Toothless International Human Rights: Genocide in Gaza

It strains credulity to believe that vengeance against the Palestinian residents of Gaza was not among the motives of the Israeli government’s ministers in retaliating for the Hamas attack against occupation on October 7, 2023. Within days, Israel’s president publicly accused every Palestinian in Gaza of being guilty. Because it cannot be assumed that every resident of Gaza who had voted Hamas into office was in favor of the attack, and the residents who had voted for the PLO could even less be assumed to be supportive of Hamas, the Israeli notion of collective justice is ethically flawed. Deficient as a subterfuge for the very human instinctual urge to inflict disproportionate vengeance, the espoused justification did not hold South Africa off from charging Israel with genocide at the International Court of Justice (ICJ). At the time, both South Africa and Israel were parties to the Genocide Convention. Because the ICJ was at the time the principal judicial body of the United Nations, the UN’s lack of enforcement power—notorious even on resolutions passed by the Security Council—meant that even a conviction could send the message that a national government can get away with even genocide.

In its accusation, South Africa claimed that Israel was “in violation of its obligations under the Genocide Convention” in that “acts and omissions by Israel . . . are genocidal in character, as they are committed with the requisite specific intent . . . to destroy Palestinians in Gaza.”[1] At the time (at the end of 2023), over 21.5 thousand people had been killed by Israel in Gaza since October 7, 2023, far outstripping the 1,200 Israelis who had been killed by Hamas and the 240 hostages during that period.[2] The disproportionality alone eviscerates claims of retaliation and thus “justice.” That a significant number of the Palestinians killed were innocents, including children, and 85 percent of the 2.3 million Palestinians there had been left homeless[3] and at least as many without sufficient food and medical care supports South Africa’s claim that “there are ongoing reports of international crimes, such as crimes against humanity and war crimes, being committed as well as reports that acts meeting the threshold of genocide or related crimes as defined in the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide, have been and may still be committed in the context of the ongoing massacres in Gaza.”[4] Also in the final days of 2023, Israel’s finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich publicly accused the “2 million people” in Gaza of aspiring “to destroy the State of Israel” so only a few hundred thousand should be allowed to remain there.[5] Hence, South Africa’s government stated that it was “gravely concerned with the plight of civilians caught in the present Israeli attacks on the Gaza Strip due to the indiscriminate use of force and forcible removal of inhabitants.”[6]

One way to massively decrease population, the use of “indiscriminate bombing” was, according to U.S. President Biden, being used by Israel. Even though the unguided bombs could get at Hamas’ underground tunnels, the use of such bombs, especially in a densely populated urban context, was prohibited by international humanitarian law. American intelligence assessment suggested “that nearly half of the air-to-ground munitions that Israel has used . . . have been unguided.”[7] The Israeli government put out the following statement: “Israel is committed to international law and acts in accordance with it, and directs its military efforts only against the Hamas terrorist organization and the other terrorist organizations cooperating  with Hamas.”[8] Astonishingly, the statement added that Israel had been making “every effort to limit harm to the non-involved and to allow humanitarian aid to enter the Gaza Strip.”[9] This flies in the face of the nearly 2 million residents who had been displaced from their homes and with the extent of starvation. Just weeks before South Africa’s application, thousands of Gaza residents desperate for food had mobbed food-aid trucks in the city of Rafah.[10] Even Israel’s finance minister admitted that Gaza was a ghetto (so decreasing its population was justifiable).[11] Masha Gessen, who won the Hannah Arendt prize for speaking truth to power as Arendt did during the Eichmann trial, wrote that Gaza is “like a Jewish ghetto in an Eastern European country occupied by Nazi Germany.”[12] That Gessen was herself Jewish and had lost ancestors in the Holocaust did not stop her from “catching hell” for her statement. The presidents of Harvard, Penn, and MIT also caught hell for asserting that the context (of the war) could make political speech redressing Israel’s genocide with a corresponding one against Israel protected as free (rather than hate) speech, while Yale caved. Even a Yale alum can tip his hat to Harvard in the hope that Yale might take a lesson rather than fortify its truth, and instead humbly improve.

For its part, the Israeli government was in denial. As South Africa’s charges were made public, the state founded for victims of German atrocities had become a victimizer in striking back with vengeful disproportionality, and yet this was too much for the vengeful to see in their mirrors. The Israeli government’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs played the antisemitic card in claiming that South Africa was “calling for the destruction of the State of Israel,” which was blatantly untrue.[13] For his part, Prime Minister Netanyahu was saying that the attacks would continue for months.[14] Clearly, the Israeli government would dismiss any adverse ruling by the UN’s court on crimes against humanity leveled this time against Israel. For nothing short of a brick wall can arrest such stubbornness, especially when it is fueled by disproportionate vengeance. Yet the UN has shown itself to be utterly feckless, shirking even from standing up to its own members.

The root of the problem that enables a government to commit even a genocide with impunity, or invade another country unprovoked (e.g., Russia) and intentionally bomb civilians, is the absolutist interpretation of national sovereignty, which had come out of the writings of Jean Bodin (c. 1529-1596) in Six Books of the Commonwealth. Given the Reformation-fueled strife of his day, he “was convinced that peace could be restored only if the sovereign prince was given absolute and indivisible power of the state.”[15] The state’s sovereignty was absolute. A century later, Thomas Hobbes carried this political theory further in Leviathan. To be fully sovereign must include having the last say on theological doctrine and Biblical interpretation. Hence, the monarch in Britain is head of the Church of England. In the turbulent sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in Europe, absolute sovereignty was deemed worth the risk of the power being abused in tyrannical rule without any internal check. As for any normative check by other monarchs, none of them would have wanted to see their own absolute sovereignty impinged by an invading prince from another realm.

The norm that a government’s rule is a matter of a country’s internal affairs had survived even into the twenty-first century. The governments of Russia and China had been the most explicit in insisting that this norm be universally accepted. With the advent of human-induced climatic change and modern weapons of mass destruction, however, we might expect the norm to be challenged, but the ongoing impotence of the UN and the want of any serious proposals of reform that would involve national governments giving up some of their sovereignty suggests that the norm still had considerable staying power and would thus require a lot of energy to be dislodged from its privileged status as the status quo default. In other words, even as the harms from unchecked national power have increased tremendously, Bodin’s theory of absolute sovereignty has remained hegemonic.

So the Israeli government could simply enunciate false claims and not really have to worry about anything more than bad public relations from the charges at the International Court of Justice. Even genocide in retaliation for a much lesser, albeit horrific, attack could be protected by the sovereignty of the Israeli government.

The silent culprit may be the diffusion of responsibility globally as the rest of us watch the ongoing dire situation in Gaza (and Ukraine) as if we were paralyzed from demanding that our respective governments cede some authority militarily to the UN or a new international body empowered to enforce its decisions. The governments refusing to go along could be excluded commercially as well as diplomatically from those who have been willing to be held accountable themselves and thus cede some sovereignty in exchange for a voice (and vote) at the global table.

After more than a century of tremendous technological development—my grandfathers, for instance, witnessed the coming of cars, airplanes, radio, television, huge medical advances, and even computers—the retarded condition of political development really stands out—or should stand out—given the increased global interdependence and threats, including the scale of harm that a government can commit by means of military technology. That Nazi Germany could follow the Enlightenment should give us all pause in the trust we place in our governments, including their police and military forces. If we are Kantian rational beings, so too are we capable of tremendous rage that can snuff out what Adam Smith pointed to as the human imagination enabling sympathy for others in a “fellow-feeling.” Both Putin of Russia and Netanyahu of Israel have recourse to tremendous military force and yet arguably little if any sympathy even in the midst of such large-scale, disproportionate suffering. That the two men can get away with continuing to inflict even more suffering as long as they feel like it is reason enough for the defeat of Bodin’s political idea.

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1. Pierre Meilhan, Bethlehem Feleke, and Tamar Michaelis, “South Africa Files Genocide Case Against Israel at International Court of Justice Over Gaza War,” CNN.com, December 29, 2023.
2. Ibid.
3. Waffa Shurafa, Bassem Mroue, and Tia Goldenberg, “Israeli Strikes in Central Gaza Kill at Least 35 as Netanyahu Says War Will Continue for Months,” The Huffington Post, December 30, 2023.
4. Pierre Meilhan, Bethlehem Feleke, and Tamar Michaelis, “South Africa Files Genocide Case Against Israel at International Court of Justice Over Gaza War,” CNN.com, December 29, 2023.
5. Sanjana Karanth, “Senior Far-Right Israeli Official Admits Gaza Is A ‘Ghetto’ for Palestinians,” The Huffington Post, December 31, 2023.
6. Pierre Meilhan, Bethlehem Feleke, and Tamar Michaelis, “South Africa Files Genocide Case Against Israel at International Court of Justice Over Gaza War,” CNN.com, December 29, 2023.
7. Ibid.
8. Ibid.
9. Ibid.
10. “Chaotic Scenes as People Run after Lorries Carrying Aid in Gaza,” BBC, December 27, 2023.
11. Sanjana Karanth, “Senior Far-Right Israeli Official Admits Gaza Is A ‘Ghetto’ for Palestinians,” The Huffington Post, December 31, 2023.
12. David Mouriquand, “Author Masha Gessen Receives German Prize Despite Comments Comparing Gaza to Nazi-era Ghettos,” Euronews, December 18, 2023.
13. Pierre Meilhan, Bethlehem Feleke, and Tamar Michaelis, “South Africa Files Genocide Case Against Israel at International Court of Justice Over Gaza War,” CNN.com, December 29, 2023.
14. Waffa Shurafa, Bassem Mroue, and Tia Goldenberg, “Israeli Strikes in Central Gaza Kill at Least 35 as Netanyahu Says War Will Continue for Months,” The Huffington Post, December 30, 2023.
15. “Jean Bodin,” Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

On Calls for a Genocide of the Jews: Harvard vs Yale

A university administration can be susceptible to creating an unlevel playing field in the name of truth but with political ideology in the driver’s seat.  Amid controversial political disputes wherein ideology is salient and tempers are flaring, free speech can be arbitrarily and prejudiciously delimited as academic freedom is eclipsed by ideological intolerance. More abstractly put, the ideology of an organization’s dominant coalition can be stultifying. During the fall 2023 semester at Yale, for example, I attended a lecture at which the lecturer, a faculty member, held his own topic hostage by deviating to an unfounded ideological presumption of systemic racism in Hollywood. The leap in his assumption evinced an ideological agenda capable of blocking even his intellectual reasoning, and the resulting irrational intolerance easily impaired the academic freedom of the students to even question the unfounded assumption or ask what had happened to the advertised topic. Whether the label is systemic racism or antisemitism, the highly-charged application thereof into a political dispute can be act as a weapon to weaken or block outright an unliked political position and thus unfairly limit free speech and even academic freedom. I have in mind here calls for a genocide of the Jews as Gaza ceasefire rallies were occurring on college campuses. Which is more fitting: university codes of conduct against hate-speech or the protection of free speech, which is vital to academic freedom and a university’s academic atmosphere? In other words, are such calls more accurately classified as hate-speech or political speech?

The full essay is at "Genocide of the Jews."

European Federalism: Beyond “Sticks and Stones"

Domestic governance is perhaps more difficult than international relations in that real enforcement mechanisms are in force only in the former. Flaunt a UN resolution and that feckless organization is unchanged; if a state official flaunts a federal law, on the other hand, the viability of the federal system can collapse as governors and legislators in other states get the same idea. Before long, the states are once again sovereign. Unfortunately, it is easy to get distracted by political theater and miss such existential threats from the point of view of the viability of a system of public-sector governance. Yet we depend so much on governments, so to tamper with necessary beams (or cards, as in a house of cards) is quite dangerous. Along with the governors of Hungary and Slovakia, Poland’s top official knowingly compromised the viability of the European Union (E.U.) in 2023, but, unfortunately, I don’t think many people stood up and paid attention to the danger. Political theater staged for election purposes is more tantalizing, which raises the question: who in the E.U. was watching the proverbial store?

In response to Ukraine’s President Zelensky’s depiction of Poland’s government as engaging in “political theater” in making a “thriller” in objecting to the E.U.’s lifting the ban on Ukraine crops traveling through and being bought in the union, Poland’s Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki to the Ukrainian “never to insult Poles again.”[1] To remark that a politician, especially one up for re-election, is using hyperbole to appease Polish farmers for electioneering purposes is not to insult the Polish farmers or the Polish people as a people. So it is outlandish, not to mention a bit strange, that Poland’s prime minister told journalists, “The Polish people will never allow this to happen, and defending the good name of Poland is not only my duty and honor, but also the most fundamental task of the Polish government.”[2] If so, then the Polish people had a terribly reckless judgment concerning the rationale for war and the prime minister lapsed terribly in not knowing that the primary responsibility of a government is to protect a people from being attacked from abroad. Retaliating for one insult is not generally viewed by political theorists as a legitimate (and even smart) reason to go to war. Furthermore, “Never insult us again!” strikes me as childish. Were Zelensky to resort to that jejune mentality, he might have replied, sticks and stones may break your bones but names will never hurt you, and then stuck out his tongue just for effect.

One of the benefits of representative democracy is that reflection by elected representatives who enjoy the buffer of a term in office can hold statescraft off from the momentary excitements of a mob. Both Plato and Aristotle viewed the mob as the bad form of democracy. To Plato, reason in a just person and polis controls the appetites, or emotions. Indeed, structures of governance, both public and private, are instituted in order to subject flaring passions to reasoned-out routes. As a E.U. state, Poland committed an egregious error when Morawiecki refused to recognize the federal (i.e., E.U.) change of policy lift the ban on Ukrainian grains in the E.U. In this respect, the prime minister’s political tactics could compromise the viability of the E.U. as a system of public-sector governance (i.e., a system of government). The E.U. is hardly alone; the U.S. has also been susceptible to resistance from the governments of member states.

In 1832, the legislature of South Carolina decided that it could lawfully void any federal law from being valid within South Carolina; it was a matter of that republic defending its interests. President Andrew Jackson sent troops to the wayward member state, whose government had even drawn up an “exit” document, which was used in 1861 to exit the U.S. In 2023, Alabama ignored the U.S. Supreme Court decision affirming “a lower court that had ordered the state to redraw its seven-seat congressional map to include a second majority-Black district or ‘something quite close to it.’”[3] After the decision in June, the Alabama legislature “again approved a congressional map with only one majority-Black district.”[4] Just as the history of the E.U. has included instances in which state governments, and even state supreme courts, have ignored decisions by the European Court of Justice, the government of Alabama was saying, in effect, that rulings by the U.S. Supreme Court could be ignored. Considering that this was hardly an open question, considerable gall as well as denial went into the recalcitrance of the state officials. The judges of the lower court whose ruling the U.S. Supreme Court reaffirmed wrote, “We are deeply troubled that the State enacted a map that the State readily admits does not provide the remedy we said federal law requires.”[5] Flouting federal law is no small matter, as the supremacy of the federal judiciary in adjudicating on federal law had long been established by U.S. Supreme Court Justice Marshall’s ruling in Marbury v. Madison (1803).

In 2023, the governors of the E.U. states of Poland, Hungary, and Slovakia announced that they would continue to ban Ukrainian wheat even though the E.U. had just lifted the ban. Specifically, the European Commission rejected the state bans on Ukrainian grains, dairy, sugar, fruit, vegetables and meats.[6] A spokesperson for the Commission said, “In this context, it is important to underline that trade policy is of EU exclusive competence and, therefore, unilateral actions are not acceptable.”[7] Yet those states persisted. In fact, Slovakia and Bulgaria enacted bans! In so doing, all of those states weakened Ukraine, which was defending its territory against the Russian invasion.  The states indirectly aided President Putin.

Because the E.U., like the U.S., was aiding Ukraine militarily, the illegal state bans thwarted E.U. foreign policy too. The E.U. had “decided to suspend duties and quotas on a long list of Ukrainian exports . . . , including many agricultural goods, in a bid to help the war-torn country cope with the economic fallout from Russia’s war and facilitate trade for Ukrainian farmers.”[8] So at the federal level, the decision taken involved an acknowledgement that helping Ukraine as a matter of foreign policy to thwart Russian aggression would entail economic costs within the E.U.

The governors of Poland, Hungary, Slovakia, Romania, and Bulgaria had jointly written a letter to E.U. President von der Leyen, “If market distortions causing damage to farmers in our [states] cannot be eliminated by other means, we ask the Commission to put in place appropriate procedures to reintroduce tariffs and quotas on imports from Ukraine.”[9] As states being directly represented at the federal level in the European Council, the recalcitrant five were obliged to abide by federal law rather than be sore losers when their joint request was denied. For each state had agreed to cede some sovereignty to the E.U. even in the federal qualified-majority-voting procedure itself—not to mention the exclusive competencies, such as trade—so to continue as semi-sovereign states and yet act if those states were sovereign state, just as South Carolina had done and Alabama would do, is nothing short of duplicitous and egoist.  

A federal system simply cannot function viably if every state can decide for itself whether a certain federal law is valid within the state’s boundaries. Such a federal system would reduce to a confederation, in which governmental sovereignty resides with the members (i.e., states). Just as the U.S. discovered from 1776 to 1789 in the Articles of Confederation and the E.U. was discovering in 2023 both with regard to raising money and enforcing federal law, a confederal system has too many vulnerabilities to be viable except internationally. With a bicameral legislature (i.e., the Parliament and Council of the E.U.), an executive branch (i.e., the Commission), and a supreme court (i.e., the European Court of Justice), the E.U. is not an international body; rather, like the U.S., both national and international principles of governance are included in the system.

So even though not nearly as childish as making threats on the basis of an insult erroneously inferred to be against the people, Poland’s refusal to recognize a federal law is much more significant than even whether Poland would permit Ukrainian wheat to pass through (or be bought within) the state, and definitely more important than whether someone insults the Poles. When I was a kid in America, telling Polish jokes was a stable. In hindsight, it seems so silly, and only a fool gets upset over childish things. Certainly, heads of governments should not. Chief executives of governments, and CEOs for that matter, should not talk to each other as if drunk in a bar. Dick Fuld of Lehman Brothers swore like a sailor and was very immature in his “empire building” of real estate, and his emotional immaturity was one reason why the investment bank collapsed. Governments, however, cannot simply collapse, and so people who represent others have a responsibility to talk like adults rather than children. Being an adult includes being willing to submit to constraints, such as federal laws, and even international law were they to be given any enforcement power.

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[1] Maija Ehlinger and Mariya Knight, “Never ‘Insult Poles Again,’ Poland’s Prime Minister Tells Ukraine’s Zelensky,” CNN.com (September 23, 2023).
[2] Ibid.
[3] Ariane de Vogue and Fredreka Schouten, “Supreme Court Rejects Alabama’s Attempt to Avoid Creating a Second Black Majority Congressional District,” CNN.com, September 26, 2023 (accessed September 30, 2023).
[4] Ibid.
[5] Ibid.
[6] Robert Greenall, “EU Rejects Ukraine Grain Bans by Poland and Hungary,” BBC.com, April 17, 2023 (accessed September 30,2023).
[7] Jorge Liboreiro and Sandor Zsiros, “’Not Acceptable’: EU Decries Bans on Tariff-free Ukrainian Grain Imposed by Neighboring Countries,” Euronews, April 17, 2023 (accessed September 30, 2023).
[8] Ibid.
[9] Ibid., italics added.

Oppenheimer

An artificial sun rose on an otherwise dark night when the nuclear-bomb test named Trinity ushered in the era wherein our species’ aggressive instinct could render homo sapiens extinct. Given the salience of that instinctual urge—for we are related to the chimpanzee species—the wise (i.e., sapiens) species can be its own undoing. For it took a lot of intelligence in sub-atomic physics to invent the nuclear bomb, yet very little smarts went into deciding to use it against Japan, an enemy that would have lost anyway, in order to save American lives from having to invade the mainland (as if conventional bombs could not have reduced the casualties). Even less thought was put into the need to contain the proliferation of nuclear bombs. Expediency without heeding long-term risk is not a virtue. Kant wrote that even if our species were to institute a world federation, presumably having nation-states that would be semi-sovereign as a check against global totalitarianism, peace would merely be possible, rather than probable. This does not speak well of human nature, and this in turn renders the Trinity test something less than redeeming. “Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds,” In the film, Oppenheimer (2023), Robert Oppenheimer reads from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad Gita, as a woman is on top of him in sexual intercourse. The irony of him being an instrument of mass destruction as director of the Manhattan Project and yet being engaged in potentially reproducing life with a woman is doubtlessly the point of that scene. Hindus who leap to the conclusion that Nolan is insulting their religion miss this point. Had the director included a scene in which Oppenheimer is praying, for example for the Jews in Nazi Germany at the time, a quote from the film, Gettysburg (1993) would have been similarly fitting. In that film, Col. Chamberlain of the Union army remarks, “What a piece of work is man . . . in action how like an angel!” Sgt. Kilrain replies, “Well, if he’s an angel, all right then . . . But he damn well must be a killer angel.” In the nuclear age, killer angel takes on added significance. The question is perhaps whether we have left angel behind as our species’ intelligence has outdone itself, whether in terms of developing nuclear weapons or heedlessly emitting so much carbon that the Earth could someday be unsuitable for us. Or, can we catch up by inventing antidotes? 

The full essay is at "Oppenheimer."

Applying Justice to Nazi Jurists in the Context of the Cold War

Judgment at Nuremberg (1961) is a serious film that enables the viewers to wrestle with the demands of justice for atrocities enabled by German jurists in NAZI Germany and the post-war emerging Cold War between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R., for which the American military needed the support of the German people against the Soviet Union. The film accepts the need of such support as being vital in 1947, when the actual trial took place (the film has it as 1948). To the extent that acceptance of this assumption is deemed spurious, the viewers would likely view the tension as being between the need for justice, a virtue, and expediency, a vice. Accordingly, the pressure from an American general on the prosecutor to recommend light sentences so not to turn the German people against the Americans and thus from helping them in the Cold War can be viewed as being astute political calculation in the political realist sense of international relations, or else undue influence or even corruption of a judicial proceeding. 

The full essay is at "Judgment at Nuremberg."

Turkey’s President Enables Euroskeptic Ideologues

The European Union is not a military alliance, like NATO or the ancient Spartan League. Nor is the E.U. merely a free-trade agreement like NAFTA. In terms of the history of federalism, the E.U. instantiates “modern federalism,” wherein governmental sovereignty is split between federal and state levels, rather than confederalism, wherein all such sovereignty is retained by the states. Both the U.S. and E.U. instantiate modern federal systems, although ironically the U.S. was originally a confederal system of sovereign states. In likening the E.U. to NATA in 2023, President Erdogan of Turkey unwittingly committed a category mistake. This in turn weakened his attempt to leverage his power in approving Sweden as a country in NATO with his demand that the E.U. admit Turkey as a state.

Just prior to the NATO meeting in June, 2023, Erdogan stated at a news conference, “First, let’s clear Turkey’s way in the European Union, then let’s clear the way for Sweden, just as we paved the way for Finland.”[1] Becoming a state in a political union, whether it is the U.S. or E.U., is qualitatively different than joining a military alliance. Joining the latter does not involve a transfer of some governmental sovereignty to a federal executive branch (e.g., the E.U. Commission), legislative branch (e.g., the Council of the E.U. and the E.U. Parliament), and judicial branch (e.g., the European Court of Justice). A state in such a federal system is qualitatively different than a country being in a military alliance because an alliance itself has no governmental institutions and sovereignty.

To characterize a state in a union and a country in a military alliance both as “member states” is misleading. In fact, efforts to do so may stem from an ideological “state’s rights” (or Euroskeptic) effort to deny that the E.U. is in fact an instance of modern federalism rather than confederalism. In remarking that “almost all NATO member countries are European member countries,” Erdogan unwittingly fell into the trap of the ideologues who refuse to recognize that the E.U. and U.S. fall within the same genre of unions of states (i.e., modern federalism rather than confederalism).[2] Because the term country implies full sovereignty, both E.U. and U.S. members are states in the sense of being semi-sovereign political units in a federal system. The U.S. states are members of the U.S., because they joined the U.S. from being formerly sovereign countries (or assumed to have been of such status) and the members of the U.S. Senate, which is based on international rather than national law. The Council of the E.U. is also founded on international principles, wherein political units rather than citizens are the members.

It follows that the countries that are members of UNESCO, the UN, and other international organizations are not states thereof, and should not be referred to as member states. To do so in an attempt to imply that the E.U., unlike the U.S., is also an international organization flies in the face of the very existence of the E.U. Commission, the European Court of Justice, and the European Parliament. International organizations do not have legislatures and high courts and executive branches to implement law and federal judicial rulings. That the Euroskeptic ideology denies this just shows the downside of ideology in general as being intellectually dishonest as regards empirical facts. To want to remake things as they presently are is one thing; to claim or insinuate that things are already different than they are is quite another. I contend that the Turkish president fell into the trap laid by the intellectually dishonest ideologues in Europe.

1. Hande A. Alam and Christian Edwards, “Erdogan Links Sweden’s NATO Bid to Turkey Joining the EU,” CNN.com, July 10, 2023.
2. Ibid.

Putin's Fear: Autocratic War Triggering a Russian Revolution

Having watched Oliver Stone's lengthy interviews of Vladimir Putin, President of the Russian Federation, which had been taped several years before Russia's invasion of Ukraine, I noticed something very different about the autocrat's demeanor in a video made after a year of the war: his shifty eyes.[1] It was not difficult to infer that the former KGB spy's trained suspiciousness of people had intensified. At the very least, the man looked pensive or nervous. A few weeks earlier, an anti-Putin Russian group may have been responsible for flying a drone over the Kremlin to blow up the dome, and even more recently such a group may have attacked militarily on Russian soil elsewhere. Putin may have been afraid of being assassinated. It is even possible that he had realized that a full-blown revolution could happen. 

Days after an anxious Putin had sat down with the head of Russia's constitutional court, the head of the mercenary military Wagner group, which fights for Russia, warned that if Russia continued to suffer more casualties, "all these divisions can end in what is a revolution, just like in 1917."[2] It is highly improbable that Vladimir Putin would release power as easily as the weak Russian emperor Peter III did after just six months of his reign when Russian troops loyal to Catherine enacted a coup even though she was German and the Russians had been fighting a war against Fredrick's Prussia. 

Whereas the Russian revolution in 1917 was in line with Russia's autocratic-state historical culture, a revolution against Putin could be in democratic direction because Putin had squandered the opening for democracy in the 1990's by incrementally tightening his reigns until it could be said that he had become a dictator. Russians were being locked up during the war just or calling the conflict a war; protests against the war were firmly put down by police wielding clubs. Police initiating violence against non-violent people, as if they were disobedient dogs, naturally triggers the impulse for democratic accountability rather than for tightened autocracy. While this impulse was up against a formidable cultural headwind when absolute monarchy was the norm in the world, the world in 2023 provided the prospective Russian revolutionaries with enough functioning democratic republics abroad for there to be a tailwind in moving in a democratic direction. 

Of course, I am biased in that I was born and raised in a democratic system in which the ideology was instilled in me even when I was a child. Even so, I have not read of a country in which its dictatorship has been held accountable from within the system of government. Furthermore, Rousseau had a good argument against dictatorships in claiming that we are born free but live our lives in chains. The liberty is innate whereas the chains are artificial, hence, I submit, a natural right can be derived. 

1. "Putin's Latest Move Includes a Map of the 17th Century," CNN, May 23, 2023 (accessed May 24, 2023)

2. Rob Picheta and Mariya Knight, "Wagner Chief Warns Russians Could Revolt If Invasion Continues," May 24, 2023. (accessed same day)