A Clean House?

Trump just flipped off the International Criminal Court, ICC for short. Which is not to be confused with the International Cricket Council, which is a very different thing. They are the safeguards against crimes against humanity, the supposedly real-life Justice League. The International Criminal Court that is; not the International Cricket Council, because that’d be silly. And the Orange Hydra just flipped them off last Thursday, and his foreign policy-guy, Pompeo(us), threatened sanctions against individuals within the court.

So what?

So… war crimes are bad, m’kay? Although it might take some philosophical wrangling to come to the conclusion that there can be agreed-upon rules to something so barbaric as war, it doesn’t take a lot of effort to agree that some jerky stunts are just simply BM and shouldn’t be condoned. Firing at people with 50 cal., using chemical weapons, targetting civilian populations, rape-and-pillage tactics, all a real bad look for humanity at large. Certainly behaviour that run tantamount to whatever we consider the civilized human creature to be. And just after the “War to end all wars”, and then one that came right after that, we all sat down and agreed on what methods of mass murder we would keep and which we would punt into history. Seemed like a good plan. Everyone agreed. And that was that.

Well, at least right up unto the point where people started doing all the real bad things again, not being satisfied to stick with the just-sort-of-bad things we agreed to keep doing to each other. And thus, the ICC was founded. To round up whatever cretins broke our rules of war, try them, and sentence them.

Turns out, there are few certain someones in the world that never ratified the ICC’s authority back in the day. The US is one such nation, despite the fact that the US was instrumental in forging the ICC in its work with the Nuremberg trials, which may have been the watershed moment for an international court of law. But the US has never subjected themselves to the court they helped start.

So, why is this a problem now, that the Orange Hydra has to address it? Well, one might assume that he’s trying to rally support from his military, a military increasingly disgusted with their commander in chief, as it’s being deployed in Sith-like style against its own population. Or maybe he’s just using the controversy to shift focus away from his sinking domestic political ship. Or maybe it’s the fact that an ICC prosecutor and investigator is getting mighty curious about the US activities in Afghanistan post-9/11. Either case, just as the ICC are finally beginning to investigate Team America, World Police, for war crimes, Trump tries to levy economic sanctions against affiliated individuals.

What’s the defence? Well, according to the Orange House, the ICC has become politicized. That the Court subverts American sovereignty (despite the fact that alleged war crimes were committed in a dubious invasion against a foreign sovereignty). That the ICC is just intended to mete out justice in failed states; states that cannot be trusted to keep their own house clean. Basically, the Orange House is levelling the same kinds of criticisms against the ICC like any authoritarian bully would, echoing the tantrumtastic mewlings that you might expect from countries such as China, North Korea, or Russia.

Abu Ghraib prison, Iraq, early 2000’s: A US-run detention camp in the forge-hot aftermath of 9/11, where prisoners were tortured, raped, sodomized, and murdered by the US servicemen and women stationed there. A travesty after which 17 soldiers and officers where removed from duty and court-martialed. Two of which were sentenced to prison. But only after the conditions at Abu Ghraib broke publicly. Even though internal memos surfaced, that had been reviewed by the contemporary US president Bush Jr. that explicitly described and sanctioned above mentioned “enhanced interrogation methods”.

A little township, Yemen, 2011: Anwar Nasser al-Awlaki is killed by a US drone strike. Cause of death is listed as “AGM-114 Hellfire”. Just another name stricken from the dreaded kill-list that the US had begun after 9/11, but which only grew and grew with each military assassination. All done under the cover of the unassailable “War on Terror”. What was so different with al-Awlaki? He was a US citizen. Born in 1971, Las Cruces, New Mexiko. He was never tried in a court of law. He was never judged by his peers. The US government has never provided proof of al-Awlaki’s relationship with any terrorist organization. And the national hero Barack Obama personally signed the kill order, despite years of judicial protests that killing a US citizen without a trial would disqualify the very tenets that the nation was built on. Two weeks later, al-Awlaki’s son, Abdulrahman, born in Denver, Colorado, was also killed. 6 years later, Obama’s successor, Donny Trump, would order the murder of al-Awlaki’s then 8-year old daughter. Another name scratched off the infamous kill-list.

Balad, Iraq, 2005: 19 year-old LaVena Lynn Johnson, private first class of the US Army, was found dead in her tent at the army barracks. The coroner’s report stated that she had a broken nose, black eye, loose teeth, a gun-shot wound, and her genitals had been burned away with corrosive chemicals. The US Department of Defence ruled LaVena’s death as “suicide”, closed the case, and moved on with their day.

America. Would you say that you keep a clean house?

/Sebastian Lindberg 15/6-2020

The Terrorist Stigmata

Last week, New Zeeland was rocked by a mass murder, motivated by white supremacy and religious fear. A man stormed through two mosques, firing indiscriminately through the crowds. Killing, as of the time of writing, fifty people. The world calls it an act of terrorism.

Debates in the States follow, forming around how people perceive terrorism. About the fact that most deaths in terrorist attacks are perpetrated by white supremacists or domestic nationalists. Not the dreaded jihadists that the American war machine has made their public enemy number one. A war machine that spends unprecedented resources on targetting remote extremists abroad. Not to mention murdering domestic citizens without due process.

In the domain of the eastern dragon, the Chinese empire is hard at work to suppress and dismantle the predominantly Muslim Uighur ethnic minority in the Xinjiang province. Amnesty, the UN, and Reuters, among others, report that over a million people have been detain to ”re-education camps” across Xinjiang. China indignantly answer international criticism about their Uighur incarcerations by claiming that they are fighting Muslim extremism. Jihadism. That this, the persecution of the ethnic group in what was once known as Chinese Turkmenistan, is a Chinese ”war on terror”.

In the beginning of the 20^th century, the anarchist was the public enemy number one. Revolutionaries and political dissidents were hunted down by governments across the world. Their acts did not define them as much as the label. As soon as one was stamped with the epitaph of ”anarchist”, your actions became irrelevant. Same thing carried on during the McCarthy communist hunts in the States. The fire brand with which you demonized and marginalized your enemies had then become ”the communist”, rather than ”the anarchist”.

Today, it’s ”the terrorist”.

But as we can clearly see, the intentions of this term, this brand, is not the same as its meaning. Or its definition: ”Inciting political change through violence and the threat thereof, causing fear and terror”.

The brand ”terrorist” serves no other purpose than to stigmatize. To trivialize whatever reasons the individuals may have for inflicting violence upon the world. Equating them with raving madmen. Lunatics. Rabid dogs without rhyme or reason. You don’t have to like them, or sympathize with them, but calling a violent belligerent a ”terrorist” has become nothing but a pointless slur. A slur popularized in modern discourse by the rotting hegemony of the United States of America, a nation founded on the principles of violent insurrection and political change through fear and might.

For there is no discernable difference in practical terms between the ”terrorist” and the ”political revolutionary”. Which is why I think the term should be scrapped. At least in its modern use. For it offers us nothing that the much more refined concepts of ”supremacist”, ”fundamentalist”, or quite simply ”revolutionary” already gives us. And the primary reason why all of those potentially disparate qualities have been rounded up under the umbrella slogan of “terrorist” is for sovereign powers to use it as an excuse for persecution and wanton murder.

Nation states will always have enemies. Civilian and otherwise. So long as we have nation states, those states will want to remove threats to their existence. This is nothing new, and will not change any time soon. It’s fine! But we, the citizenry, do not need to listen or regurgitate the nation states’ rationalizations and excuses. Whether we agree with their behaviour or not, we should always be wary of their efforts to legitimize their actions by trying to control the narrative.

The Christchurch massacres are a tragedy. Just as the Nice truck attack of 2016 was a tragedy. Or the great turning point for the current age of warfare without borders, the World Trade attack in 2001, for that matter. But by marginalizing the intentions, reasons, and people behind those attacks, by stigmatizing them as terrorists and vermin to be snuffed out by any means necessary, you let the people in positions of power to weave straw men out of those tragedies. Making use of them to validate their predations upon the world and even their own citizens. Turning these supposedly hallowed events instead into travesties.

And both the victims, the survivors, and the world at large deserves better than that.

/Sebastian Lindberg 19/3-2019