It’s sweet when honest international law people feel hurt each time they notice the hypocrisy, with each new signal that the whole edifice might be mostly just a self-justifying vocabulary of the powerful to validate their power and privilege rather than, well, law - rules that can demand adherence because they offer protection in return. International law demands obedience without offering protection. Its actual constituents, the audience that international law thinkers and practitioners imagine when they write, are not the vulnerable of the world, but rather the powerful, safe and moralizing. It lacks the feedback loop of genuine law, the ability of those it claims to protect to tell it when it is failing. It is an ideology of moral validation, a political language with political and psychological goals. It is not, in the sense that ordinary people conceive of the word, law. And Assad, sweet, murderous Assad, clarifies just how cartoonishly lost the whole project really is. Would that we could actually have the sort of international law that the decent ones among them hope and yearn for. I’m not criticizing Veronica’s morals or values. Not at all. Her only crime seems to be hoping against hope for a better world. I’m only criticizing the naïveté inherent in putting so much trust in self-righteous western ideologues. https://bird.makeup/@verobellin/1863347260492329418
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