Banal Observations on International Law

Plus a modest proposal (does not involve eating babies)

International law covers a lot of stuff, but its true subject matter is war. Other things, like fishing rights or fugitives can, at least in principle, be dealt with by agreements between countries, whereas it doesn’t really make sense for two countries that wish to go to war with each other to first sign a treaty restricting what they will both do. War is the breakdown of international cooperation, and international law is the attempt to impose order on this uncooperation.

The first thing to say about international law is that when you look at its elements in isolation, they don’t correspond to any natural sense of morality and aren’t supposed to. Take Clive. He’s by temperament and opinion a peaceable guy, but was conscripted into the army and is now tasked with guarding a military installation of some sort. Clive is a kind, loving father of 13, volunteers in a soup kitchen, donates all his spare money to charity, and is working in his spare time on a cure for leukemia. But Clive is a legitimate military target, you have fighter jets, and now he’s splatter. On the other hand, Orson is a well-known warmonger, devoted to promoting belligerence and race-hatred among his countrymen, and donating his ill-earned gains to biological weapons research. On top of that, Orson is a multiple recidivist paedophile and unironically listens to Coldplay [!?]. All moral arrows point towards obliterating him, but there’s one snag: he’s a civilian, so you can’t, unless he wanders into an army base you wanted to hit anyway. And even then, if he turns up with enough of his mates, you have to call it off. Of course, being a chickenhawk warmonger is actually even worse than being a warmonger who goes to battle, so Orson deserves to die more even than the guilty soldiers, but it’s too bad. What gives?

What gives is that the purpose of the rules of law isn’t to separate the innocent from the guilty, it’s to limit the extent of the killing. The civilian-combatant distinction, which doesn’t make any moral sense at all, is an incredibly powerful tool for achieving this goal. We see this in the distinction between WW1 and 2. In the first one, an incredible 15-22 million people died, the result of the absolute failure of military elites on both sides either to accurately anticipate the impact of technological changes on war, or to adjust accordingly once it became clear what they were, a failure that justly (if, on the whole, regrettably) led to the irreversible discrediting of the European ruling class ante bellum. On the other hand, WW2, which was characterized by vastly superior tactical and operational competency, and had relatively few drawn out battles, claimed around 75 million lives because of the breakdown of restraints that had formerly bound the participating countries. Was it logical for German and British troops in 1914 to get out of the trenches on Christmas day and play footy? Not very much, but once the intricate network of rituals and customs of which this was one expression collapsed, everyone knows (even if they pretend not to) why they are necessary.

Order and Chaos

The next observation about international law is that, while it protects the civilian vs. the combatant, it absolutely does not protect the weak against the strong. In fact, it does the opposite by reducing the amount of variance in warfare, thus increasing the odds that the more powerful country will win. The more you take out-of-the-box options like anthrax off the table, the more it just comes down to a competition of manpower and money. This is not a flaw in the system, it’s by design. The more predictable the outcome of war is, the less likely it is to happen, because one of the parties has a very strong interest in preventing it. There are stories of renaissance condottieri who, upon seeing they were outmaneuvered, would call off the battle before it had started, compensating their opponent accordingly for his troubles. That’s exactly what we’re looking for.

Indeed, the ideal international law of war would look like this:

1. Both sides agree at no fewer than 3 days in advance when hostilities will commence.

2. The geographical area for hostilities is specified in advance.

3. Both sides can only use weapons listed on an online wiki-document.

That we don’t impose such strict rules is because most nations will not agree to such restrictions on their freedom of action, but the closer we can get to such a framework the better.

It is in this respect that international law most truly expresses its nature as law. There is a well-known 🤯 quotation from Anatole France that goes like this:

The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal loaves of bread

Well, yes. If you don’t want people pooping all over the pavement on your way to work, it is primarily the indigent that need to be restrained from doing so. Bill Gates has a toilet at home. The only way for civil peace to be achieved is if those who have drawn the short straw in life agree, or are compelled to agree, not to try and rectify matters by violence. Despite what massive retards might tell you, Lockean original appropriation never happened and, even if it did, there hasn’t been a train of legitimate transition since then anywhere. The solution to this problem is ‘from time immemorial’ or, more prosaically, ‘get over it’. It is only the submission of the weak to the strong, deserving and underserving alike, that buys the peace in which some of the weak have a chance of a dignified existence.

International law is the same: it is the imposition of a set of codes that makes war less brutal and less likely by codifying the superiority of those who are stronger in terms of conventional military capabilities, i.e. those that are allowed by international law. I realised this with a great degree of clarity a year or so ago when well known idiot and … I guess just idiot, Cenk Uygur was responding to the observation that Hamas fight out of civilian areas:

What was Hamas supposed to do? Go build a military complex in the middle of the desert somewhere in Gaza? Well they would be bombed immediately. So it’s an impossible standard.

Yes. YES. A million times YES! These are exactly the standards that a military in the position of Hamas should be held to. And if they can’t abide by these standards without being blown to bits then they should not fight. No war, no dead people. That’s literally the whole point. But obviously international law isn’t working out that way right now, which brings us to our next point.

The kernel and the husk

There’s a broad global consensus that both Hamas and Israel have committed war crimes on and since Oct 7th 2023. Therefore, the ICC in its majestic equality issued arrest warrants for Yoav Gallant, Benjamin Netanyahu and Mohammed Deif. Now, Mohammed Deif is probably dead, but even if he isn’t, he’s been a Specifically Designated Global Terrorist wanted by America and Israel for many years, and has survived numerous assassination attempts, so the ICC warrant places upon him no new burdens. On the other hand, Yoav Gallant and Bibi Netanyahu do want to be able to meet with global politicians, or blow off some steam at the beach without getting pinched.

Of course, the complaint made by the Left is that the ICC’s application of international law isn’t unequal enough, because AIPAC means the U.S. won’t enforce the warrant and will bully other nations into not doing so either. This is true and it isn’t. There’s some reason to believe that Israel accepted crummy terms in the Lebanon ceasefire in return for the ICC problem going away, but that is not the point here which is that, to whatever extent the ICC’s powers of enforcement are real, they operate solely against Israel. Everything against Hamas is entirely symbolic.

This is a microcosm of the broader problem, which is that international law after WW2 almost immediately became subject to cobra effects, specifically their exploitation by the weaker side in the conflict to tie the hands of the stronger party, thus prolonging wars, and making them more likely to start in the first place.

Let us take the most obvious example, which is that Hamas’ system of tunnels under civilian areas, and systematic embedment among civilian populations makes it impossible for the IDF to attack Hamas without either (a) incurring massive casualties itself or (b) killing a very large number of civilians. There are basically two responses to this problem. The first, that of supporters of Israel, is that’s it’s tough s**t for Gazan civilians. If there is one Hamas terrorist and 6 gorillion Gazan civilians camped out in a chemo ward then it’s bye-bye. The second, that of Israel’s opponents, it’s that it’s tough s**t for the IDF. If there’s six gorillion terrorists and one precious baby in a dugout, then you can’t fire. As obvious flat-effect weirdo Norman Finkelstein - a sort of reductio ad absurdum of Leftist callous altruism - repeats every other sentence half of the population of Gaza are children, and therefore you can’t fire on anyone, anywhere.

As to where the law lies, no-one really knows. Is 3:1, 7:1, 24.9470408493:1 or something else the right civilian to terrorist ratio? It depends on the terrorist, partly, so is there are a terrorist badness rating we can use? Like a lot of things, to a large extent it comes down to paperwork: did you do a review, did you fill in the form, is it correctly formatted?

In practice, the international community gave Israel a decent degree of free license in the first six months of the war, and then started reeling it back as the pictures of smashed up corpses and burnt out wrecks piled up. It’s obvious that this sets a terrible precedent, but most countries figure they will never be in the position Israel is in and, if Europe can pull off pantsuit deportations, then they’re right. Since the whole point of international law is to stop too many people getting killed, it doesn’t make sense to let Israel kill hundreds of thousands of people to stand on an abstract point of principle. This is not wholly true, though, because at some point western countries might need to go to war somewhere, and, in general, it isn’t wise to have rules of law that can be exploited by the other side, if only because it creates an incentive to default once again to the no-rules of the mid 20th century.

The fundamental problem is the same one that faces the conservative or reactionary everywhere. The rules of law are the product of European civilization, one of its many unique and priceless creations, but they have been eaten out from the inside by liberalism until they become parodies of their original form. In truth, it is impossible to say where the civilization ends and the liberalism begins, where order stops and entropy begins. This is because the entropic doctrines are already there at the earliest stages of creation and thus, in a certain sense, liberalism really is the fullest expression of European civilization. On the other hand, in another sense which is just as true, liberalism is both completely retarded and the negation of the civilization that bequeathed it. The pithiest attempt to square this circle, applied to the particular conditions of the United States, is the phrase ‘the Constitution is not a suicide pact’, but this betrays a certain suspicion that the Constitution actually is a suicide pact, which, in fact, it is. But it isn’t just that.

How you go about solving this problem determines which Dissident-Right (or ironic too-cool-for-school ex-Dissident-Right, definitely-not-bitter) faction you identify with.¹² Of course, the simplest response is that the whole concept of limited warfare is itself cucked, goyish, Christian, Jewish, whatever, and we should kill at will. But, no, that’s bad. And that’s where we hit the end of the road for a blog post because the truth is that, as with anything important, resurrecting a true and profound and real concept of international law that isn’t just LARPing is something that would require decades of dedicated study by a great mind, and I’m just some guy spitballing on his day off.

But my general approach is to solve problems one by one, and I do have a specific amelioratory recommendation for the case of Hamas. The basic issue with the debate as it stands is that it hinges on how much to punish Palestinian civilians for Hamas violating the rules. A better method is to revive a precept of the old international law, which is to systematically disincentive membership of militaries that flout the rules by killing them.

Now, you might say ‘isn’t that what Israel is trying to do already?’ Yes and no. During this war alone, according to its own estimates, Israel has captured 6,000 Hamas fighters. What I’m saying is that, provided it can be demonstrated that they are members of Hamas’ military branch, they should all be, for that reason only, executed. Of course, some might be willing to turn snitch and Israel would have the latitude to do whatever deals it wanted under such circumstances, but, as a default rule, being a fighter in an army that uses asymmetric violation of the laws of war as a military tactic should be a death-penalty offence. Some readers, doubtless, will respond that this itself violates international law, and that is pretty much the problem. But right now, however briefly, we’re in one of the West’s periodic thaws where all the libtard orthodoxies are once again up for debate, so I’m floating this one.

1. I’m aware that some normies read this blog, though I could never for the life of me figure out why.

2. For the record, I fully and unconditionally identify with the following group: