National peculiarities.

I’m a big fan of French cinema with its vagueness, mystery, and open ends. First, I like when the movie makes me think and get to my own conclusions without explaining me what and why. Secondly, I like when the life is shown as beautiful, dramatic and complicated as it is, instead of the world of special Hollywood effects. However, even French cinema sometimes contains way too explicit stories.

Movie “L’enfant” (Baby) is a banal story of two careless teenagers who don’t really care about money and where to sleep, until the girl got pregnant and they get a 9-days-old baby. She comes back to her boyfriend, irresponsible petty criminal, who at some point decides to sell the baby for adoption without even telling his girlfriend. He explains that they “will get another baby” if they want. In short words, the whole idea of the movie is that this guy is actually a baby.

Now, something more interesting. I wouldn’t think of that movie if just a day after I didn’t read an article about similar story happened to two teenagers in Russian orphanage. A 14-year-old girl and a 15-year-old guy, living in the orphanage where they started dating, decided that they wanted to keep the baby from the accidental pregnancy. The story itself is fascinating because in the most Russian orphanages teenage pregnancy is a subject to hide from the authorities to avoid the scandal: girls usually are persuaded to do the abortion.

Somehow, in this case both parents insisted on keeping the baby. However, the hardest part was to decide what to do with a young family after the birth: they can’t stay in the orphanage and they can’t be left alone in the outside world. Luckily, local media started talking about this story and just a month before the delivery they found a host family, a woman who agreed to be their guardian. She already has 7 adopted kids, four of whom are adults and live separately. 
Now, I don’t know what will be the end of the movie, but young parents and their new host mom look happy on the pictures. 

International Law and Pathetic Me

For in much wisdom is much grief: and he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow. Story of my life :) 

I was so sincerely excited and inspired to learn about human rights in the world, especially, considering that in my home county they are not very much worshipped by people. You don’t touch the law and the law hopefully will forget about you – the mainstream ideology in Russia.

In my pathetic world, human rights were represented by a nice, beautiful girl with a kind face and a big red cross on the T-shirt feeding skinny, scared African children. Nice, beautiful people and skinny African children were preserved: I guess, just to make me happy. And these nice, beautiful people created nicely sounding words about human dignity and equality; words that ended up being a political project to avoid talks about decolonization and to replace them with less harmful ideals of liberal democracy. And Red Cross in many African cities became known for being corrupted and having certain hierarchy.

However, let’s not spoil my childhood dream: my last hope was humanitarian law with a kind girl still looming somewhere at the horizon. The girl was killed by single professional shot at her back and the sniper calmly explained to me that the girl needed to be killed in order to achieve the military advantage; that it was proportional to the number of casualties required for getting that land. And I shut up, because according to jus in bello he was right to act that way, because there is no standards that say precisely how many people need to be killed to get this land. Someone might say 10, someone might say 15, and it’s completely random choice: who will be among these lucky 5 and among these unlucky 10. And technically, there should be a distinction between combatants and non-combatants, but who knows, who knows, maybe, the girl was diversionist dressed up as a civilian…

Reasonable me still agrees that bad laws are better than no laws and they might be useful to stop armies from destroying the whole land of their enemy. Pathetic me starts thinking that laws in the ancient times were actually more fair: you steal something, people saw you stealing, your arm is cut off, others who watched will rather die from hunger than steal. Simple morality.

Nowadays, with a help of beautiful, incomprehensible for average people words lawyers (and certain amount of money and power behind them) can prove that you were saving the world by killing thousands of people. It’s called progressive humanism.

P.S. Still didn’t give up to find the reason why I should like the law.