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Notes -
Another case of culture war cancellation dropped, this time somewhat more important than the usual cases.
The case of Nicolas Guillou, French judge at the ICC, cancelled by Marco Rubio personally.
If your French is not sufficient, here is Xitter summary.
Can it happen to you?
Not in this way, not even the most IRL important mottizen is worthy of Marco's personal attention.
If it happens, it will happen because AI analyzed your online activity and decided it crossed a threshold of dangerous nihilist extremism (and you could do about it just as much as Nicolas Guillou, this means nothing at all.)
This is cancellation for power politics reason, not bc of culture war.
In Europe, debanking etc isn't due to Americans. Nobody in US cares about random anti-immigration activists who are typical targets.
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To me this post seems to be a reflection of the absurd dominance of American power, how all of EU is America's bitch, and pointing out how crazy this is without taking sides. But most comments are about defending American actions as moral and proper and how this asshole Frenchman started shit anyway. Have I badly misread this or is everybody else crazy?
This is the "just build your own financial system if you want to [political act]" finally deployed against the outgroup.
Which is why people are cheering it. It's that simple.
But then again, this is what happens when you willingly outsource your technology and financial system to the Americans. It doesn't come for free; just like membership in NATO, the cost is not "X% of GDP on military", it's "the US gets to fuck around in your country, delete your sovereignty, and there's fuck all you can do about it".
If Europeans didn't want to be vulnerable to this, they can build their own system. Oh, but that costs money and requires paying for the kinds of talent that run to the US at the first opportunity, and if there's anything European elites hate more than being told "no" it's having to pay their countrymen at fair market prices. So the response to this will be impotent at best- maybe more EU sanctions/finger-wagging to American tech companies because their AI can deny the Holocaust or whatever (and I'm sure it was coincidental that the French launched an investigation against Grok for that around this time).
While I agree that there's an element of this, consider:
This Nicolas Guillou is spearheading an effort to fuck around with Israel's sovereignty as well as to set up precedents that will inevitably be used to fuck around with American sovereignty.
Certainly as I Brit I find it hard to see the EU as a guardian of national sovereignty.
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The implications, issues, and tensions with the ICC's efforts to establish broad jurisdiction despite being a non-universal treaty organization have been discussed in various contexts for approaching 30 years. I can't say how much you may have misread as opposed to not read at all.
In most other contexts, it is considered absurd to try and impose treaty institutions on a state that is not part of the treaty, even when you think that treaty is a good idea or should supersede other principles of international law.
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In your effort to notice, you seem to have forgotten to notice that there is nothing surprising about the Americans opposing attempts by Europeans to create precedents of universal jurisdiction that could also be applied against the Americans by international legal institutions Americans also aren't a part of. And by nothing surprising, I mean that the so-called Hague Act is over two decades old, and over half of that was under Democratic administrations.
The Americans have consistently opposed various European efforts to apply the Rome Statute beyond the jurisdiction of the Rome Statute, which has very clear jurisdictional limitations even when you factor in the internal-ICC efforts to claim jurisdiction over the Gaza conflict via a membership application by the Palestinian Authority, which is not a sovereign state, over a decade after the Palestinian Authority was thrown out of (or off of high rises within) Gaza. That various members and lobbyists in the ICC are inclined to ignore this in pursuit of their foreign policy preferences doesn't really change the implications of this longstanding opposition. It doesn't change things even if they are Europeans doing it in Europe with European funds to European applause. They they attempted to apply this against an American ally, in a format that isn't-currently-but-could-easily be invoked against American administrations were it successful, is merely poor statecraft.
That it is also poor legal policy on their part, and very likely counter-productive to the aims they claim to be pursuing, are entirely separate matters.
As a side note, from what I hear, there was a decent amount of internal dissent within the ICC over the decision to go after Netanyahu. Apparently there were some elements who correctly predicted that doing so would not accomplish anything except to undermine the legitimacy of the ICC.
But I think that when progressivism infests an organization, it's analogous to a virus infecting a living organism. i.e. the organism's systems and resources are hijacked to primarily serve the interests of the invader as opposed to those of the host. So that in the same way Disney keeps churning out lousy woke movies that lose money, the ICC has seriously undermined its own legitimacy in order to damage Israel.
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Regardless of your feelings about Netanyahu's actions as PM of Israel, he is a democratically elected head of state who took office in a free and fair election. This is the first time the ICC has ever been so bold as to issue a warrant for a leader who meets that definition (prior recipients such as Putin and Gadhafi mostly dont even bother to wave the fig leaf of democracy), and IMO sets a terrible, no-good, very bad precedent that should be treated with utter contempt by all peace-loving denizens of the world.
Issuing an actual international arrest warrant because you don't like what the leader of a democracy is doing is dangerous and destabilizing to the norms of international behavior. The only people who can get away with it are those who have enough actual international muscle to shake up the playing field, and the ICC definitely fails that test. Our robed man of excessively signaled virtue fucked around and is now finding out. This is a good thing.
?
Despite some amount of electoral fraud, Putin gets pretty securely elected. It's nowhere near as impressive as the democratic fig leaves in the West, but he's clearly taking care to preserve democratic legitimacy.
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Not only that, Israel has mechanisms in place to hold leaders to account if they misbehave. In fact, Netanyahu himself has been prosecuted for some sort of minor corruption charge.
The ICC Treaty is not supposed to apply in situations where the country at issue already has an effective system to investigate and prosecute its own citizens for war crimes. But of course, anyone with a modicum of intelligence and intellectual honesty knew at the time that this provision would eventually be ignored in order to go after Israeli leaders.
I agree, but as I pointed out in another post, this is sort of the international law equivalent to Disney releasing yet another woke movie which will obviously flop. i.e. when an institution has been captured by progressivism, the resources of that institution are put towards progressivism as opposed to the interests of the institution itself.
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Why should being democratically elected shield you from ICC prosecution? The whole point of the ICC is that it is, well, international; you may believe that the people of Israel forfeited their right to judge Netanyahu when they elected him, but the ICC does not judge in the name of the people of Israel but in the name of the people of a pretty large chunk of the Western world. If anything, maybe the majority of Israeli voters should also stand trial in some sort of reverse class action suit - I think it's high time to patch out the stage magic trick by which democracies make accountability disappear.
For a very different polarity example, by all accounts Milošević was elected democratically and "genocide the Albanians" seems to have represented the Serbian people's will pretty accurately in the '90s. Was it "dangerous and destabilising" that he was dragged to the Hague for enacting it? Are you instead using the old descriptivist definition of "democratic" as "friends with the US" here? (Playing brazen word games like that is how you wind up bleeding soft power.)
This is smuggling in a consensus of the basis of the ICC authority. The ICC does not get to judge because it does so the name of the people of a pretty large chunk of the Western world, nor does it get any extra legal authority from having the word 'International' in its name. These are utterly irrelevant factors. It would have the exact same jurisdictional reach if it's title were changed to the European Criminal Court. Its jurisdiction beyond non-signatories would be just as valid if its composition switched so that non-signatories were the signatories and the signatories were the non-signatories.
The International Criminal Court is a treaty-law organization. Its powers derive not externally, but from the sovereign authorities of its constituent members. As such, by it's very nature, it judges in the name of its treaty signatories. No more, and no less.
But this also means that- as a treaty-law organization- a treaty law organization's legitimacy in applying authority to non-signatories ends where the treaty's signatories end. Other- and higher- principles of international law recognize that the sovereign right of sovereign states to bind themselves in international laws, i.e. treaties, also entails to not join into such international agreements. In turn, the sovereign legitimacy of those states, whose sovereignty is what enables them to commit or not to such arrangements, derives from the legitimizing source of those states.
As such, it is not that 'being democratically elected should shield you from ICC prosecution.' It is that 'a legitimate sovereign state, whose sovereign legitimacy derives from its democratic processes to elect its own leader, should have the right to refuse to become a member of any treaty, and to refuse attempts to impose treaty-law they are not a part of.'
A pretty large chunk of the Western world has no greater grounds to pass judgement or ignore the sovereignty of other nations than another chunk of the Western world, or the non-western world.
Yes.
Opposing Milosevic was moral, righteous, and even lawful for reasons beyond the ICC. UN treaty law that the Soviet block was also nominally a party of already forbade genocide. There's a reason that for decades when anti-NATO shills try to raise 'muh sovereignty' objections to the Yugoslav interventions, they conspicuously avoid asserting Milosevic's own legal obligations at the time. At the same time, dragging Milosevic also entailed an international war that- but for a geopolitical context of a temporary decrease in Russian military capability to intervene- could have expanded into a much broader regional conflict. 'Just war' does not mean 'safe war.'
But the R2P ('Responsibility to Protect) principles also encoded into the Rome Statute and that were invoked over Milosevic have absolutely been both risky and destabilizing when put into practice. Its attempts to assert universal jurisdiction as a basis, reason, and even requirement for states to act to resolve the injustice directly contribute to geopolitical conflicts when the state being motivated is acting against a state that- even if evil- will work to ensure its own survival. And that's when R2P works.
R2P was a contributing factor / legitimizer to the neocon wars of the middle east, including the Iraq War, when 'bringing Saddam to justice' for many very real and very bad things he did to the Shia and Kurd populations entailed cracking apart a police state and triggering a civil war. R2P can be directly tied to regional policy disasters that have made the humanitarian issues they were intended to resolve worse, such as the Libya intervention that a pretty large chunk of the western world was happy to use as a pretext to settle old scores with a dictator who had, if not repented, long since stopped being a state sponsor of terrorism that ran up those scores. R2P might have 'succeeded' with Milosevic, but that experience and validation was what contributed to the American participation in Somalia, and thus the Battle of Mogadishu in 1993, which in turn had just a little to do with the American decision to sit out the far-more-genocidal rwanda genocide in 1994, and (some time later) the electoral prospects of a later American president who ran on a platform of domestic focus and compassionate conservatism.
Ah, but those are American military interventions. Perhaps you 'only' meant legal stuff, not enforced by state hard power?
Well, it turns out that when motivated would-be litigants sympathetic to separatists or insurgencies would like to sue countries for the ugly business of fighting said conflicts, it neither inclines the states to hand over jurisdictional authority to the potentially sympathetic judges that motivated parties are seeking to court shop, or to adopt the belief systems of the people who think they really should anyway. Which is how nations like India (which speaks for about 1/6th of the whole world, not just a good chunk of the west) ends up not exactly wanting to become a part of that legal mindset, and involved in expatriate conflicts with in-exile separatist advocates who absolutely will try to lawfare whatever they can wherever. Which, in turn, brings India- or India equivalents- into geopolitical conflict with the states hosting such litigants. Hence the India-Canada issue, which shapes the India-US relationship, which is very significant to the India-US-China dynamic, which is the single biggest geopolitical stability issue of the century.
Or, conversely, claims to universal jurisdiction lets any state attempt to lawfare-litigate as a geopolitical cudgel. South Africa absolutely has no internal or international political interests to be advanced by accusing Israel of genocide, it is solely because they really care that much. And, since the South African movement created a legal obligation on the part of Europeans to act against Israel, which weakens the European influence on Israel to end the war (cause, you know, the Prime Minister of Israel will no longer go to European capitals where they can try and talk or lobby him). This might have made the Israelis more susceptible to American pressures to end the war in the Trump peace plan (that was widely panned as being unrealistic and prone to failure), but that influence / negotiation goes both ways, since things the US President is more comfortable with are no longer deal-breakers if there is no European deal to break. So while the Europeans recognized a Palestine, the Israelis restarted a long-restrained eastern jerusalem / west bank settelement plan that even the litigants would probably eagerly concede / argue / accuse of being bad for the (West Bank) Palestinians, but which the ICC won't have any real recourse except to support an invasion to take by force of arms, or sit around for years/decades hoping that international isolation will lead to an Israeli collapse... which no one claims will help the Palestinians in the interim, if at all.
And let's not get started on the topic of amnesty in international law, and the commodification/commercialization of it as an economic migrant population flow policy, and what various states have to accept- in terms of legal and political opposition- to mitigate it. Or exploit it as leverage, such as the totally-not-Russia-encouraged Belarusian-Poland border crisis the year before the Ukrainian invasion, which totally-wasn't-a-signal of what too much support to Ukraine could lead to. Or used globally in later propoganda as a demonstration of what European claims to human rights law really means.
All of which further weakens the role of humanitarian protection in international law. When you present humanitarian considerations as self-evidently legitimate basis for overcoming all objections, including sovereignty, you are incentivizing states to pre-emptively avoid systems created to respect it because there is no limiting principle. It sets incentives for motivated parties to invoke it as much as they can, but surviving states that don't want to be eternal hostages to Current Thing to systematically reduce the relevance of laws intended to codify empathy of a different era. It even incentivizes states to take fait accompli actions that international law cannot reverse in any sort of consistent or timely manner.
But worst of all, it doesn't normalize prioritizing humanitarian consideration. International law normalization is a function of how many states actually do the thing. The more states that are pushed by, or to, cynicism to water down humanitarian protections, the weaker those protections become when they are needed most, not as steady-state lobbying devices but as calls to action to stop imminent genocide.
Which- if it's not clear enough- is a reason to overcome sovereignty objections. States concede that genocide is not an internal-only matter when they sign certain treaties. But when this gets expanded and leveraged beyond actual not-even-technically genocide on grounds of universal jurisdiction, at the behest of people whose interests aren't actually genocide, the consequences (of bad policy) and the blowback (of delegitimization) can be measured in terms of catastrophes.
Milosevic is a symptom, not a cause. It is not 'because NATO countries intervened in the caucuses, these bad things happened.' Rather, NATO intervened because of pre-existing paradigms of optimistic / moralistic assumptions that, when run into reality, regularly do not pan out. That does not mean they never pan out. Again, Milosevic. But when they fail, they can fail in ways that make existing problems worse, and destabilize entire geopolticial regions for years or decades to come.
The premise behind R2P have always been risky and destabilizing. Sometimes risks are worth taking, even when they incur costs. But risky and destabilizing they still remain.
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Obviously the ICC and the rest of the internationalist crowd continues to believe (just as they did in 2003 when W invaded Iraq) that national sovereignty must give way to international law. Waving around the democratic mandate of the Israeli government is totally irrelevant to the question, given they don't believe that the nation itself has such authority. Quibbling about how it's constituted is besides the point.
They're pretty obviously wrong, but it is important to actually understand the core of their position (even if we all disagree with it). It would be impossible for them to concede that a national leader has impunity if he can demonstrate sufficient democratic mandate -- indeed it makes a mockery of the entire conception of international law as vindicating universal and inalienable human rights. They can't just say "well they're inalienable unless the guy alienating them won an election" -- that's an untenable position.
I'd take the case against international law more seriously here if there were any politically significant actors who abstained on principle from invoking it to condemn their geopolitical enemies as well. I find the rank hypocrisy morally more revolting than any object-level "violation of international law".
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This is not cancellation, and "I see what you did there". This is hardball diplomacy.
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Play stupid games win stupid prizes. It is refreshing to see virtue signaling bearing consequences.
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The most shocking thing is that Rubio isn't even doing this to protect Americans. Rubio is doing this on behalf of a foreign country.
Be assured if the ICC had their way, they would have charged Rummy and Cheney.
Protecting a small country from the ICC is an excellent way to remind them not to try it against a big one.
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He's helping an ally (Israel) against an enemy (the ICC). Israel hasn't been the best of allies, but the ICC has been a perfectly fine enemy.
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Sounds like Europe isn't a reliable ally, since whatever unmentioned action he took was opposed so strongly. Swap out "African", "Asian", or even "South American" for European there, and it becomes an utter non-story, as written.
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It doesn't matter whether Europe supports him. He issued an arrest warrent for the prime minister of a state which is not a party to the Rome Statute. He is acting ultra vires to overthrow the government of a US ally. If Europe supported Osama Bin Laden, and The Netherlands let him set-up a compound in The Hague, the US would still send in Seal Team Six.
To your other point, United States financial regulations are amongst the most powerful tools on the planet. Underestimate them at your peril.
Agreed. It's not like he was just sitting in the Netherlands, minding his own business. He is trying to reach out across international borders and kidnap and imprison a head of state. So he's not really in a position to complain that someone reached out across international borders and sanctioned him.
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And what happens when the ICC kangaroo court puts out a warrant for you?
If such unlikely situation happened, I would go to Hague to clear my name. After few years in comfy United Nations prison, I would show I never participated in any genocide, war crimes or crimes against humanity.
There are many rightful complaints against ICC, major is very slow procedure, but no one seriously claimed that any person, of rather short list so far found guilty by ICC was wrongfully convicted.
(i am not aware that any person blacklisted by US received any sort of trial)
For what it may be worth, I am ready to defend the position that (1) Netanyahu has not committed any war crimes whatsoever by any reasonable definition of the phrase "war crimes."; (2) there is no reasonable basis to accuse him of such; (3) based on any reasonable interpretation of the ICC Treaty, there is no basis to issue a warrant for his arrest; and (4) therefore, the ICC is acting illegitimately.
I would add that this attack on Netanyahu is pretty obviously the result of the coalition of progressive, Muslim, and Arab Jew-haters.
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Just shows the importance of having your own versions of the services which are necessary for daily life. Europe made the mistake of funneling its resources to paying for the welfare of low human capital instead of developing indigenous service providers. Now it's suffering the consequences. The hope would be that they learn their lessons, cut welfare and move the money into long term US (and China) independent services. Payment processors are a good starting point, even places like Nigeria have fully functional home grown versions like Verve.
In the short term they really should force the American companies to lift these sanctions or suffer just as nasty consequences in Europe as not following the sanctions would inflict upon them in the US. This would basically force a divestment of the EU business by the company which would give the EU a good starting point for their own versions of these services.
This would require unchaining their private sector to provide them, which in turn changes the balance of domestic power.
These things are all linked, you can't just manage an economy like you're playing SimCity.
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These companies are much more beholden to Secretary Rubio than to Eurocrats. These are Americans in America. Violating official sanctions is not an option. Million dollar penalties and federal imprisonment are the possible punishments for purposefully violating sanctions.
Talk about being between a rock and a hard place.
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It's worth noting that something similar could be said about Guillou vis-a-vis a certain Israeli citizen. Yes, I know, from Guillou's perspective he's just prosecuting a ruthless bloodthirsty war criminal. But from another perspective, Guillou is targeting a Jewish head-of-state, the leader of a vibrant democracy which is simply trying to defend itself from an enemy dedicated to maximizing civilian casualties on both sides.
So, as usual, it's not about cancellation per se but rather who/whom.
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That's fascinating. Good news, though: China maintains a nearly full-stack offering, so you have options! I'm not even being entirely sarcastic - out of an excess of masochism, I turned down the usual offer of a VPN when visiting China for the first time and had to live entirely without the American tech stack for a week. It was interesting and entirely viable once you got used to it, though perhaps less so if you live in Europe.
(Caveats: obviously I wouldn't do this myself except in extremis because it's inconvenient and the Chinese will obviously use it to spy on you and control you, but I find it interesting that they saw the danger and the promise of full-stack control so far ahead.)
Try even installing wechat. Last I checked it was an unbelievable pain in the ass.
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I did similarly this past summer. Wechat let me validate my identity with a selfie and a photo of my US passport.
Incidentally the Motte is accessible in China and I posted from there without VPN. I did not even have a VPN on the phone I brought.
You could get Wechat working as a foreigner? Every time I've tried I've been stuck in non-verified jail which is impractical to get out of once you're flagged.
Do like the rest of their ecosystem, though.
I was using my wife's old phone signed into the Chinese Apple app store with Chinese WeChat installed. They have Chinese-only versions of apps for only people with Chinese mainland phone numbers and bank accounts. It was effortless. I clicked through a few screens of taking photos and entering info and I was done. A verified foreigner ready to buy a bun from a street vendor with Wechat pay. I'm not sure if the American version of WeChat is as functional.
Many years ago a Chinese immigrant coworker got locked out of WeChat. I tried to helped them get back on by them scanning a QR code from my account. The point being a user in good standing who is physically in front of a person can verify them. WeChat wrongly implied this would unlock their account. It ultimately did not. They couldn't get on as Chinese person recently immigrated to America. Somehow flagged as a fake account. But inexplicably I, an American who worked a bit in China long ago, was let into the system. Something about anarcho-tyranny applies.
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I mean, if the Chinese censorship apparatus works off of blacklists, the motte is probably just too small to be listed.
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Official English translation
AP article on the ICC prosecutors who have received the same treatment
EU page explaining the "blocking statute" that the judge wants the EU to implement in order to prevent EU companies from obeying US sanctions
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