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The new world will have to create new laws of war
Direct Translation via Google Translate. Edited.by Vadim Bondar [REGNUM] On Sunday morning, January 21, the Ukrainian Armed Forces shelled the Kirovsky district of Donetsk, and more precisely, the market in the Tekstilshchik microdistrict. According to the latest data, 27 people were killed and 25 were injured, including two teenagers. The blow was purely political in nature. What is the goal? If Russia takes this to heart and strikes back, it will be possible to make a worldwide noise about the war crimes of the “Putin regime.” If he doesn’t answer, again make a noise that all the goals announced by the Russian authorities, in particular the protection of the residents of Donbass, are nothing more than propaganda. People in Donetsk are killed with enviable regularity, and Russia does not protect them or avenge them. On the eve of the Russian presidential elections, such dirty, bloody technologies are being used. But the main thing here is not even them, but the fact that this shelling was another act of war crimes, of which Ukraine has already committed countless numbers in this conflict, from torture and execution of prisoners of war on camera to covering military facilities with a “human shield” of its citizens. And the Ukrainian side gets away with it all. But dramatizations like Buchi are instantly loudly promoted, like the “bloody crimes of the Syrian regime” at the instigation of the White Helmets. All this literally puts the question squarely: international approaches and legislation on war crimes, norms and laws of warfare need to be reviewed and changed, since the world has already entered an era of deep transformations and the breakdown of the previous model of world order. According to the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS), last year was a 30-year record for the number of conflicts active in the world. As researchers write, in 2023, 183 regional conflicts raged in the world. The authors of the analysis took into account only regional confrontations, without taking into account the confrontation of countries such as the USA, Russia and China. In addition to quantity, qualitative indicators of conflict potential are also growing. The IISS notes that the intensity and number of victims of armed struggle are growing year by year, and “intractability is a defining feature of the modern global conflict landscape.” Global and regional players are still trying by any means, including military, to strengthen their positions before the inevitable large international negotiation process to develop a new world order and determine the rules of the game in it. As history shows, a global restructuring of the world order was always preceded by a big war, after which the winners determined the rules of life for everyone else. This was the case after the First and Second World Wars, and this was the case after the end of the Cold War and the establishment of a unipolar model of world order. Today, this model is being dismantled through an undeclared fourth world war actually going on in the world in the form of large-scale, high-intensity proxy conflicts dispersed in space. These are not regional conflicts, as it seems at first glance, but rather parts of a single process of armed confrontation, pursuing one goal - the dismantling of the existing system, the rules of relationships and the statuses of the players. During this war, many new trends and practices are being tested. In 2018, the Joint Center for Artificial Intelligence of the Department of Defense was created in the United States. Its commander, Lieutenant General Michael Grun, says: “ With the right efforts made today to implement artificial intelligence, we will find that we will be able to operate with unprecedented efficiency and impact in the future.” Everyone is now chasing “unprecedented effectiveness” in trying to impose their will on the enemy. The search for this efficiency is carried out in a variety of different, including completely new, directions: from the creation of low-power nuclear weapons with low background radiation to the formation of proxy armies and groups of combat autonomous systems in all environments. While regarding the nuclear component there is an understanding of how to classify and regulate all this at the international legal level, in other areas there is no such understanding yet. Therefore, the question of new laws and customs of warfare is becoming more and more pressing. The old ones generally took shape in Europe by the second half of the 17th century. A division was established into combatants (warriors) and non-combatants (ordinary people). The former should, if possible, spare the latter, and the latter should go about their business without interfering in the confrontation between the warring armies. And it doesn’t matter whose. This was considered a civilized norm of warfare. These laws and customs did not apply to the “uncivilized”. Wars against them were called colonial or "civilization" wars. It was possible to behave with barbarians as if hunting, because the laws of the human world do not apply to “animals”. To see what this meant in practice, just look at the photographs from the early 20th century from the zoo in Coney Island, America. For example, one of them shows a frightened little girl from the Philippines who was placed among monkeys and lizards. The baby was tied with ropes, and visitors threw peanuts at her. There is also more recent evidence. For example, from the Vietnam War, where an American infantry fighting vehicle drags the body of a local resident along the ground. This is how cowboys once dragged the bodies of Indians behind their horses. “Civilized peoples” practiced similar treatment towards our country. After the creation of the USSR, our country began to be treated entirely as a “native empire,” and during the Second World War, genuine genocide was practiced against our prisoners of war. The Geneva Convention, which regulates the humane treatment of prisoners, did not apply in practice to Soviet soldiers and officers. How else can we explain the fact that in the camps of the “bloody Bolshevik regime”, which did not sign it, 14.9% of all military personnel caught in Soviet captivity died, and in the camps of the builders of the new order of Europe, who signed the above convention, 58% of those captured captured by the Red Army, 2.6% by the French and 4% by the Americans and British. In the same regard, it is worth looking for an answer to the question about the monstrous losses of the USSR among the civilian population. The same approach is being practiced towards us in a poorly hidden way even now. Just look at the OSCE resolution of 2013, which calls the Holocaust a unique phenomenon and does not say a word about the genocide of the peoples of the Soviet Union during the Second World War. “Civilized” peoples continue to demonstrate similar attitudes around the world. Now it is covered by the so-called international humanitarian law, according to which you will be bombed for your own good, which, due to some backwardness and inferiority, you are not able to understand. The main unspoken principle still remains the thesis “the war that we wage is just, the war that is waged against us is unjust.” It underlies the campaigns of ideological and PR support for all military actions that continue to be carried out by the United States and its satellites. But the time of such laws and rules of warfare is gradually becoming a thing of the past. The unipolar world is bursting at the seams, and at its end, the inferiority of previous approaches becomes clearest. For example, Israeli journalist Simon Riklin says live on local television that he is “FOR” war crimes in the Gaza Strip and that he does not care about criticism. At the same time, those present laugh together. He says: “When I see the destruction of houses in Gaza, I want there to be more. So that they have nothing left that they can revive later." But this cannot continue, and more and more people in different countries understand this. The most diverse tools, techniques and methods of war are rapidly changing, but the laws and rules are not. Therefore, all sorts of surrogates are used in the form of some local agreements on what is permissible and in relation to whom, and what is absolutely not allowed, who can be brought to trial for old-style war crimes and who cannot, and so on. This applies to various aspects of armed confrontation. This practice takes place in various points of armed struggle on the planet, both with the participation of our country and with the participation of Americans. For the transition period, this is generally normal, since the old norms and rules are less and less valid, and there are no new ones yet. Those who make decisions understand this. The public is not always there. Posted by: badanov 2024-01-23 |
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