren't signatories to the Geneva Convention anyhow, so they are under no obligation to abide by no stinkin' Marquis de Queensbury rules here. In their rule book, there is no prohibition against torture or beheading either! So at least they are not being dishonest about this and claiming to be "civilized" while engaging in warfare. The hypocrisy surrounding the Geneva Convention is absolutely astounding, the only thing it is ever really used for is to prosecute the losing side of a war for war crimes after the fact. The winning side never gets prosecuted of course, anymore than cops get prosecuted for murder when they gun down unarmed civilians.
Where the hypocrisy of the Geneva convention is really coming to the fore these days is in the Refugee Crisis over in Eurotrashland. In a recent article I read, the Norwegians are threatening to pull out of the Geneva Convention if the situation gets any worse over in Sweden, and refugees start pouring over the border into Norway as the last stop on the Refugee Highway before you hit the Arctic Ocean and got no northbound land left to migrate to.
One of those "guaranteed Human Rights" in the Geneva Convention is the "right to asylum" for civilians GTFO of Dodge from hot warzones. So abiding by the GC, all "civilized" countries are obligated to take these folks in. Except when there are millions of them, who gets the Hot Potato? Each civilized country wants to hand off the problem to the next one, and no single country can take all of them, in fact with countries that have small populations of locals to begin with, just taking a few thousand in all at once screws with the demographics and the economics of the neighborhood. This doesn't include the obvious cultural problems you have here with standards and norms of behavior that are expected of "civilized" people, but which many of these migrants don't have, in large part because they grew up in a war zone! Their entire childhoods were spent with bombs dropping down every day, the countries they lived in changed goobermints as often as you change your underwear and grinding poverty was systemic for many if not most of them.
The Geneva Convention also has more extra-special Human Rights for children, which has led to a remarkable number of "unaccompanied minors" migrating to the Promised Lands of Germany and Sweden. If you get designated as a minor, you get better and marginally safer housing, you get free education etc. Of course, most of the folks streaming out of Syria come out undocumented, no Passport, no Birth Certificate, no Driver's License, nada. So they claim to be whatever age they want to claim, and there is little to no way to verify the claim. I personally could have claimed to be 15 well into my 30s, I was regularly proofed even before this became standard proceedure over the last couple of decades. When you read "unaccompanied minor" and "children" in the MSM, you tend to think of wide eyed pre-adolescents, but there aren't too many of those traveling alone. There are a significant number of REAL teenagers traveling alone, but are teenagers really children? Particularly if they have reached sexual maturity? Beyond that though, you have all the 20-30 year olds who CLAIM to be teenagers being treated as children, and getting all the bennies the Geneva Convention says children are supposed to get. There is no distinction made between a 10 year old who is 4' tall and weighs 80 lbs and a supposed 15 year old who is 6' tall and weighs in at 220. In the newz reposrts and according to the rules, these are both "children" or "unaccompanied minors". There is in fact a HUGE difference here, but the Geneva Convention doesn't cover it at all.
Further problems accrue with just what exactly is a war zone? See, if you are not fleeing from a certified WZ, you don't qualify for the Geneva Convention rule book. Everybody can pretty much agree these days that Syria is a WZ, but what about Morocco or Libya or Algeria? We might not be dropping Death from Above on these locations at the moment, but there is certainly plenty of violence going around those locations daily. How do you determine if an undocumented refugee came from a certified war zone or not? If you're not from a CWZ, then your prospective promised land country can reject you as an "economic migrant". So who would claim that? Even if you come from the Turkish side of the Turkey-Syria border, claim to be Syrian! Then you are covered by the Geneva Convention!
So on just about every level from the Code of Conduct that civilized nations are supposed to adhere to in time of war to what Human Rights soldiers or civilians have as POWs or Refugees, the Geneva Convention fails miserably and is overall a worthless document. It is certainly not structured to handle a situation where warfare is systemic and there are millions of people on the move as refugees of one sort or another. You can make the lofty statement the everybody has a "right to asylum", but what if everybody is more than your society can possibly assimilate? What about the Human Rights of the people currently living in a given location? Don't they have the right to accept or reject anyone moving in? Taken to the extreme, are you obligated to let anyone at all move into your house?
Along with the Geneva Convention, the Shengen Agreement which stipulates free movement between Eurozone countries is also failing now. The free movement idea only works in a time of great surplus, but once resources start to run thin, anyone living in a given location is not predisposed to sharing what they have left with anyone else. You can make the case that some places, like Sweden, like Siberia, like Alaska are underpopulated and could support more people, but that is only given copious inputs of fossil fuels. Take away the FFs, these places also are in overshoot. Not as bad overshoot as a place like Syria or Saudi Arabia, but overshoot nonetheless and none of them can possibly accept the millions if not billions of people who will try to migrate to these places over the next couple of decades. The Free Migration idea comes from an era when there were still empty places to move into, and places with people already there were not yet at their full carrying capacity for Homo Saps with a huge energy store to tap. Those days are basically gone now, and going with them are the concepts of Human Rights people have in time of Warfare, which never were adhered to very well in the first place anyhow. Becoming accustomed to this, and to the vast amount of suffering and death that is going to occur in many places is going to become an increasing feature of life as we move on through collapse, and there really is nothing that can be done to manage it very well. Tough times are ahead, and while for the moment the brunt of this problem is hitting MENA and Europe, it's going to expand across oceans and engulf the entire world in due time. There will be drought migrants out of CA and the Great Plains, there will be economic migrants out of Venezuela and Bolivia, there will be failing infrastructure migrants out of Sao Paolo, Detroit and Chicago as time goes by as well. Eventually, even Wall Street and the City of London will have pigmen streaming outward to try and find the Promised Land. There is no promised land left, and what they will run into are people already out there who will not welcome them with open arms, they will welcome them with Gunz & Bullets for a while, and then with Atl-Atls and Cross Bows.
And that's all the Doom, this time until next time, here on the Doomstead Diner.
Although the Geneva Conventions have been around in one form or another since 1864, they never have done a whole heck of a lot of good in any real war zone. In a war zone, nobody studies rule books on "civilized behavior", and whether it was the Concentration Camps of WWII or the Tiger Cages or Vietnam Prison Camps or GITMO, just about nobody ever follows this rule book during wartime.
Nevertheless, the Geneva Conventions are trotted out for Propaganda purposes every time you get a decent size war going, with the attendant "Humanitarian Crisis". The HCs are then trotted out as justification for another type of military intervention, "R2P", or "Responsibility to Protect". In most of these cases, what is being Protected here are not the lives of the innocent, but rather the property and infrastructure of Multi-national Corporations. Protecting the civilians is just a sideshow and cover story.
In the rant, I LOL at what some might think are "innapropriate" moments, like the mass tragedy of refugees stranded at borders or children stuck in War Zones. For myself, I can only laugh or cry when confronted with these events, Tragedy & Comedy are flip sides of the same coin as Shakespeare well knew.
It is a horrific situation already, and the likelihood here is it is only going to get more horrific moving forward. It is all so absurd to me at this point now that I can only laugh at it anymore. If I let the tears overwhelm me, I would lapse into an uncontrolled spiral of depression. It is so sad, so very sad what is going on right now and what lies in the future for Homo Sap. To keep my spirits up, I laugh in the face of death. Still though, I cry on the inside always.
Anyhow, most of us have heard "Geneva Convention" yanked out by the MSM and Politicians either to prosecute someone they don't like on the "bad guy" side of a war or to justify a military intervention, but most of us haven't actually read the rule book. We just know that it's supposed to protect people in war zones, both soldiers and civilians. Unfortunately for all the dead people in the war zone, the Geneva Conventions didn't do them any good and it's doubtful that these documents stopped many atrocities from occuring either. However, you may want to read them for yourself, so here is the pdf outline issued out by the International Red Cross:
There are many problems with these rules I covered in the rant, particularly selective enforcement of the rules and who the rules actually apply to. The "Right to Asylum" is perhaps most in the news these days with the Refugee Crisis ongoing in Europe. However, if some "Authority" decides your country isn't really at war, you are designated an "economic migrant" and you get no right to asylum. What if there are riots in the streets and daily violence in your neighborhood though? What if there are gangs of armed men terrorizing the population? At what point is this violence sufficient to be considered a "war zone"?
The right to asylum also doesn't specify who is supposed to give the asylum, it doesn't address the problem of millions of people fleeing war zones and countries they flee to not having the economic means to support them. At some point these countries start shutting their borders, and then how does someone who has the right to asylum exercise this right?
I'm not the only one to question the effectiveness of the Geneva Conventions, it has been called into question as well by academics researching the problem. From the Washington Post:
...As part of a project on civilian victimization in civil wars, we looked to see whether the signatory states held up their commitment to spare the innocents who were not fighting. We conducted an empirical analysis for the years from 1989 to 2004 for 72 countries based on data on the number of civilian victims in civil wars. Information about the state parties' year of ratification to the treaties related to international humanitarian law and the ICRC's on-site presence and activities were extracted from the ICRC's website and the ICRC annual reports.
Unfortunately, what we found suggests that international humanitarian law is of doubtful effectiveness - and that the ICRC is failing as a watchdog for international humanitarian law....
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