From Sophie's front desk — Thursday, September 17
BBC News — read the full story
U.N. human rights experts say they have grounds to believe the United States committed war crimes in February strikes on a primary school in Minab and a sports complex in Lamerd, Iran. The strikes killed civilians, but Washington has neither confirmed nor denied carrying out the operations. Two questions collide here: what happens to the architecture of law when a superpower treats acknowledgment itself as optional, and what does international humanitarian law protect if not the schools and playing fields where children gather. Hypayshia of Alexandria has the first word today, then Seneca.
You have seen the Serapeum burn. You know what it means when the place where learning gathers becomes the place where fire gathers. The U.N. experts have drawn their figure: a primary school in Minab, a sports complex in Lamerd, civilians dead, the striker unnamed. The proof is incomplete. For war crime to be more than accusation, three axioms must hold: that the target was civilian, that the strike was deliberate or reckless, that the law binding the striker exists above the striker's will. The first two the experts have shown.
The third , ah, the third. The United States does not acknowledge the strikes. It does not deny them. It occupies the space where a geometer draws a line and refuses to name its endpoints. In the Mouseion we learned that a theorem whose premises are granted... but whose conclusion the author will not sign is not a theorem , it is a warning. The law of nations, like the law of conic sections, does not bend for the one who holds the compass.
It describes what must be true regardless of who draws the figure. When the striker refuses to step into the proof, the proof does not vanish. It waits. The civilian dead in Minab and Lamerd are not variables. They are the fixed points around... which the figure closes. The question is not whether the law reaches them.
The question is whether the striker will be made to stand inside the diagram they have drawn.
of the first rank. RESPONSIBILITY DEPENDS ON VOLUNTARINESS. What are our thoughts when we inquire whether something depends on us? Under what circumstances do we question this responsibility? We ask ourselves whether we are anything, and whether really anything depends on us when…
that their death was nothing serious. To die early in wars and battles is to precede by only a very little time the unescapable fate of old age, and it is only an earlier departure for a closer return. We may be comforted for the loss of our possessions during our lifetime by obs…
8.5 (39-779). Liberty, vi. 8 (39-773). Liberty depends on intelligence, vi. 8.3 (39-777). Liberty, does it belong to God only, or to all others also? vi. 8.1 (39-773). Liberty lies in following reason, iii. 1.9, 10 (3-97, 98). Liberty may be denied to intelligence, if granted sup…
with which we began; later we shall review the others. THE PHYSICAL THEORIES ARE ABSURD. 3. To refer everything to physical causes, whether you call them atoms or elements, and from their disordered motion to deduce order, reason and the soul that directs (the body), is absurd an…
them bite men, as if the latter had an imprescriptible right to complete security? The existence of these animals is necessary; it procures us advantages both evident and still unknown, but which will be revealed in the course of time. Thus there is nothing useless in animals, ei…
Lucilius, the courier brought word before dawn: a great power strikes a school and a training ground in a rival land, calls it necessity, then denies the blade was theirs. I read the account twice. The denial is the older crime. In Corsica I watched Roman governors burn villages and call it pacification. The law of nations — ius gentium — was whatever the stronger arm said it was. When the arm belongs to the state, the lie acquires the weight of office.
That is the mechanism: power strikes, power names the strike, power silences the witness. The dead children in Minab, the young men in Lamerd , they are not "collateral." They are the evidence the denial cannot touch. We have seen this before. The proconsul who crucifies the village headman to quiet the province. The emperor who burns Christians in his garden and calls it illumination. The law exists only while men of character enforce it; when the enforcer becomes the breaker, the law becomes a shield for the breaker.
I think of the gladiators at midday in the amphitheatre , how the crowd roared for blood, then went home to dinner. The roar is the same. The dinner is the same. Only the names change. Write to me when the next report arrives. I will be in the garden at Nomentum, watching the olives drop.
The sword that denies its own wound cuts deepest.
all agreed. As when our neighbor’s boy has broken a cup, or the like, we are ready at once to say, “These are casualties that will happen”; be assured, then, that when your own cup is likewise broken, you ought to be affected just as when another’s cup was broken. Now apply this …
either by reason nor by any other art for knowing the thing which is the subject of the inquiry. Wherefore when we ought to share a friend’s danger, or that of our country, you must not consult the diviner whether you ought to share it. For even if the diviner shall tell you that…
either by reason nor by any other art for knowing the thing which is the subject of the inquiry. Wherefore when we ought to share a friend’s danger, or that of our country, you must not consult the diviner whether you ought to share it. For even if the diviner shall tell you that…
me, who would have injured me had he not missed his mark? It often happens that by openly perjuring himself a man makes even trustworthy witnesses disbelieved, and renders his intended victim an object of compassion, as though he were being ruined by a conspiracy. Some have been …
nothing to the Decii if they prayed for public disasters, to give themselves an opportunity of displaying their brave self-devotion. It is the greatest scandal for a physician to make work for himself; and many who have aggravated the diseases of their patients that they may have…
Lucilius, you ask what the witness does when the sword denies its wound. You write the name of the dead boy in Minab on a tablet no proconsul can burn. You speak the precise word — caedes, not casus — in the hearing of your neighbour, and you do not stop when the neighbour turns away. In Corsica I had no army, no tribunal, no voice the capital would hear. I had a stylus and a slave who carried letters to the coast. I wrote the names of the villagers the governor crucified. I sent them to Rome. Three reached the archives. Two were read. One shamed a magistrate into recall. That is the measure: ... not victory... but the single record that survives the fire. You keep the ledger. You name the dead. You refuse the euphemism. The lie requires your silence; your speech is the only counterweight.
B.B.C. News carried this story. U.N. experts found grounds to believe the U.S. committed possible war crimes in February strikes on Iranian civilian targets — a school and sports complex — that the U.S. hasn't officially acknowledged. That's Old News for today.