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Comment by isr | Hacker News Reader

Just off the top of my head:

- these boats are not in American waters. They are in their own, or neighbouring countries waters, and are being attacked by vessels whose home waters are 1000s of km's away

- they are not being interdicted (which is illegal kidnapping anyway, see above). They are just being killed. Plain and simple.

To put your argument back to you. Latin American countries who are combating narcotics trading armed paramilitarys, who are mostly getting their arms from US supply chains. So, for example, Mexico is entitled to go into US waters, and "interdict" American-owned boats with US citizens on board? Without any kind of warrant from even the Mexican courts, much less US courts?

Or, scratch that. Mexico just sinks them.

Should be ok, right?

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Your worldview is built on top of the assumptions of liberalism: international law, sovereignty determined by institutions like the UN, etc.

The people who support this are not liberals when it comes to international affairs, even if they might be (but often are not) liberals at home. They know that they're violating international law. But they don't care because they do not value international law as it is currently constructed. They see it as an unjust imposition, made up by a bunch of lawyers and diplomats, that prevents them from securing their own interests.

I understand what you're saying. But, I don't have any "liberal assumptions". The Gaza Holocaust has demonstrated that there really is no such thing as international law, because there's no enforcement against certain parties, because they are deemed too powerful to touch (US empire, essentially).

Note, that's not the world I like to see. It's just the world we have.

But pointing out the outright hypocrisy of certain parties actions, vis a vis international law, natural law, or even "what if we flipped the tables?", is always worthwhile (I hope). Even if it's just shouting into the wind

I mean it's not nearly comparable to the Holocaust either in means or scale or intent or cause or any other dimension, and I reject these rhetorical games that try to get something labelled a certain way to achieve a persuasion outcome.

> Gaza Holocaust

There was only one Holocaust, the Shoah. Even if the Gaza events qualified as a genocide, a label that can be applied to many such events throughout time and place, that is still not a Holocaust.

Well if you're going to argue with words, there was one Holocaust but many holocausts:

> Extensive destruction of a group of animals or (especially) people; a large-scale massacre or slaughter.

However it's discussed if "Holocaust" is a good term to describe the Shoah:

> This use of the term has been criticised because it appears to imply that there was a voluntary religious purpose behind the Nazi actions

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/holocaust

Well stated.

The trouble for these people is that politics has not been openly this way since the cold war because the position is untenable. A group that gets its power by pushing the doomsday clock is ultimately dependent on some counter force putting seconds back.

It’s a frequently met claim right now that the USA killing foreigners that its president deems adversaries on their boats is something unprecedented and beyond the pale, lacking necessary authorization like criminal charges and trials or declaration of war. But one of the very first foreign actions the USA did as a nascent country, still very high on all the eighteenth-century concepts of rights that inspired the American Revolution and Constitution, was send a naval force to kill a bunch of Barbary pirates with charges filed, no trial, and no formal declaration of war by Congress.

Well, we're all aware that the term "gunboat diplomacy" has been in use for centuries.

The Barbary Wars was an interesting case of how multiple naval forces were engaging in piracy etc against each other. Barbary vessels in the Med. British against US shipping (that, and press ganging sailors, was one of the public reason for the 1812 war). And, funnily enough, American privateers doing exactly the same thing to the British colonial shipping in the Caribbean (piracy plus press ganging)

In this current scenario, the only real connection would be that the US are the pirates.

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