Period 5-Andrew's Reflection

The Chinese repression of Tibet tells me that human rights are often put down in place of national or personal goals. This also shows that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights issued by the United Nations can not be reinforced in all situations due to the reluctance of the United Nations to violate nation sovereignty. The United Nations lack the real power needed to enforce their laws. Individual countries in the United Nations have power but will not work together to enforce the international laws like the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

I feel that the leaders of China made the wrong move by violating Tibet’s nation sovereignty and by killing, through starvation and displacement, thousands of people. However, I also firmly believe that China is right to keep the United Nations from doing anything inside the borders of Tibet now that it is controlled by China. National sovereignty should be placed above everything else or the United Nations or other powers could begin readopting the barbaric imperialistic notion of “helping” countries while just taking them over.

Nobody, including the United Nations, should be allowed to violate nation sovereignty. Any and all activities against what the government of a nation is doing must be restricted to an outside area and only a nation’s agents should be allowed to enter the nation’s borders. All negotiations should be held in a previously agreed upon neutral territory where neither of the powers in dispute has any hold or presence prior to the commencement of the meeting.

The idea of Humanism is a true belief but the fact remains that some things are simply more important than individual humans. During the Holocaust the people running the concentration and death camps believed that their lives and their country were more important than human lives. The Chinese also believe in something more important than human lives. In Germany the idea was wrong. Themselves and their government were not more important than the lives of the individual people they were killing. In China the government is protecting the invaluable principle of nation sovereignty. They have a justified reason in that, if there was another series of imperialistic takeovers many hundreds of thousands of people more than they were killing could die.

Nothing should be more important to a government than nation sovereignty apart from the survival of the human race. And no one should have the power to violate that nation sovereignty at will.