I find the issue a bit more complex. If keeping a Greek statue is indefensible, what about land in North America?
Israel's seizure of land at the Six Day War seems to be the exact point at which nobody can agree. It's the last of the settler states.
Greece, Iran, Italy, Mongolia, Turkey, Russia, and Ukraine all have potential claims.
If annexation by force is no longer a legitimate means of acquiring land, then it is reasonable to say that it was never legitimate. If it is, then going to war to take territory is still possible. But there really is no fair way to declare a fixed epoch and say that forceful annexation was only legitimate in the prior era, and is now unacceptable in the following era.
Either conquest is still okay, or it never was.
If it never was, you must be prepared to support repatriation claims from aboriginal peoples until the end of time. Perhaps there is a case for establishing adverse possession for land sovereignty. If you can take it and keep control of it for 20 years, your claim is presumed valid.
And it could give national rivals a nice, limited territorial war every 18 years or so, to feed their military industrial complexes through hard times, when the world is just too peaceful to make a profit.~
There's something to be said for systems that, more-or-less, are practical and work without making perfect logical sense or being perfectly self-consistent.
Building a perfect legal regime has a lot in common with building a perfect software application.
I believe the parent's argument was that land seizure by any country which has signed the UN charter after they've signed the charter is not legitimate.
It may not have been legitimate before, but signing the charter saying you agree it's not legitimate does put a nice line in the sand.
Sibling poster is correct. International law is basically that you can do whatever you want if you have the strength to back it up without backing down. Meaning that conquest is still de facto okay, even if you signed the charter to make it de jure not-okay. And as long as it's still okay, all those conquered peoples that lost their land can go pound... well, I don't know what they can pound, since the sand doesn't belong to them any more.
I think the legitimacy of US sovereignty over its land (or Canadian or Australian etc) is also strengthened by the fact that it is a representative democracy, so to some degree its management of the land is carried out on behalf of all of its citizens, including the descendants of natives. If the US were governed by an aristocracy of descendants of settlers, as in Apartheid South Africa, then that would be clearly unjust to me.
edit: to be clear, I think that native populations in all these countries have legitimate grievances today, I just wouldn't go so far as to say that all their original land is still rightfully theirs.
As I understand it, most north American indiginous groups had very little concept of realty.
Moreover, in this context, it's a specious argument.
Here ya go: https://www.google.com
As I understand it, most north American indiginous groups had very little concept of realty.
But they did understand war, and the taking of land/territory from one another. The idea that the indians were all kind of peace-loving pacifist hippies is a historical revision.
It will come as news to some people who don't read anything published earlier than the 1960's, but many indian tribes were proud warriors, and routinely fought and conquered other tribes.
There were also indian tribes that were shunned (for example, the Karankowa (sp?) in Texas who were known for being cannibals), and those who were considered backwater misfits (for example, Moapa Paiute).
The indian tribes were much more interesting and varied than modern history teaches.
Of course they were violent and murderous: they are human beings. They did not, however, commit genocide in the pursuit of property.
Please keep this sort of rude trick off HN.