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Butler Shaffer, LewRockwell.com
Many have expressed surprise, if not outrage, at the United Nations granting to American and British soldiers immunity from international criminal prosecution for wrongs committed while they were engaged in UN missions. "Given the recent revelations . . . the US has picked one hell of a moment to ask for special treatment," said an official of Human Rights Watch.
Those who are shocked by such news need to review history. Political systems insisting they not be held accountable for wrongs they have committed goes to the very essence of politics. Any first-year political science student can tell you that governments are defined as institutions enjoying a monopoly on the use of force within a given geographic area. If force is the operating principle in politics, then how naïve are those who believe that people who enjoy the popularly sanctioned power to pursue their ends through violent means will respect any formal restraint on such capacities? No more than would a lion be expected to moderate its forceful energies vis-à-vis the interests of a gazelle, should we expect statists to take seriously the notion that they be held responsible for how they choose to exercise their monopoly powers.
That political systems should regard themselves as immune to the processes of accountability attending the behavior of ordinary people, is not a recent phenomenon. Its origins can be traced to our earliest ancestor who picked up a club and beat his neighbors into submission. I suspect that the only recourse others had was to get an even bigger club, thus introducing us to the evolutionary processes that have created the modern state.
The exemption the United States was able to extract from the United Nations was but another expression of the medieval notion of "divine right of kings." The proposition that "the king can do no wrong" did not succumb to the same forces that brought an end to monarchical power; it was only transformed – in secular and democratic cultures – into the notion of "sovereign immunity." But the same insistence that institutionalized force be free to act without accountability remains as intact as ever. Our caveman tyrant would be flabbergasted by the modern, sophisticated clubs with which his descendants rule others, but he would comprehend the underlying principle at once.
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