David Bush, self-proclaimed leftist and radical organizer in Toronto, posted the following on Facebook a few hours ago:
International law for thee not for me. The invasion of Iraq was preceded by sustained campaign to at least try to win international and domestic support and justify it legally.
This bombing of Iran had no such attempt to justify it. It was a naked act of aggression. A war crime. International law is in shambles and weirdly liberals don’t even pretend to care.
Might makes right. The world is getting more dangerous by the minute.
Bush, like so many of the social-democratic left, refer to breaches of international law. John Clarke’s views, former major organizer of the defunct Ontario Coalition Against Poverty (OCAP), are superior. Clarke posted this recently on Facebook:
I’m all for exposing breaches of international law, in an effort to hamper the agents of dispossession and genocide. However, let’s not get too legalistic and fixated on the rules. Most of the violence, oppression and exploitation that goes on in the world is done perfectly legally because those who are responsible for these things get to make the rules.
Radical leftists should indeed point out breaches in international law, but with the purpose of exposing the hypocrisy of the ruling class of employers and its political representatives. It should simultaneously expose the limitations of law (see for example The Idealization of International Law by the Social-Democratic or Social-Reformist Left: The Case of the Genocide of the Palestinians by the Israeli Government, Part One).
The Abolitionary 