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.