Advertisement

Unifor Leaderboard

One law for the West and another for the rest?

A presidential pardon and the killing fields of Gaza

Middle EastWar ZonesHuman RightsUSA Politics

The scales of justice. Photo by James Cridland/Wikimedia Commons.

On December 1 Joe Biden, acting under the authority conferred upon presidents under the US Constitution, granted to his son Hunter Biden a “Full and Unconditional Pardon”:

For those offenses against the United States which he has committed or may have committed or taken part in during the period from January 1, 2014 through December 1, 2024, including but not limited to all offenses charged or prosecuted (including any that have resulted in convictions) …


Hunter Biden had already been charged and convicted of three federal gun and nine federal tax charges, for which he was due to be sentenced on December 12 and 16 respectively. He could have served up to 25 years in federal prison on the gun charges and 17 years on the tax charges, though the general expectation was of leniency.

Other US presidents, including George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and Donald Trump, have also (ab)used this power to pardon associates, including friends and relatives. But the only precedent for a pardon this open-ended (it covers all offenses that Hunter may have committed or taken part in over 11 years), is the pardon Gerald Ford granted to Richard Nixon following the latter’s resignation after the Watergate scandal.

Even if evidence surfaced proving that Hunter committed murder during this timeframe, he could not be prosecuted federally for it, because Dad has pardoned him in advance.

A loving father?

Biden appended a personal statement to the official announcement of Hunter’s pardon, explaining why, despite having promised on several occasions not to do so (“I abide by the jury decision. I will do that and I will not pardon him,” he said in June), he had taken so extraordinary a step.

He maintained that Hunter was treated differently than people who commit the same crimes typically are, and the reason for this was political vindictiveness by the GOP.

His statement concludes:

I believe in the justice system, but as I have wrestled with this, I also believe raw politics has infected this process and it led to a miscarriage of justice—and once I made this decision this weekend, there was no sense in delaying it further. I hope Americans will understand why a father and a President would come to this decision.


Biden’s action has sharply divided Americans. Most people understand why a father might wish to pardon his son in these circumstances. Fewer accept that paternal love justifies their president taking the law into his own hands to overrule the courts.

Republicans have predictably accused Biden of nepotism and hypocrisy, with MAGA attack dog Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton gleefully proclaiming: “Democrats can spare us the lectures about the rule of law when, say, President Trump nominates Pam Bondi and Kash Patel to clean up this corruption.”

That Senator Cotton can say this with a straight face, when a convicted (though never sentenced) felon who appointed his daughter Ivanka and son-in-law Jared Kushner to (very lucrative) positions in his first administration is about to re-enter the White House—a felon who avoided sentencing and escaped other trials for election interference and stealing confidential documents only because his hand-picked Supreme Court justices manufactured a new definition of presidential immunity—boggles the mind.

But it is also beside the point. The issue here is not Trump (of whom nothing better is to be expected) but Biden—who made a “sacred pledge” that “the defense, protection and preservation of American democracy would remain, as it has been, the central cause of my presidency.” A cornerstone of any democracy is the rule of law.

Democratic dilemmas

Hunter Biden’s pardon has split the Democrats, who are already reeling from Kamala Harris’s electoral defeat.

Some—many of them progressives—have cheered Biden’s decision on the realpolitik grounds that Trump has made it clear he will not play by the rulebook and will weaponize the Department of Justice to exact revenge on his political opponents, including Hunter Biden. Why should Joe abandon his son to the mercies of a judicial system the incoming administration has made clear it intends to pervert?

Biden is now reportedly facing calls to extend a similar preemptive pardon to others on the Trump hit list, including Adam Schiff, Liz Cheney, Anthony Fauci, special prosecutor Jack Smith, and former Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley.

Others—who are mostly, though not all, on the more “moderate” wing of the party—worry about the precedent Biden has set and erosion of respect for the law.

“I’m disappointed,” admitted Colorado representative Jason Crow. “He promised he would not do this. I think it will make it harder for us going forward when we talk about upholding democracy.” Biden’s “decision put personal interest ahead of duty and further erodes Americans’ faith that the justice system is fair and equal for all,” agreed Colorado senator Michael Bennet. Senator Gary Peters of Michigan said that “A president’s family and allies shouldn’t get special treatment … This was an improper use of power, it erodes trust in our government, and it emboldens others to bend justice to suit their interests.”

In a biting editorial, the New York Times editorial board agreed:

This was a significant misstep that could leave lasting damage. It will not only tarnish Mr. Biden’s own record as a defender of democratic norms, it will also be greedily embraced as justification for Donald Trump’s further abuses of pardon power and broader attacks on the integrity of the justice system.


Trump is already hinting at using Biden’s pardon of Hunter to justify pardoning at least some of those jailed for the January 6 insurrection (as he likely intended to do anyway).

Other critics have pointed out that there are many other miscarriages of justice in the American system, including inmates sitting on federal death row convicted on dubious evidence and thousands of mostly Black prisoners jailed for minor drug offences or non-violent crimes, who are at least as deserving of a presidential pardon as Hunter Biden. Trump has already promised a spree of executions should he regain the presidency.

What better way of signaling that there is one law for the rich and powerful and another for everyone else?

A basket of deplorables

On December 3, two days after Biden pardoned Hunter, the US—presumably on the president’s instructions, and certainly with his knowledge—voted against a UN General Assembly resolution titled “Peaceful settlement of the question of Palestine,” which was designed to reinforce the organization’s commitment to a two-state solution. Despite American opposition, the resolution was adopted with the overwhelming support of the international community—157 votes in favor, eight against, and seven abstentions.

The resolution was unambiguous. It also concerned the rule of law, in this case laws governing relations between states and the conduct of war:

By terms of that text, the 193‑member organ stressed the need to urgently commit to a Middle East peace process. Israel, the occupying Power, must comply with international law, including ceasing all settlement activities and evacuating settlers from the Occupied Palestinian Territory.


Apart from the US and Israel, the only states opposing the motion were far-right populist Javier Milei’s Argentina; Viktor Orban’s “illiberal democracy,” Hungary; and the US client states of Micronesia, Nauru, Palau, and Papua New Guinea (which signed a defense pact with the US in May 2023). A basket of deplorables, one might say. The seven abstainers were Cameroon, the Czech Republic, Ecuador, Georgia, Paraguay, Ukraine—whose arms supply for its war with Russia relies on continuing American goodwill—and Uruguay.

All members of the G7 except the US supported the motion, as did all EU and/or NATO members except the US, Hungary, and the Czech Republic. Australia and New Zealand were on board. These countries—the so-called “Western democracies,” whatever their geographical location—have been among Israel’s strongest backers historically and throughout the fourteen months of its current assault on Gaza.

In supporting the motion, Canada was breaching its “years-long policy” of siding with Israel in all UN votes.

Whatever their past positions (or present evasions, including on enforcing ICC arrest warrants for Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant for war crimes should either set foot on their territory), the UK, France, Germany, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand’s votes calling for Israel to comply with international law put them on a collision course with the US.

If Donald Trump’s recent pronouncements and proposed appointments (Marco Rubio as secretary of state; Mike Waltz as national security advisor; Elise Stefanik as ambassador to the UN; Mike Huckabee as ambassador to Israel) are anything to go on, this rift will likely grow even wider under the incoming US administration.

For some unfathomable reason—though America’s habitual arrogance, insularity, and bottomless faith in its own exceptionality might have something to do with it—the Biden administration’s complicity in enabling Israel’s war crimes, crimes against humanity, and (“plausible”) genocide in Gaza and the other occupied Palestinian territories does not arouse the same outrage among US politicians and pundits as Hunter Biden’s pardon.

Indeed, these crimes are seldom seriously debated at all outside university campuses and fringe media, and any attempt to raise them is likely to be met with accusations of antisemitism and support for terrorism by Republican and Democratic politicians alike.

Yet the same legal, moral, and political questions of respect for democratic institutions and the rule of law arise in both instances.

The ICJ provisional measures

A number of judgments over the last year from the world’s two highest courts, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) set up by the UN in 1946, and the International Criminal Court (ICC) established by the Rome Statute in 2002, have put it beyond any doubt that both Israel’s continuing occupation of the Palestinian territories and the manner in which it has conducted its military campaign against Gaza since October 7, 2023, are contrary to international law.

On January 26, the ICJ delivered an interim ruling on South Africa’s case against Israel for genocide (which will likely take years to arrive at a final judgment).

The court imposed six “provisional measures” on Israel aimed at “preserving … the right of the Palestinians in Gaza to be protected from acts of genocide and related prohibited acts.” The judges ruled that this right to protection was “plausible” (§54) because there was “a real and imminent risk” (§74) that genocide could occur before the ICJ delivered its final judgment unless steps were actively taken to stop it happening.

The ICJ required Israel to:

take all measures within its power to prevent … (a) killing members of the group [Palestinians]; (b) causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; (c) deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; and (d) imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group (§78).


The court also instructed Israel “to take immediate and effective measures to enable the provision of urgently needed basic services and humanitarian assistance to address the adverse conditions of life faced by Palestinians in the Gaza Strip” (§80).

Benjamin Netanyahu protested that “the very claim that Israel is committing genocide against Palestinians is not just false, it is outrageous, and the court’s willingness to discuss it at all is a mark of disgrace that will not be erased for generations.”

Israel’s Defense Minister Yoav Gallant—who on 9 October 2023 ordered “a complete siege on the Gaza Strip” in which “There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed. We are fighting human animals and we are acting accordingly”—complained that “The ICJ in The Hague went above and beyond, when it granted South Africa’s antisemitic request to discuss the claim of genocide in Gaza, and now refuses to reject the petition outright.”

The US stood behind Israel, asserting that “We continue to believe that allegations of genocide are unfounded and note the court did not make a finding about genocide or call for a ceasefire in its ruling and that it called for the unconditional, immediate release of all hostages being held by Hamas.”

Further ICJ measures on Gaza

On further petitioning from South Africa, on March 28 the ICJ ordered Israel to:

(a) take all necessary and effective measures to ensure, without delay, in full co-operation with the United Nations, the unhindered provision at scale by all concerned of urgently needed basic services and humanitarian assistance … to Palestinians throughout Gaza, including by increasing the capacity and number of land crossing points and maintaining them open for as long as necessary; and (b) ensure with immediate effect that its military does not commit acts which constitute a violation of any of the rights of the Palestinians in Gaza … including by preventing, through any action, the delivery of urgently needed humanitarian assistance (§45).


Revisiting the case for a third time on May 24, the ICJ ordered that “Israel must immediately halt its military offensive, and any other action in the Rafah Governorate, which may inflict on the Palestinian group in Gaza conditions of life that could bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part”; “take effective measures to ensure the unimpeded access to the Gaza Strip of any commission of inquiry …mandated by competent organs of the United Nations to investigate allegations of genocide”; and “submit a report to the Court on all measures taken to give effect to this Order” (§57).

Remember Rafah? It was one of Joe Biden’s “red lines,” which did not stop the IDF expelling its population and reducing it to ruins. Joe caved, of course. His fatherly concern evidently does not extend to the 17,400 Palestinian children killed—mostly by US bombs—in Gaza, or the thousands more who have been maimed or orphaned.

Israel did not comply with any of the January, March or May ICJ orders. The Rafah offensive continued. So did massacres of civilians. This was followed by a renewed IDF seige of North Gaza, which even the onetime Likud Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon characterizes as an exercise in “ethnic cleansing.” In October and November the flow of humanitarian aid into Gaza hit its lowest levels since the beginning of the war.

Instead of cooperating with the UN—let alone permitting it to conduct an inquiry into allegations of genocide—Israel has prohibited UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterras from entering the country and has conducted a vicious smear campaign to discredit the UN’s special rapporteur on the occupied Palestine territories, Francesca Albanese.

In an ultimate snub to the ICJ, on October 28 the Israeli parliament adopted two laws designating UNRWA—the principal channel for distributing humanitarian aid in Gaza—as a “terrorist organization,” banning it from operating in Israel or the occupied territories.

The US breaks its own laws for Israel

Once again the US fully supported Israel in its defiance of the court and continued to supply it with arms. Having suspended funding in January, the US banned all funding to UNRWA for a year on March 25, with substantial bipartisan support from Congress.

In late April, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken ignored both a US Agency for International Development (USAID) memo claiming that Israel was “subjecting US humanitarian aid destined for Gaza to ‘arbitrary denial, restriction and impediments,’” and misgivings within the State Department over whether Israel’s use of US-supplied weaponry in Gaza was “consistent with all applicable international and domestic law and policy,” and certified Israel’s own assurances as “credible and reliable.”

This was arguably contrary to both the Biden administration’s own National Security Memorandum (NSM) 20, a measure adopted on February 8 with the declared aim of ensuring accountability, and the Leahy Laws “prohibiting the US Government from using funds for assistance to units of foreign security forces where there is credible information implicating that unit in the commission of gross violations of human rights.”

This pattern repeated itself even after the US presidential election. In what was clearly in retrospect an electoral ploy, the US had put Israel on 30 days notice that if it did not show “a sustained commitment to implementing and maintaining” concrete measures “to reverse the downward humanitarian trajectory” in Gaza, there might be “implications for US policy under NSM-20 and relevant US law (weapons supply).”

On November 12—despite massive evidence to the contrary—the State Department announced it “has concluded that Israel is not currently impeding assistance to Gaza and therefore is not violating US law.” Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren co-sponsored a Senate motion of disapproval on the administration’s continuing to supply arms to Israel in these circumstances, which gained only 20 votes in the 100-member assembly.

President Joe Biden at Ben Gurion Airport in Tel Aviv, Israel. Photo by Adam Schultz/White House/Flickr.

The ICJ advisory opinion on the occupation

In a development that is independent of South Africa’s genocide case, on July 19 the ICJ delivered a far-reaching advisory opinion on the “Legal Consequences Arising from the Policies and Practices of Israel in the Occupied Palestinian Territory” (including Gaza).

While ICJ advisory opinions are not binding, they “carry great legal weight and moral authority … [and] contribute to the elucidation and development of international law and thereby to the strengthening of peaceful relations between States.” To ignore the court’s advice is to undermine a central pillar of the post-war international legal order.

The judges concluded that “Israel’s continued presence in the Occupied Palestinian Territory is unlawful,” and it must therefore “end its unlawful presence … as rapidly as possible”; ”cease immediately all new settlement activities, and … evacuate all settlers from the Occupied Palestinian Territory”; and “make reparation for the damage caused to all the natural or legal persons concerned in the Occupied Palestinian Territory.”

Importantly, the ICJ judgment also made it emphatically clear to Israel’s supporters that:

all States are under an obligation not to recognize as legal the situation arising from the unlawful presence of the State of Israel in the Occupied Palestinian Territory and not to render aid or assistance in maintaining the situation created by the continued presence of the State of Israel in the Occupied Palestinian Territory.


Israeli reaction was furious. Foreign Minister Israel Katz damned the ICJ judgment as “fundamentally warped, one-sided, and wrong.” Israel Gantz, head of one of the largest settler councils, the Binyamin Regional Council, argued that it was “contrary to the Bible, morality and international law.” Benjamin Netanyahu posted to X:

The Jewish people are not occupiers in their own land, including in our eternal capital Jerusalem nor in Judea and Samaria (West Bank), our historical homeland. No absurd opinion in The Hague can deny this historical truth or the legal right of Israelis to live in their own communities in our ancestral home.


National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir said the ICJ conclusions “prove for the thousandth time that this is a clearly political and anti-Semitic organization,” while his fellow far-right cabinet member, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, said the appropriate response to the ICJ’s decision is to “impose sovereignty (over the West Bank) now.”

As an original signatory of the statute that established the ICJ (though one that has since had a fractious relationship with the court, withdrawing from its compulsory jurisdiction in 1986), the US was more measured in its response—while making its disapproval of the ICJ’s unwanted interference in its plans for the Middle East clear.

Expressing “concern” that that “the breadth of the court’s opinion will complicate efforts to resolve the conflict,” the State Department said that the demand for Israel to withdraw as soon as possible from the occupied territories was “inconsistent with the established framework” for resolving the conflict—i.e., the “peace process” established by the Oslo Accords of 1993 and 1995, which Benjamin Netanyahu has proudly sabotaged—and warned all parties not to use the ICJ advisory opinion “as a pretext for further unilateral actions that deepen divisions or for supplanting a negotiated two-state solution.”

The ICC arrest warrants

The most damning legal indictment of Israel’s conduct of its offensive in Gaza came on November 21, when the pre-trial Chamber of the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and then-Israeli Minister of Defense Yoav Gallant.

The court stopped short of charging Netanyahu and Gallant with genocide, accusing them only (!) of “the war crime of starvation as a method of warfare; and the crimes against humanity of murder, persecution, and other inhumane acts.”

Among (many) other things, the ICC pre-trial chamber asserts:

both individuals intentionally and knowingly deprived the civilian population in Gaza of objects indispensable to their survival, including food, water, and medicine and medical supplies, as well as fuel and electricity … [as well as] impeding humanitarian aid in violation of international humanitarian law and their failure to facilitate relief by all means at its disposal …


Needless to say, reaction in Israel—though not always among the Jewish community internationally—was uniformly hostile. Netanyahu’s office denounced the chamber’s decision as “antisemitic,” while Gallant claimed it “sets a dangerous precedent against the right to self-defense and moral warfare.” Opposition politicians concurred. Benny Gantz said the decision was a “shameful stain of historic proportion that will never be forgotten,” and Yair Lapid called it a “prize for terror.” Not to be outdone, Itamar Ben-Gvir urged Israel to annex the West Bank by way of reply.

Unlike most Western democracies—and together with Israel, Russia, China, and India—the US is not a party to the Rome Statute that established the ICC in 2002, and is not one of the 124 countries that accept its jurisdiction. This did not stop it from welcoming the same court’s issue of an arrest warrant in March 2023 against Vladimir Putin for war crimes in Ukraine (which Joe Biden said was “justified” and “makes a very strong point”).

But for Israel—as usual—it is a different story. “We fundamentally reject the court’s decision to issue arrest warrants for senior Israeli officials,” said White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre. “We remain deeply concerned by the prosecutor’s rush to seek arrest warrants and the troubling process errors that led to this decision.” In fact, the court took months longer to issue arrest warrants for Netanyahu and Gallant than it had for Putin. “The United States has been clear that the ICC does not have jurisdiction over this matter,” the US national security council added.

It is telling that these statements focus on questions of the court’s jurisdiction—which the Chamber actually considered in its decision—and process, and avoid addressing the substance of the charges entirely.

Republicans outdid one another in macho belligerence. Mike Waltz posted that “The ICC has no credibility and these allegations have been refuted by the US government,” adding “You can expect a strong response to the antisemitic bias of the ICC and UN come January.” Invoking the 2002 so-called Hague Invasion Act, which authorizes the use of military force to free Americans or allied citizens detained by the ICC, Tom Cotton declared that “The ICC is a kangaroo court and [ICC prosecutor] Karim Khan is a deranged fanatic. Woe to him and anyone who tries to enforce these outlaw warrants.”

Trump’s ally South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham—who ironically is a former Chair of the Senate Committee on the Judiciary—not only called on the US government to impose sanctions against ICC personnel (as the previous Trump administration did), but threatened “To any ally, Canada, Britain, Germany, France, if you try to help the ICC, we’re going to sanction you. If you are going to help the ICC as a nation enforce the arrest warrant against Bibi and Gallant … I will put sanctions on you.”

Democratic majority leader Chuck Schumer didn’t go so far as to threaten America’s allies, but urged the Senate “to pass the bipartisan legislation that came from the House sanctioning the Court for such an outrage and President Biden needs to sign it.”

As ever, US support for Israel—even against charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity—was bipartisan. Among other Democrats, Florida Congressman Jared Moskowitz accused the ICC of “antisemitic double standards,” Nevada Senator Jacky Rosen urged Biden to “use his authority to swiftly respond to this overreach,” and New York Congressman Ritchie Torres accused the ICC of “criminalizing self-defense.”

Pennsylvania Senator John Fetterman posted on X, “No standing, relevance, or path. Fuck that,” accompanied by an emoji of the Israeli flag.

Questions of equivalence

More chilling than any of this all-American bluster was the official White House response from Joe Biden. Here is his presidential statement—in full:

The ICC issuance of arrest warrants against Israeli leaders is outrageous. Let me be clear once again: whatever the ICC might imply, there is no equivalence—none—between Israel and Hamas. We will always stand with Israel against threats to its security.


Though Justin Trudeau promised that Canada would abide by the ICC ruling, he had advanced the same line of argument back in May, when ICC prosecutor Karim Khan first requested arrest warrants against Netanyahu and Gallant (as well as three Hamas leaders whom Israel has since assassinated). What the Canadian prime minister found “troubling,” in his words, was “the sense of an equivalency between the democratically elected leaders of Israel and the bloodthirsty terrorists that lead up Hamas.”

Trudeau’s Special Advisor on Jewish Community Relations and Antisemitism, Anthony Housefather, similarly condemned drawing “moral equivalency … between the leaders of a recognized terrorist organization and the elected leaders of a democratic state.” Then-UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak got on the same high horse, pontificating that “There is no moral equivalence between a democratic state exercising its lawful right to self defense and the terrorist group Hamas. It is wrong to conflate and equivocate between those two different entities.” In similar vein, on November 24 the Washington Post condemned the ICC for “putting the elected leaders of a democratic country with its own independent judiciary in the same category as dictators and authoritarians.”

It suffices to recall that Adolf Hitler was the duly elected leader of a Western democratic state to see the fundamental flaw in these arguments. The issue is not the standing of the accused—democratically elected politicians as against “terrorists” (as designated by the West though not in this case by much of the rest of the world)—but the equivalency of the crimes they are charged with having committed, no matter who they are.

To argue that democratic regimes should be exempt from prosecution for war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide simply because they are democracies is to say that there should be one law for the West and another for the rest.

Lindsey Graham obligingly let the cat out of the bag, when he told a Turkish broadcaster that “The Rome Statute doesn’t apply to Israel, the United States, France, Germany, or Great Britain because it wasn’t conceived to come after us.”

Kind of like US law doesn’t apply to Hunter Biden because his loving Dad pardoned him.

Where ignorant armies clash by night

It is not only Palestinians that are dying on the killing fields of Gaza. The genocide exacts a toll on its perpetrators too. Israel and its Western enablers—principally, but no means exclusively, the United States—are committing two kinds of crime in Gaza.

The first are the war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocidal acts that have led to the ICJ and ICC rulings discussed here. Though the mainstream Western media has for the most part denied, distorted, deflected from, or simply not reported these crimes, there can be no excuse for continuing to ignore them. The evidence is overwhelming.

Apart from the courts’ own documents, Israel’s crimes have been copiously documented in reports published over the last year from UN agencies and rapporteurs, human rights organizations like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, NGOs like Oxfam and Save the Children, and research units like Forensic Architecture.

A particularly rich and detailed—and extremely harrowing—source is the Israeli historian Lee Mordechai’s online database of Israeli war crimes in Gaza, which:

[C]ontains over 1,400 footnotes referencing thousands of sources. It details instances of Israeli troops shooting civilians waving white flags, abusing individuals, captives and corpses, randomly firing their weapons, gleefully destroying houses, burning books and defacing Islamic symbols.


I quote a lengthy article on Mordechai’s database in the newspaper Haaretz—Israel’s longest-running daily newspaper (it was founded in 1918), with which the Netanyahu government has now banned its employees from having any contact.

To dismiss all of these as “antisemitic propaganda” is risible—and disingenuous in the extreme.

The second kind of crime, with which I have been more concerned here, are crimes against the rule of law. These may prove to be no less consequential. Or genocidal.

For over a year now, the West has been tearing up the legal and institutional fabric on which the post-war international order and its increasingly threadbare claims to moral authority rest—in much the same way as Joe Biden has overridden the US judicial system in order to grant his wayward son an unprecedented pardon and Donald Trump promises to weaponize the same system to settle scores with his political enemies.

An old-new Wild West beckons, only this time with nukes and 2,000-pound bunker-buster bombs and hellfire missiles and AI-guided quadcopters and drones in place of Colt 45s. A lawless future is a bleak future. For everybody except the rich and powerful.

The closing lines of Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach,” written in 1867, the same year Karl Marx published Capital, come to mind:

And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.


Derek Sayer is professor emeritus at the University of Alberta and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. His most recent book, Postcards from Absurdistan: Prague at the End of History, won the 2023 Canadian Jewish Literary Award for Scholarship and was a finalist for the Association of American Publishers PROSE Award in European History.

Advertisement

PSAC leaderboard