[By Alison Pyle]
The right to exist
Is something all people are endowed with
By virtue of birth and a shared humanity
The right to exist
Is not endowed upon states
They are merely the mechanism
To ensure individuals’ rights to exist
Who determines the right to exist?
In practice, it is the state
Morally, it is a principle of humanity
State power is a mechanism
To ensure individuals right to exist
State power may destroy the right to life
Humanity may object and fight legally
To hold to account the injustices
Against the individuals’ right to exist
The state itself has no right to exist
States change under its forms of rule
States promote ideologies and practices
None of which have inalienable rights
As these ideologies are worthy of criticism
The actions of a state are worthy of critique
States are malleable mechanisms of power
Never ever entities with rights to exist forever
Like people, states are judged for their actions
Their choices and their deeds
States guided by an ideology
May be criticised for the actions borne out
Of the ideological concepts they promote
As such, states may be deconstructed
To promote a different ideology
To argue a state does not have a right to exist
Is not to deny the rights of individuals to exist
The right to exist is the right of all individuals to
The right to exist does not apply to the state
States come and go
As ideology moves on
Ideas change over time
The mechanism to act on those ideas
Will come and go
Those mechanisms have no right to exist