At 09:35 27/05/99 -0400, Charles also wrote:
>Charles: Again, a jury or court would not necessarily find that because
the U.S. is "bombing a country run by a political coalition which it wants
to defeat" is a defense to the charge here, if it finds that the conduct
fits the anti-genocide language. And there is a colorable legal argument
that NATO's conduct violates the anti-genocide law. Of course, the other
side will argue otherwise, but that is always the case in a law case.
>
>The law works on "pure syllogisms". You know that Hegel uses jurisprudence
as an example along with mathematics as formal logics or understanding. Law
procedes by taking the written law, in this case the anti-genocide
convention, and making a formal logical link as above. The one I give might
not win out in this case. But you must offer a similar reasoning chain to
prevail for your side of the legal argument. So, protesting the "pure
syllogistic" aspect of my argument is a weakness in what you are saying.
<
I did not know the point about Hegel. I do know Engels's very interesting argument in his letter to Schmidt 27th October 1890, about the relative independent sphere of the law, which must be internally coherent. But he goes on:
"to a great extent the course of the 'development of right' only consists, first, in the attempt to do away with the contradictions arising from the direct translation of economic relations into legal principles, and to establish a harmonious system of law, and then in the repeated breaches made in this system by the influence and pressure of further economic development, which involves it in further contradictions. ...
The reflection of economic relations as legal principles is necessarily also a topsy-turvy one: it goes on without the person who is acting being conscious of it; the jurist imagines he is operating with a priori propositions, whereas they are really only economic reflexes; so everything is upside down."
>I suppose the test would be how much money one side would put up to back
>its proposition.
>
>Charles: Well, yea, law is politics and politics is money, especially in a
case like this. What I am putting forth is a non-frivolous legal argument.
All legal arguments are challenged by the other side in court. So, the "you
say/they say" is presumed here.
<
>Chris
>No problem that not all of them are Marxists. Clearly the Genocide
>Convention was not drafted by marxists, but was a bourgeois liberal
>compromise drawn up in the aftermath of the Second World War.
>
>Charles: No Marxists were very much a part of drafting the anti-genocide
>convention. The Soviet lawyers were Marxists.
I did not know that. The Soviet Union organised quite a lot of ethnic cleansing at the end of the second world war. Generally I would say the Genocide Convention is a bourgeois democratic one against anihilatory national oppression.
>You are dismissing my argument above too quickly. It is legally
sophisticated; and suggests some connection between the law and currently
widely reported facts regarding the conduct of NATO
>
I do not doubt that a case can be made and has been made. I doubt it is sufficiently logically compelling to overcome the determining logic of economic power. That does not defend old fashioned rights like those of a nation of 10 million to retain territory with sacred mediaeval history within its sovereign state when this right is in conflict with the right of people to live in notional dignity as educated wage slaves in a much larger subcontinental market dominated by finance capital, without the risk of persecution according to ethnicity, religion or gender orientation.
> It should be no big surprise to charge the NATO countries with genocide,
in part exactly because of what you mention above about part of their
genocidal history. The NATO countries are the biggest genocidalists of all
times. On the other hand, ironcially, they did formulate these laws in a
moment of temporary sanity; and we should use these statutes and sharpen
them up.
>
>The Canadian statement may be on a website. I will look for it.
Good.
It may well be there can be a counter-convention condemning NATO for genocide or other breaches of international law.
But today the International Court at the Hague has formally indicted Milosevic as a war criminal. That is not just polemic. It means he can never safely travel outside Serbia until this indictment is lifted. Pinochet has also just lost an appeal against extradition to Spain for crimes against humanity. We are seeing new concepts of international law emerging, however hostile we are to finance capital.
Justice is the justice of the victors and I submit there is little doubt the direction of the economic forces on this question.
Leftists can try to argue these cases purely logically and morally and may get a certain distance, but the bourgeoisie has strong counter-arguments and they have a better chance of getting them accepted. I suggest a more principled marxist position is to take on board the logic of reforms very realistically but to try to use that struggle for more radical and revolutionary purposes.
I suggest our stance should not be reactive but be pro-active. And much of the leftist criticism of NATO has been reactive.
The broad strategy for a proactive stance is to understand the enormous economic momentum behind finance capital's ideology of human rights and to try to critique and convert it into an agenda of concrete human social rights.
I suggest we accept that NATO has a stronger case, as defined, of a charge of genocide against the nationalist Serb regime, but demonstrate in concrete terms they cannot deliver an answer that really meets the human rights needs in their social and economic context.
Chris Burford
London