Obliteration

The governments of Israel, Turkey and Burma refuse to recognise the rights or even the existence of, respectively, the Palestinian, Kurdish and Rohingya peoples, and these are by no means the only examples. Is there no limit to the human capacity to obliterate inconvenient peoples? This is the backside of nationalism, which for all its popularity is an oppressive ideology. As long as human rights are defined by the 'United Nations', there seems to be no escape. We need concepts based not on nationality but on citizenship, not on nation-states but on jurisdictions, not on the right of nations to self-determination but on the right of people to live unmolested according to their culture in the country of their birth.