Genocide, atrocity and war propaganda pt 1
Hey Twitter bro
Part 1
This Fallout series of articles was provoked by thoughts I have already been having on propaganda thoughts, which are already somewhat covered in our upcoming book, Russian Genocidal Warfare (Bellamy, Blood, Du Cane - see end of post) and some recent developments. Its also based around Twitter’s smug feeling of immunity for responsibility for providing Russian genocidal rhetoric a channel.
There is no public service or free speech protection and defence for genocidal and war crime speech. I wonder if the Twitter legal department is too busy handling idiots like Elon Musk and Kanye West, and especially Donald Trump. Yes, they’re all richer than me but they’re just highly specialised predators in parasitic niches. At least as sociopaths if not psychopaths and one needs help.
Well, Kanye is good great genius with music but I find it pretentious and not to my taste. Big up junglist, gwan.
Back to the subject, is Twitter too addicted to engagement? The Facebook trap? There is no public service reason to let Russian government agencies and crypto agencies spew their filth via Twitter.
They are the current-day Nazis. The more freedom they have to vent their bile, the more bile they produce and it seems Russian actors are engaged in a spiral of hate speech which does affect their policy and behavior. Hate comes before action. Always. Giving them social media access is oxygen to their fire of hatred. Its the same with Russian market access, Russian tourism and Russian speech.
Access means atrocities. We can follow the rambling chaos of Russian traditional media and Telegram which contains more evil and genocide than the archives of the SS would over a thousand year Reich.
Propaganda is a key part of preparation and conduct of warfare - and in genocide. Not every war is genocidal, not every genocide requires war but every genocide and involves propaganda.1 Russian propaganda supports their war and their genocide. There must be responsibility.
And I even think Twitter in particular is straying into criminal responsibility before the ICC or national jurisdictions for its executives and employees for facilitating war, genocide and atrocity propaganda via allowing Russian criminals a platform for the calls to illegal action, especially genocide. Twitter, the ICC doesn’t care about your safe harbour provisions - and you’re not covered by the US War Criminal Immunity Act except for extradition.2 Media is a tool of war and social media in particular is still a tool of war.3 It is also a tool in this war and Russian genocide.4 Provide a platform for genocide propaganda? Go to jail.
Twitter bros - you do not have safe harbour protection from this:
Article III The following acts shall be punishable:
(c) Direct and public incitement to commit genocide;5
The ICC has jurisdiction over you.
Article 25(8) Individual criminal responsibility
1. The Court shall have jurisdiction over natural persons pursuant to this Statute.
2. A person who commits a crime within the jurisdiction of the Court shall be individually responsible and liable for punishment in accordance with this Statute.
3. In accordance with this Statute, a person shall be criminally responsible and liable for punishment for a crime within the jurisdiction of the Court if that person:
(c) For the purpose of facilitating the commission of such a crime, aids, abets or otherwise assists in its commission or its attempted commission, including providing the means for its commission;
…
(e) In respect of the crime of genocide, directly and publicly incites others to commit genocide;6
(c) and (e) above combine.
I will need to do some groundwork so let’s start the (disjointed) legal history lesson.
“Propaganda was invariably a factor in preparing and conducting acts of aggression […] With the help of the police controls and of a system of censorship, it was possible to do away altogether with the freedom of the press and of speech […] The basic method of the Nazi propagandistic activity lay in the false presentation of facts.” - Iona Nitchenko, legal murderer, bad lawyer and Soviet judge at the International Military Tribunal (IMT, the big Nuremberg trial)7
Iona Nitchenko, Moscow show trial murderer was a terrible lawyer. So was his (from a colleague) concept of war of aggression which was conjured up in his version to appropriate the greatest atrocity of World War Two from the Jews and other genocided people - to the attack on glorious rodina, the USSR (Russia rebranded).
Nitchenko was a legal nihilist - he saw law only as a tool. Trials were only to give the arranged verdict. He protested to the other judges on this and they were embarrassed/shocked (claimed), being naive about Russian ‘law’. He was mostly an embarrassment at Nuremberg - like attempting to blame the Germans for Katyń.8 But he was right with his quote on propaganda (above), in his dissent to the acquittal of Hans Fritzsche, Nazi flunky, who escaped any punishment at Nuremberg.9 Fritzsche was a stand-in for murderer-suicider Goebbels. Friszche convinced the naive Western judges he didn’t know about the Holocaust. Turned out that he most definitely did. He should have hung. Russians know propaganda and know it is used in genocide! The judge murderer was simply applying principles of incitement to violence that he knew - propaganda precedes, catalyzes or causes and justifies the violence! We see that today with smartphones becoming instruments of violence as or more important than guns, machetes and burning tires (Ford, Hoskins, Radical War)
One of Trainin’s murderer-pretending-to-be-a-lawyer ‘friends’ (they denounced and murdered each other, promotion was very much over the body of your predecessor) was Andrey “Give me a man and I will find the crime.” Vyshinsky, who undoubtedly put Rafael Lemkin on the Soviet kill list during the Soviet invasion of Poland with its ally Nazi Germany in September 1939. Vyshinsky particularly despised Lemkin’s idea of limiting state sovereignty. A position held by many other fascists then and now (yes I know he was technically a Russian communist, but the flip side of the same coin).10
Lemkin most famously coined the term genocide with his work Axis Rule in Occupied Europe.11 He was one of the architects of the Genocide Convention, which Vyshinsky tried to sabotage at convention and in committee.12
“Mr President, who is making international law for the world –Vyshinsky or the General Assembly?” - Lemkin at the UN 1946”13
Lemkin wasn’t only the author of the term genocide. In 1934 he worked with his Lviv (Lwów) University mentor, on the appropriately nicknamed Kodeks Makarewicza, a progressive and humane criminal code that reformed Polish law at a time of growing fascism and legal nihilism throughout Europe.14 Juliusz Makarewicz is a fascinating man. A Jew who hated being Jewish, a Polish nationalist, who taught at Lviv University throughout the war and continued after 1945 when my grandmother was chased out of Lwów and Stalin took the city for the Russian Empire (it’s good that it is now a Ukrainian city, and it should stay that way, my grandmother was half Ukrainian). Lwów University was a genius foundry - then the Nazis annihilated the legacy, to the point that the university didn't know Lemkin was a graduate (Philip Sands pointed this out and now Lemkin is appropriately celebrated)15. Hersch Lauterpacht, QC, another genius of law, a titan of human rights law, and one of the key authors of the European Convention of Human Rights that the fascist Suella Braverman, who soiled the position of QC, despises, was supposedly unable to study law as a Jew at Lwów because of Polish nationalism. However, Makarewicz was Lemkin’s friend and mentor. All Jews. All brilliant lawyers. Two of them claimed Poland very vigorously and rightfully so. Makarewicz was very nationalistic. He was not a fascist. Neither was Lemkin, who became somewhat of a Zionist and attempted to become too friendly with the American right, who despised him as a Jew and Pole, a polyglot who spoke funny.16
I digress. The Kodeks Makariewcza contains:
Art. 113. §1 Whoever publicly agitates for a war of aggression, is subject to imprisonment for up to 5 years.
§2 Prosecution only occurs if the act under §1 is criminalised by the legislation of the country against which the agitation is brought.
This was obviously a reaction to Nazi agitation against Poland, but also Soviet agitation, Poland had won an existential war against Soviet Russia only a decade before.
Lemkin claimed authorship of this provision of law.17 He was in 1934 a noted lawyer, public and private in Poland. This alone would have got him on Soviet kill lists, even before he attacked Soviet legal nihilism and instrumentalism in his commentaries on Soviet pseudo-law.18 His thoughts on international law including banning war of atrocities brought him to genocide. He didn’t however make the Soviet nonsense claim that war was the root of all evil and atrocities. Atrocities occur without war (Holodomor) and are the reason for war (Holocaust on Jews mixed with lebensraum genocide and revanchist behind that was the dominant driver of Nazi war)
This is not the same provision as the Soviet legal appropriation mechanism of war of aggression against rodina… Soviet appropriation reached such absurd levels post-war that even the term genocide was also appropriated:
Essentially, Andriukhin interpreted as genocide any attack on any group potentially sympathetic to the Soviet Union.19
The prohibition of propaganda to war as well as the prohibition of war itself were subjects that lawyers and politicians were dealing with in the inter-war period and Lemkin was not alone or the leading jurist on the subject.20 He was however making the steps that would lead him to legal greatness.
However, at the same time, others were taking steps towards the Holocaust.21 Lemkin was a genius of law. The Nazis were geniuses of propaganda.
But the Nazis not only silenced discordant voices. They created positive controls as effective as their negative ones. Propaganda organs, on a scale never before known, stimulated the Party and Party formation with a permanent enthusiasm and abandon such as we, democratic people, can work up only for a few days before a general election. They inculcated and practiced the Führerprinzip which centralized control of the Party and of the Party controlled State over the lives and thought of the German people, who are accustomed to look upon the German State, by whomever controlled, with a mysticism that is incomprehensible to my people... We have here the surviving top politicians, militarists, financiers, diplomats, administrators, and propagandists, of the Nazi movement. Who was responsible for these crimes if they were not?... International law, natural law, German law, any law at all was to these men simply a propaganda device to be invoked when it helped and to be ignored when it would condemn what they wanted to do. [Legal nihilism]" - Justice Jackson, US Judge at the IMT, US Supreme Court Judge.22
Your eyes will be glazing over by now, so part 2 this week.
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PS Update 29 November 2022
They’re getting worried about the Hague
PPS Junglist gwan heavy
‘War, Propaganda and the Media’. Accessed 11 October 2022. https://www.globalissues.org/article/157/war-propaganda-and-the-media.
Yanagizawa-Drott, David. ‘Propaganda and Conflict: Evidence from the Rwandan Genocide’. The Quarterly Journal of Economics 129, no. 4 (2014): 1947–94. https://www.jstor.org/stable/26372590.
‘The Road to Genocide: The Propaganda Machine of the Self-Declared Islamic State (Is) in: International Criminal Law Review Volume 16 Issue 3 (2016)’. Accessed 11 October 2022. https://brill.com/view/journals/icla/16/3/article-p361_1.xml?language=en.
Wieringa, Saskia, and Nursyahbani Katjasungkana. Propaganda and the Genocide in Indonesia. London: Routledge, 2020.
‘American Service-Members’ Protection Act’. In Wikipedia, 31 July 2022. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=American_Service-Members%27_Protection_Act&oldid=1101575158.
Lower, Matthew, and Thomas Hauschildt. ‘The Media as a Tool of War: Propaganda in the Rwandan Genocide’. Human Security Centre (blog), 9 May 2014. http://www.hscentre.org/sub-saharan-africa/media-tool-war-propaganda-rwandan-genocide/.
Ford, Matthew C., and Andrew Hoskins. Radical War: Data, Attention and Control in the Twenty-First Century. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2022.
Souza Dias, Talita de. ‘Russia’s “Genocide Disinformation” and War Propaganda Are Breaches of the International Convention Concerning the Use of Broadcasting in the Cause of Peace and Fall within the ICJ’s Jurisdiction’. EJIL: Talk! (blog), 4 March 2022. https://www.ejiltalk.org/russias-genocide-disinformation-and-war-propaganda-are-breaches-of-the-international-convention-concerning-the-use-of-broadcasting-in-the-cause-of-peace-and-fall-within-the/.
‘Treaties, States Parties, and Commentaries - Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide, 1948’. Accessed 11 October 2022. https://ihl-databases.icrc.org/ihl/INTRO/357.
Rome Statute International Criminal (2022). https://www.icc-cpi.int/sites/default/files/RS-Eng.pdf.
‘Putting Criminal Accountability into Perspective: Russia, Ukraine and the ICC’. Accessed 11 October 2022. https://www.leidenlawblog.nl/articles/putting-criminal-accountability-into-perspective-russia-ukraine-and-the-icc.
Hirsch, Francine. Soviet Judgment at Nuremberg: A New History of the International Military Tribunal after World War II. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2020.
World Socialist Web Site. ‘The Nuremberg Tribunal and the Role of the Media’. Accessed 11 October 2022. https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2003/04/nure-a16.html. Watch out, Russian friendly!
Irvin-Erickson, Douglas. Raphael Lemkin and the Concept of Genocide. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017, 49. https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv2t4ds5.
Lemkin, Raphael. Axis Rule In Occupied Europe: Laws of Occupation, Analysis of Government, Proposals for Redress. Washington D.C: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1944.
‘United Nations Office on Genocide Prevention and the Responsibility to Protect’. Accessed 11 October 2022. https://www.un.org/en/genocideprevention/genocide-convention.shtml.
Cooper, John. Raphael Lemkin and the Struggle for the Genocide Convention. Basingstoke [England] ; New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008, 113.
‘Rozporządzenie Prezydenta Rzeczypospolitej z Dnia 11 Lipca 1932 r. - Kodeks Karny.’ Accessed 11 October 2022. https://isap.sejm.gov.pl/isap.nsf/DocDetails.xsp?id=WDU19320600571.
Sands, Philippe. East West Street: On the Origins of Genocide and Crimes Against Humanity. London: W&N, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2016. Covers Lemkin, Lauterpacht and Hans Frank, a murder lawyer who outdid his Soviet colleagues.
Irvin Erickson, Rafael Lemkin, chapter 7, “The Cold War and the Civil Rights Movement”.
Irvin Erickson, Rafael Lemkin, 43. RaphaËl Lemkin Genocide Prevention Program. ‘Lemkin’s Theory’. Accessed 11 October 2022. https://lemkinprogram.gmu.edu/lemkin.
Lemkin, Rafał, and Wacław Makowski. Kodeks Karny Rosji Sowieckiej. Warszawa: F. Hoesick, 1928.
Weiss-Wendt, Anton. A Rhetorical Crime: Genocide in the Geopolitical Discourse of the Cold War, 20. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2018.
Kearney, Michael G. ‘The Roots of the Prohibition of Propaganda for War in International Law’. In The Prohibition of Propaganda for War in International Law, edited by Michael G. Kearney, 0. Oxford University Press, 2007. https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199232451.003.0002.
United Nations, ed. Historical Review of Developments Relating to Aggression. New York: United Nations, 2003. https://legal.un.org/cod/books/HistoricalReview-Aggression.pdf.
‘Opening Statement before the International Military Tribunal - Robert H Jackson Center’. Accessed 11 October 2022. https://www.roberthjackson.org/speech-and-writing/opening-statement-before-the-international-military-tribunal/, https://www.roberthjackson.org/speech-and-writing/opening-statement-before-the-international-military-tribunal/. Jackson made a bad call calling war of aggression the crime of crimes at Nuremberg, I won’t forgive him easily because his bad quote is constantly cited when the words he said are actually Trainin’s.