The act of fabulating victims and circumstances in already heinous deeds, as you note about Srebnica, is something common in a lot of "moralized" and "sanitized" historical tall tales used by verbal clubs. Massacring military age males, or even soldiers, is a heinous criminal act--no one should think SS massacring American and Canadian POWs in 1944 or NKVD massaring Polish officer prisoners at Katyn were OK just because their victims were military personnel, for example. As you observe, inventing victims and circumstances that don't exist actually weakens the cases and discredits the institutions engaged in such accusations when the claims are cross referenced with the facts. Yet, this is everywhere, not just in Western tales about the alleged brutes in, well, whatever: I've seen wild claims about alleged American war crimes in Korea and Vietnam, alleged regime atrocities in such and such historical occasions after political upheavals, supposed atrocities by various invaders and colonizers, and such. Many dubious allegations with a certain kernel of truth inflated multifold with generous helpings of tall tales.
I tend to think there are two dimensions to this: I think this reflects the fact that vast majority of us are latent war criminals ourselves, who wouldn't think twice about massacres and torture being visited in the "deservingly bad" people and are moreover perceptive enough that the others might think the same. So Serb militiamen massacring military age males "makes" sense to us in a way that wilfully massacring women and children wiuld not. So what makes for "war crimes" is moved farther into fantastical realms so that we ourselves would not be potentially guilty, if only by sentiment.
The second is that these tales become a part of the profession of of the faith, literal creed or catechism, things you "believe" even if you know that they are not "factually" true. People often talk about creationism among American fundamentalist Protestants: well, I'm extremely familiar with the topic (actual academic research in my previous line of work) and I can assure you that they really don't, at least the educated ones--and, for peculiar sociodemographic reasons, American creationists are better educated on average than non creationists. They can tell between science/practical reality and religious "truisms" without having them interfere with each other in their minds. In this, they are no different from various tenets believed by other religious people--I mean, Resurrection? Transubstantiation? Final Judgment? Reincarnation? Much the same thing exist as national creation myths for many nations and peoples (literal King Arthur stuff, but might involve bears turning into people or peaches instead) but they can believe these tales and still accept that waves of proto-Koreans and proto-Japanese came from different directions, those from Southeast Asia bringing rice culture and those from Central Asia via Mongolia bringing cattle and jade craftsmanship. Yetmp believing in the national myths goes beyond just facts--it is, again, profession if faith--affirmation to both yourself and your peers (the former being at least as important) that you are truly a member of the community. If PMC-ship is a quasi religious/tribal phenomena, it has to have its rituals and creeds, things that you genuinely "believe," even if fantastical. But the Liberal myths of some or even many PMC can't let the myths be and they have to have those truths to be literal truths as well as "transcendental truths." In this, they seem to me analogous to the small minority of "scientific creationists," those looking for scientific "proof" of creation--those who most non-creationists think to be the typical creationists.
Many thanks. This was informative. The racist Rwanda genocide decision is particularly ridiculous and harmful. It is not new, having to endure the inevitable collapse of societal structures, by a PMC who have no harsh life experience from which to develop intellectual discrimination, nor a well informed comprehension of how complex societies actually function. I survive from day to day now in my own bubble of suspension of disbelief in our present world leadership. Believing that not all are as incompetent as they seem.
The topic of effective speech is near and dear to me, thank you for treating it so comprehensively here.
On the philosophical angle - this is a major Kant problem! So one directly connected to the academic genealogy of the international legal order.
Kant's idea of freedom depends on a specific concept of effective speech. His idea is in turn foundational to mid-20th-century human rights theory and the establishment of a liberal world order, e.g. through Columbia University and the UN. This is why in "What Is Enlightenment?" the most basic right of the enlightened citizen is to appear before the reading public "as a scholar" - that is, through authorship. Such a word is understood to be innately powerful. It is key to Kant's understanding of freedom, to say nothing of cognition and rationality. On Kant's understanding, not only is public speech effective, but it is in fact the engine of enlightenment, so quintessentially powerful that it is basically all that is necessary to guarantee the establishment of a liberal order, at least in the teleological sense of that essay.
I have written about this in a couple of academic articles, but aside from the theoretical issues with Kant's framework - such as its predication on an outmoded ontological distinction between the internal and the external in cognition - it elides its own historical and material conditions. No meaningful consideration of the practical realities of printing and distribution, or the constitution and dynamics of a reading public, in the Europe of his time. Genealogically, that lapse links directly to the predicament of free speech we have today, e.g. in the sense of Citizens United and courts considering money to be speech, or the neoliberal nomenklatura's brutally censoring dissenting opinions on any issue from medicine to geopolitics. While it may be true that anyone now has a notional ability to "appear as a scholar before the reading public," and to be a member of "the reading public" in the first place, the real conditions of the situation have created something other than freedom, equality, and peace, obviously.
You might like the work of Robert Darnton, the Harvard librarian, on this topic. His research on the history of publishing, censorship, and the liberal Enlightenment speaks to current inherited assumptions about the effective power of speech. At least on my reading, his description of the censorship regime of pre-revolutionary France actually shows a system that is not clearly less democratic than the "free" domains of today's major internet platforms. At any rate, it is deeply informative work that I think inevitably challenges some of the same conventional liberal thinking that concerns you here.
FWIW I'd say these commonly skewed expectations of international law, at least within the "PMC-liberal" labyrinth, are deeply rooted in the philosophical foundation of the liberal world order going at least back to Kant and the predecessors of the current PMC in 18th-century Western Europe. A certain myth of effective speech is in some ways the founding assumption of that class, so it seems justifiable to describe it as faith. Thank you for saying so! Now if only there were a word that took away their weapons
Great discussion, all around. I would add that all agreements, especially international ones, represent a moment in time. They also are representative of the power balance between the parties at the time of agreement as well as the economic, social, cultural, and military realities of the moment. Thus the founding documents of the United Nations recognize certain rights of peoples to form nations, speak their languages, and practice their religions. Decolonization concepts are included because the colonial powers were in a weakened condition following the bloodletting, not because France and Britain et al had suddenly developed a new morality.
Today a weakened but aggressive U.S. finds the UN an impediment and seeks to invent parallel institutions such as Trump’s Leadership Council. All agreements and treaties are constituents of their moment in history. I remind you that the modern nation-state did not exist 600 years ago. If, as the song goes, “in 2525, if man is still alive” a new form of governance other than the nation-state, may have arisen. And there will be new agreements and treaties, just as fungible as our current ones…
Correction. That would be “Board of Peace”. Trump has articulated my surmise—he says the Board May “one day” replace the UN. The “Board” is to be actualized at Davos this week. Perhaps we should not totally dismiss all the value of existing international agreements…
This is a profound reflection on the importance of sovereignty, to wax Schmittian:
"The assumption that documents lead to actions, rather than the reverse, is thus one of the biggest problems with the PMC mentality. Its un-finest hour was probably the conclusion of the Rome Conference on the Statute of the International Criminal Court, hailed by NGOs as “the end of impunity” and a new beginning for the human race. No, I’m not exaggerating: the atmosphere among NGOs in Rome (who to their chagrin were not allowed into the negotiations) resembled that of a religious revival. That said, we should remember that for the PMC the law is a moral discourse rather than just texts: it’s a way of talking about the world, and a vocabulary in which to express its desires and hatreds, and so it’s the sprit, not the letter, that matters. It wasn’t really surprising, therefore, that many who loudly cheered the bombing of Kosovo in 1999 nonetheless opposed the invasion of Iraq in 2003, and tied themselves in conceptual knots trying unsuccessfully to argue that the two were legally different."
Without sovereignty, politics becomes NGOs documentary virtue-signaling.
From my experience, the PMC and political class doesn't give a shit about laws or rules. Refer to them if they are useful or if they can be made to be useful. Otherwise, they can be as bad as ICEs goons.
"And today, of course, western governments work themselves into a frenzy over foreign “disinformation,” which they believe will somehow exert magical powers over their own populations." In fact elections in Romania were cancelledt in 2024 exactly on these spurious arguments...
"It can’t seriously be doubted that the Nazis intended to wage a war of extermination in the East, because there are lot of documents that said so, notably the infamous General Plan East, which foresaw the killing of sixty million Jews, Slavs and others as part of a colonisation programme, but was never really implemented." Not really implemented? After more than 25 million Soviets were killed, majority civilians? That is about half implemented, eh?!
No, I think that what I said was clear. General Plan East existed, and was highly detailed, not just a plan to massacre tens of millions of people. Indeed, the deaths were only part of the plan. But the plan was never implemented
Thank you for this information and your views its very interesting and its disappointing to learn that international law cannot be enforced although i and i suspect many others learned this when seeing Israel getting away with the destruction of Palestinian people.
Trust is what i think people want but are not getting , perhaps trust really does not exist at all , looking at the world as closely as we can now that the internet gives us information videos points of view and political intentions every day reduces the trust we have in our political leaders we expect more peaceful solutions than they deliver.
Both times Trump has become president of the USA he has made the USA and the rest of the world a more dangerous place by his continuous online threats and other drivel it is nauseatingly miserable beyond repair he clearly thinks himself the judge and jury of all on this planet we inhabit and so far too many politicians across the world are letting their mask slip by fawning over Trump and his band of misfits that revel in lawnessless and chaos.
Some say most of his itterations never come to pass but thats besides the point , the point is people act on his word even if its a stupid word or stupid bunch of words and as we are seeing , others die as a result , murdered , the actors doing the killing are defended and hedden away from justice.
People do not trust Trump , even his allies look nervous and cagey around him he is the proverbial loose cannon attracting other loose cannons to join him , in the biblical theme he is Olethros surrounded by his Keres .
The act of fabulating victims and circumstances in already heinous deeds, as you note about Srebnica, is something common in a lot of "moralized" and "sanitized" historical tall tales used by verbal clubs. Massacring military age males, or even soldiers, is a heinous criminal act--no one should think SS massacring American and Canadian POWs in 1944 or NKVD massaring Polish officer prisoners at Katyn were OK just because their victims were military personnel, for example. As you observe, inventing victims and circumstances that don't exist actually weakens the cases and discredits the institutions engaged in such accusations when the claims are cross referenced with the facts. Yet, this is everywhere, not just in Western tales about the alleged brutes in, well, whatever: I've seen wild claims about alleged American war crimes in Korea and Vietnam, alleged regime atrocities in such and such historical occasions after political upheavals, supposed atrocities by various invaders and colonizers, and such. Many dubious allegations with a certain kernel of truth inflated multifold with generous helpings of tall tales.
I tend to think there are two dimensions to this: I think this reflects the fact that vast majority of us are latent war criminals ourselves, who wouldn't think twice about massacres and torture being visited in the "deservingly bad" people and are moreover perceptive enough that the others might think the same. So Serb militiamen massacring military age males "makes" sense to us in a way that wilfully massacring women and children wiuld not. So what makes for "war crimes" is moved farther into fantastical realms so that we ourselves would not be potentially guilty, if only by sentiment.
The second is that these tales become a part of the profession of of the faith, literal creed or catechism, things you "believe" even if you know that they are not "factually" true. People often talk about creationism among American fundamentalist Protestants: well, I'm extremely familiar with the topic (actual academic research in my previous line of work) and I can assure you that they really don't, at least the educated ones--and, for peculiar sociodemographic reasons, American creationists are better educated on average than non creationists. They can tell between science/practical reality and religious "truisms" without having them interfere with each other in their minds. In this, they are no different from various tenets believed by other religious people--I mean, Resurrection? Transubstantiation? Final Judgment? Reincarnation? Much the same thing exist as national creation myths for many nations and peoples (literal King Arthur stuff, but might involve bears turning into people or peaches instead) but they can believe these tales and still accept that waves of proto-Koreans and proto-Japanese came from different directions, those from Southeast Asia bringing rice culture and those from Central Asia via Mongolia bringing cattle and jade craftsmanship. Yetmp believing in the national myths goes beyond just facts--it is, again, profession if faith--affirmation to both yourself and your peers (the former being at least as important) that you are truly a member of the community. If PMC-ship is a quasi religious/tribal phenomena, it has to have its rituals and creeds, things that you genuinely "believe," even if fantastical. But the Liberal myths of some or even many PMC can't let the myths be and they have to have those truths to be literal truths as well as "transcendental truths." In this, they seem to me analogous to the small minority of "scientific creationists," those looking for scientific "proof" of creation--those who most non-creationists think to be the typical creationists.
Many thanks. This was informative. The racist Rwanda genocide decision is particularly ridiculous and harmful. It is not new, having to endure the inevitable collapse of societal structures, by a PMC who have no harsh life experience from which to develop intellectual discrimination, nor a well informed comprehension of how complex societies actually function. I survive from day to day now in my own bubble of suspension of disbelief in our present world leadership. Believing that not all are as incompetent as they seem.
Your last two sentences are funny and ironic, and oh so true.
The topic of effective speech is near and dear to me, thank you for treating it so comprehensively here.
On the philosophical angle - this is a major Kant problem! So one directly connected to the academic genealogy of the international legal order.
Kant's idea of freedom depends on a specific concept of effective speech. His idea is in turn foundational to mid-20th-century human rights theory and the establishment of a liberal world order, e.g. through Columbia University and the UN. This is why in "What Is Enlightenment?" the most basic right of the enlightened citizen is to appear before the reading public "as a scholar" - that is, through authorship. Such a word is understood to be innately powerful. It is key to Kant's understanding of freedom, to say nothing of cognition and rationality. On Kant's understanding, not only is public speech effective, but it is in fact the engine of enlightenment, so quintessentially powerful that it is basically all that is necessary to guarantee the establishment of a liberal order, at least in the teleological sense of that essay.
I have written about this in a couple of academic articles, but aside from the theoretical issues with Kant's framework - such as its predication on an outmoded ontological distinction between the internal and the external in cognition - it elides its own historical and material conditions. No meaningful consideration of the practical realities of printing and distribution, or the constitution and dynamics of a reading public, in the Europe of his time. Genealogically, that lapse links directly to the predicament of free speech we have today, e.g. in the sense of Citizens United and courts considering money to be speech, or the neoliberal nomenklatura's brutally censoring dissenting opinions on any issue from medicine to geopolitics. While it may be true that anyone now has a notional ability to "appear as a scholar before the reading public," and to be a member of "the reading public" in the first place, the real conditions of the situation have created something other than freedom, equality, and peace, obviously.
You might like the work of Robert Darnton, the Harvard librarian, on this topic. His research on the history of publishing, censorship, and the liberal Enlightenment speaks to current inherited assumptions about the effective power of speech. At least on my reading, his description of the censorship regime of pre-revolutionary France actually shows a system that is not clearly less democratic than the "free" domains of today's major internet platforms. At any rate, it is deeply informative work that I think inevitably challenges some of the same conventional liberal thinking that concerns you here.
FWIW I'd say these commonly skewed expectations of international law, at least within the "PMC-liberal" labyrinth, are deeply rooted in the philosophical foundation of the liberal world order going at least back to Kant and the predecessors of the current PMC in 18th-century Western Europe. A certain myth of effective speech is in some ways the founding assumption of that class, so it seems justifiable to describe it as faith. Thank you for saying so! Now if only there were a word that took away their weapons
Great discussion, all around. I would add that all agreements, especially international ones, represent a moment in time. They also are representative of the power balance between the parties at the time of agreement as well as the economic, social, cultural, and military realities of the moment. Thus the founding documents of the United Nations recognize certain rights of peoples to form nations, speak their languages, and practice their religions. Decolonization concepts are included because the colonial powers were in a weakened condition following the bloodletting, not because France and Britain et al had suddenly developed a new morality.
Today a weakened but aggressive U.S. finds the UN an impediment and seeks to invent parallel institutions such as Trump’s Leadership Council. All agreements and treaties are constituents of their moment in history. I remind you that the modern nation-state did not exist 600 years ago. If, as the song goes, “in 2525, if man is still alive” a new form of governance other than the nation-state, may have arisen. And there will be new agreements and treaties, just as fungible as our current ones…
Correction. That would be “Board of Peace”. Trump has articulated my surmise—he says the Board May “one day” replace the UN. The “Board” is to be actualized at Davos this week. Perhaps we should not totally dismiss all the value of existing international agreements…
This is a profound reflection on the importance of sovereignty, to wax Schmittian:
"The assumption that documents lead to actions, rather than the reverse, is thus one of the biggest problems with the PMC mentality. Its un-finest hour was probably the conclusion of the Rome Conference on the Statute of the International Criminal Court, hailed by NGOs as “the end of impunity” and a new beginning for the human race. No, I’m not exaggerating: the atmosphere among NGOs in Rome (who to their chagrin were not allowed into the negotiations) resembled that of a religious revival. That said, we should remember that for the PMC the law is a moral discourse rather than just texts: it’s a way of talking about the world, and a vocabulary in which to express its desires and hatreds, and so it’s the sprit, not the letter, that matters. It wasn’t really surprising, therefore, that many who loudly cheered the bombing of Kosovo in 1999 nonetheless opposed the invasion of Iraq in 2003, and tied themselves in conceptual knots trying unsuccessfully to argue that the two were legally different."
Without sovereignty, politics becomes NGOs documentary virtue-signaling.
From my experience, the PMC and political class doesn't give a shit about laws or rules. Refer to them if they are useful or if they can be made to be useful. Otherwise, they can be as bad as ICEs goons.
"And today, of course, western governments work themselves into a frenzy over foreign “disinformation,” which they believe will somehow exert magical powers over their own populations." In fact elections in Romania were cancelledt in 2024 exactly on these spurious arguments...
"It can’t seriously be doubted that the Nazis intended to wage a war of extermination in the East, because there are lot of documents that said so, notably the infamous General Plan East, which foresaw the killing of sixty million Jews, Slavs and others as part of a colonisation programme, but was never really implemented." Not really implemented? After more than 25 million Soviets were killed, majority civilians? That is about half implemented, eh?!
No, I think that what I said was clear. General Plan East existed, and was highly detailed, not just a plan to massacre tens of millions of people. Indeed, the deaths were only part of the plan. But the plan was never implemented
As usual, here my italian translation.
"Parole senza potere.
Ed il potere senza parole."
https://trying2understandw.blogspot.com/2026/01/parole-senza-potere-ed-il-potere-senza.html
Great article as always
JL Austin, the philosopher, also developed the idea of performative utterances in his book, "How To Do Things With Words”.
Thank you for this information and your views its very interesting and its disappointing to learn that international law cannot be enforced although i and i suspect many others learned this when seeing Israel getting away with the destruction of Palestinian people.
Trust is what i think people want but are not getting , perhaps trust really does not exist at all , looking at the world as closely as we can now that the internet gives us information videos points of view and political intentions every day reduces the trust we have in our political leaders we expect more peaceful solutions than they deliver.
Both times Trump has become president of the USA he has made the USA and the rest of the world a more dangerous place by his continuous online threats and other drivel it is nauseatingly miserable beyond repair he clearly thinks himself the judge and jury of all on this planet we inhabit and so far too many politicians across the world are letting their mask slip by fawning over Trump and his band of misfits that revel in lawnessless and chaos.
Some say most of his itterations never come to pass but thats besides the point , the point is people act on his word even if its a stupid word or stupid bunch of words and as we are seeing , others die as a result , murdered , the actors doing the killing are defended and hedden away from justice.
People do not trust Trump , even his allies look nervous and cagey around him he is the proverbial loose cannon attracting other loose cannons to join him , in the biblical theme he is Olethros surrounded by his Keres .
Thank you for the trouble you took with your comment. Very interesting and generally fair: the main problem, as always, is lack of space for nuances.