In Our Age of State Crimes

From To The Point Analyses

Part I -- State Crime There is a legal construct known as "state crime." As the title implies, these are crimes that are committed in the name of, and/or by the forces of, the national state. Given that such crimes can have behind them the force of national bureaucracies, they are, historically, the worst sort of crimes on record: genocide, organized campaigns of torture, war crimes and the like. Also, as the International State Crime Initiative notes, while there is little doubt that such behavior violates both international law and the national criminal law of most states, "state crime is under-acknowledged by popular and academic authors."

Why is this the case? Three reasons suggest themselves:

(a) many, though not all, lawyers and judges accept as "necessary" the use of extra-legal practices in alleged emergencies;

(b) in times of war or other emergencies most intellectuals, teachers, reporters and other people upon whom the public depends for information will identify with the state and lend it their uncritical support, with those who do not often being censored; and

(c) under these circumstances, it comes as no surprise that the state's citizenry is easily convinced by censored or coerced media and various "responsible" personages, that an emergency exists and, as long as they remain personally unaffected, will support extra-legal acts on the part of their governments.

It is true that these conditions do not always hold, particularly, if the alleged emergency seems to have abated, allowing particularly egregious acts to come to light. The U.S. crimes at Abu Ghraib, revealed first by CBS News in 2004, are an example of this exception.

As a secondary factor allowing for the committing of state crime, the abstract and depersonalized nature of the language used in such cases should be noted. It is in the nature of bureaucracies to disperse responsibility. An order comes down from the leadership and it is carried out, not by particular persons but by a "department," a "platoon," or an "agency," etc. These subgroups are most often made up of ordinary people placed in extraordinary circumstances who, through bureaucratic or military training, and of course peer pressure, simply do their assigned task. And so we get what Hannah Arendt referred to as the "banality of evil."

It is true that, as President Truman was fond of saying, the "buck stops"... somewhere -- usually with a president, prime minister, cabinet, central committee or what have you. However, unless these folks end up on the losing side of a serious war, they are almost never held personally responsible for the orders they gave or the policies they implement. Indeed, it is only if you are a leader of small power committing state crimes, and are without a great power patron, that you might have to worry. Otherwise, you can be a mass murderer and still expect to die in your own bed.

Part II -- Recent Examples Let's take a look at a couple of recent examples of state crimes. There is no lack of perpetrators:

-- Myanmar (Burma): According to Amnesty International the government of Myanmar has brutally driven over half a million men, women and children of the Rohingya (Muslim) minority out of the country -- an effort that was accompanied by "widespread and systematic murder, rape and burning."

-- Egypt: According to reports produced by Human Rights Watch, the regime of "President" Abdel Fattah al-Sisi maintains power through a campaign of mass torture. "Political detainees are routinely tortured and sometimes raped." By the way, al-Sisi is a military officer who pulled off a 2013 coup against Egypt's first and only fairly elected government, and then, in 2014, had himself elected "president" in a rigged election.

One can go on like this for quite a while: there is Zimbabwe (which has only recently rid itself of its long standing dictator Robert Mugabe), Uzbekistan, North Korea, Sudan, Turkmenistan, Saudi Arabia, China (where the Party leader has just been given power for life), Syria, Laos -- and on it goes. This is by no means an exhaustive list.

And then there is Israel: Please note that I have listed a slew of criminal states before mentioning the Zionist state. This is because supporters of Israel are always lamenting that their state is being picked on by people who ignore the crimes of others -- creating a case of double standards. Oddly, their complaint implicitly accepts that Israel is also guilty of criminal behavior, but otherwise should not be singled out. Not wanting to have to bother with this diversionary Zionist tactic, I introduce the criminal state of Israel, at this point.

According to Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, B'tselem (Israel's own human rights organization), and literally dozens of United Nations resolutions, Israel consistently acts as a criminal state. It has an ongoing policy of ethnic cleansing against the Palestinians, which also involves the establishment of illegal colonies on militarily occupied land. It uses lethal violence against unarmed protesters, as the recent massacres along the Gaza border have prominently demonstrated. It imprisons large numbers of Palestinians, including children, for acts as simple as protesting Israeli violence. It goes after civilian targets in its wars against Gaza and Lebanon. It purposely destroys civilian infrastructure on the West Bank and Gaza. It runs a regime that segregates out non-Jews from Jews in terms of housing, job preferences, and benefits and tries to cover up the resulting apartheid reality with a thin veil of tokenism. And it does all this while claiming to be the "only democracy in the Middle East" -- which is false but persistent propaganda. Is Israel really a criminal state? Well, you know the old saying, "if it quacks like a duck, it's a duck."

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