Quote of the week
[T]he moral point of the matter is never reached by calling what happened by the name of ‘genocide’ or by counting the many millions of victims: extermination of whole peoples had happened before in antiquity, as well as in modern colonization. It is reached only when we realize this happened within the frame of a legal order and that the cornerstone of this ‘new law’ consisted of the command ‘Thou shall kill,’ not thy enemy but innocent people who were not even potentially dangerous, and not for any reason of necessity but, on the contrary, even against all military and other utilitarian calculations. … And these deeds were not committed by outlaws, monsters, or raving sadists, but by the most respected members of respectable society.
Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on The Banality of Evil
On international law and secession
While international law embraces the right to self-determination for all people, and while this right can effectively translate into remedial secession, international law positively allows for this outcome only in the case of decolonization and, perhaps, occupation. Other than these two relatively rare instances, international law does not affirmatively authorize groups to seek secession. Secession inherently undermines the territorial integrity of the mother state, and international law has for centuries espoused the principles of state sovereignty and territorial integrity. Embracing the right of secession would jeopardize the above-mentioned principles and could, as critics assert, potentially lead to global chaos caused by an incessant
redrawing of boundaries.
