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One good thing about the judiciary in former communist Europe was that no one, including party apparatchiks, believed its fraudulent language. This was the main reason the system collapsed. Court proceedings against political dissidents – officially dubbed “hostile elements” or “Western-sponsored fascist infiltrators” – were make-believe travesties where prosecutors projected their real Self into their other embellished and imaginary Double-Self, well aware their legal palaver was a litany of fabricated lies. Communist judicial fallacy became visible shortly after the breakup of the communist system in the early 1990s, prompting thousands of communist judges and legislators all over Eastern Europe to embrace overnight the newly Western-imported liberal judicial mimicry.
Although using different qualifiers, the modern judiciary in the West and particularly in the USA is rapidly becoming a mirror image of the communist judiciary. In contrast to mistrustful citizens in former communist Eastern Europe, however, millions of Americans and thousands of legal experts truly believe that the American judiciary is the best in the world. But the current plague of lawfare lawsuits and prosecutions in the USA and its dominion, the EU, tell otherwise. The American judiciary can best be grasped by an outsider when its legalese is compared with the former communist legalese or when it is mistranslated and implemented into the EU judiciary.
Verbal and Legal Anomaly
Similar to the communist judiciary and its arsenal of demonizing verbal constructs designed for political dissidents, the American DOJ, along with media outlets, increasingly resort to criminalizing denominations of political opponents. “Give me the man and I will give you the case against him,” was a widespread legal practice in former communist states in Eastern Europe. Similar fabricated charges can now be easily framed against free thinkers, writers, and whistleblowers critical of government conduct. An unarmed January 6, 2021 Capitol trespasser, hollering pro-Trump slogans and forcibly removing police barriers, can hardly expect to be charged with merely a misdemeanor. To the contrary, on a whim by a presiding prosecutor, any person challenging the liberal system can find himself charged under the 18 U.S. Code Chapter 115 with “engaging in seditious and criminal activities.”
Countless verbal constructs that most American citizens take for granted need to be critically examined. Grandstanding negative or flowery expressions such as “hate speech,” “affirmative action,” “diversity,” “white supremacism,” and “Neo-Nazi gatherings” are tossed around by the media and courts with a little effort by legal scholars and linguists to prod into their meaning. When their origin, etymology, and subsequent semantic distortions are carefully investigated, flaws in in the American criminal codes will be detected. The same endeavor goes for the multitude of German and French words from their respective criminal codes, words that are practically untranslatable into English, or when they are, resonate entirely differently in American legal proceedings.
The expression “hate speech” is a bizarre verbal construct allowing the prosecution of a wide array of extra-legal maneuvering. Someone’s free speech is always someone’s else hate speech. This expression did not even exist in judicial glossary half a century ago. One wonders who crafted this expression and introduced it into law in the first place? Its abstract meaning allows presiding judges or juries to define it as they see fit.
One of the main features of communist totalitarian legalism was the use of abstract and liquid expressions that provided the prosecutor with a myriad of potential charges during court hearings. But even the word “totalitarian legalism” is a contradiction in terms, given that the ongoing juridification of politics in the EU and USA has already led to excessive legalism, i.e., lawfare, which is but a first step toward a set-up of totalitarian systems. One could further illustrate ensuing legal anomalies when examining the much lauded and universally accepted expression “human rights,” overlooking that human rights are differently understood by different parties; differently, for example, by a Palestinian in Gaza and by a Jewish settler in the West Bank. It is in the name of romantic sounding human rights principles, wrote legal scholar Carl Schmitt long ago, that the most savage crimes are committed against a party or a people declared to be outside humanity. Once declared outside humanity, a warring party and its civilians are no longer human beings; human rights henceforth no longer apply to them. The drive to impose universal human rights and world democracy was best observed during the Western Allied aerial bombardment of German cities during WWII.
Another widely used expression, rarely critically examined, is the federally mandated “affirmative action.” Other than its substance, which is well known to most employers, this expression highlights generic Soviet-Speak. It is impossible to translate it verbatim into other European languages except when grossly changing its meaning. When translated into German or French it generates a hybrid misnomer such as “positive discrimination” (positive Diskriminierung). One must raise a legitimate question: if there is such a thing as “positive discrimination” is there also such a thing as “negative discrimination”? The expression “positive discrimination” is both a lexical, conceptual, and legal anomaly that most legal professionals in the USA and EU take as an acceptable figure of speech.
Similar to the much used and abused words “Fascists” or “Nazis,” once used non-stop in the former Soviet Criminal Code when sentencing dissidents, these words have become by now part of a similar demonizing vocabulary, particular in the EU judiciary. National Socialism or Fascism no longer stand for specific historical and political affiliations, having been transformed into symbols of Absolute and Ultimate Evil.
The German Criminal Code has a multitude of similar criminalizing expressions often defying grammatical and morphological rules. The relatively new compound noun Volksverhetzung, featured prominently in the German Criminal Code, Section 130, has been awkwardly translated into English as “incitement to hatred,” although the German original has a much wider scope when used in criminal indictments. This multiple-meaning noun represents a case of linguistic anomaly similar to the wordings in the Soviet judiciary. It is called pejoratively by German citizens the “Gummiparagraph” (rubber paragraph, or elastic clause) given that its wide-ranging interpretation can send to jail any person asking politically incorrect questions; from somebody cracking a joke about an illegal Somali migrant to a person raising critical questions about the Holocaust or the state of Israel. Even an American lawyer fully versed in the German language would have a hard time deconstructing the meaning of this German noun when defending his client in a German court.
Contrary to the liberal dogma about the so-called independent judiciary, it is always the ruling class that makes and unmakes the laws; never do the laws make the ruling class. The widespread liberal myth of the Supreme Court acting as the ultimate independent arbiter during a state of emergency has never worked in practice. The Roman thinker Juvenal knew it long ago when he raised a timeless question: “But who will guard the guardians?”
Originally posted at the Free Expression Foundation.
Tom (Tomislav) Sunic was born in Zagreb, Croatia. He holds a doctorate in Political Science from the University of California and Bachelor of Arts degrees in Comparative Literature and Languages from the University of Zagreb. He worked as a professor of political science in the USA and after the breakup of Yugoslavia as a diplomat for the early Croatian state. He now gives lectures in English, Croatian, German, and French around the world on topics of politics and literature and on race and identity. He sits on the Advisory Board of the Americana Freedom Party and writes regularly for The Occidental Observer. He has authored several books in French, English and Croatian. He currently resides in Zagreb, Croatia (www.tomsunic.com).
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good article but you’re missing the elephant in the room- “anti-semitism”. this word has been crafted to totally pervert the true definition of the word semite and to twist it into a synonym for jewish.
what is happening in palestine with the attempted genocide of the truely semitic indigenous palestinian people of the levant, is the most egregious act of anti-semitism of 20th and 21st century. eight decades of brutal text book genocide conducted against an oppressed indigenous population, while the entire western world facilitated, funded and armed the illegal invasion of palestine.
the u.n. convention on genocide passed and ratified in 1947, was immediately ignored from the time israeli was illegally created and never properly ratified, a year later. things have only gotten worse over the almost eight decade reign of terror, inflicted upon the rightful heirs of the land.
now we have an open declaration of palestines being amalek, subhuman who can be killed for sport, tortured and even raped to give comfort to their troops. israel it seems has taken great delight in useing the u.n. convention on genocide, as a check list, ticking off all the boxes possible, while ignoring icj and icc rulings and following only talmedic law, to demonstrate their supremacist ideology and theology.
they have gone out of their way to publicly demonstrate, that they can openly commit every crime the nazi’s were accused of, as well as adding a few pages to the playbook. yet anyone who points this out, will immediately be accused of anti-semitism and demonized, by the very people that act more like demons, than any other culture on the planet.
to all those who would accuse me of chutzpah, i immediately spit the word back in their face and challenge them to prove their semitism through a dna test, this word has a scientific meaning and their inversion of the truth must be challenged. i’d bet my last dollar, the palestinian people have a higher percentage of semtic dna, than their cousins, long removed and it’s long past time they are removed from their illegally occupied lands and that land returned to their rightful owners.
I got a soft spot in my heart for ‘ol Tom Sunic because the SPLC censor sheenys hate him. But he’s talking out his ass here.
It is false that hate speech did not exist in “judicial glossary” half a century ago. Tom wonders who introduced it into law. DCI George H.W. Bush, moonlighting as president, introduced it into US law as ICCPR Article 20. Some other people introduced it into the law of the other one hundred and sixty (160) states parties. If only there was some machine that you could type in a question in and find this stuff out. What the fuck kind of professor bullshits about this without looking at Article 20 and General Comments 11 and 34? …oh right, a US political science professor.
Sunic’s tongue-lolling ignorance of legal shit lets propagandists pull the wool over his eyes. In fact Article 20 mostly constrains governments, so much so that the US entered a legally void reservation to let every treaty party negate the provision. Why? Because war propaganda is the essence of hate speech, and the USG doesn’t ever want to give that up. And organized hostility, discrimination, and violence are organized mostly by CIA provocateurs to entrap dissenters. And hate speech is interpreted in terms of Article 19 on freedom of expression, which scares the shit out of CIA.
Does Free Expression Foundation not know this? If I get in trouble for making fun of Jews in Mom’s basement, I’m not coming to you losers.
Tom Sunic: “One could further illustrate ensuing legal anomalies when examining the much lauded and universally accepted expression “human rights,” overlooking that human rights are differently understood by different parties; differently, for example, by a Palestinian in Gaza and by a Jewish settler in the West Bank.”
The Christian origin of the concept of “human rights” is decisively proved by the fact that only the West has acted aggressively to establish and protect them. These rights are supposed to be given by the Christian God, an innovation not found in any other religion. The fact that they have become “universally accepted” is an indication of the extent to which Christianity has triumphed. It’s gone global. For where is the man or society that is prepared to repudiate them, and declare they don’t exist? Nowhere. Even the most totalitarian countries claim to recognize their existence, and feel constrained to keep up at least a pretense of acting according to them.
It’s interesting though that such rights can be cancelled, and not just by dehumanizing the opposition, as Sunic goes on to claim here. Another acceptable way to revoke a human right is to supersede or override it with another human right. For example, a woman’s “right to choose” is thought to override the fetus’ “right to life”; the white “right of free association” can be altogether cancelled by the nigger’s desire to enter into white society; and of course, “free speech” doesn’t include the “right to offend”, so-called hate speech. Where hate is concerned, there’s almost a total blackout on free speech. So we see that the concept is elastic, and can be adjusted as needed to fit the situation.
Though an outlandish fabrication, it’s such a pivotal idea, and so much in the modern world now depends on it, we have to wonder how and why belief in “human rights” ever got started, and why the belief is kept up despite the problems it causes. What function does it serve? It justifies imperial ambitions, for one thing. Just as the legions of Rome marched behind a banner of SPQR (Senatus populusque Romani, the senate and people of Rome) the West marches behind the banner of “human rights”. Also important is that the idea has certain emollient, anodyne properties that can counteract some of the horrors of existence in an age dominated by technology. If a man believes he has “human rights” given him by God he can put up with a lot more than he could if he knew that he’s only just an animal like any other, entirely helpless in the face of life’s vicissitudes, alone in the vast universe. With his portfolio of God-given “human rights” tucked under his arm he can imagine he’s not just another cog in the machine, easy to replace. It gives him self-esteem and value, however illusory. Without this crucial delusion, a technological society could easily fall apart.
Doctor Robert Morgan is kinda confused about human rights too. “These rights are supposed to be given by the Christian God, an innovation not found in any other religion” Um, no. If you ever took four minutes to Read the Fuckin Manual, you would find the justification of human rights in the central instrument, the UDHR: you get these right cause you have recourse to rebellion.
Then we get the same old objection, that human rights is bullshit because states can distort it in bad faith. When some failed state full of assholes like the USA distorts the law, that’s not the state’s fault, it means the law is bullshit. For some reason this objection only ever applies to human rights, not to all the other laws the police state distorts. (Hint: your government doesn’t like it. Unlike bullshit US municipal law, human rights distortion is a breach of the absolute sanctified rule of law that gets reviewed by the independent experts of the treaty parties and adjudicated by the ICJ.)
There is not much consistency or coherence here, just one more guy who thinks his rights are bullshit. He doesn’t know what they are, or where they’re set out, or how they’re applied by which institutions, under what procedures, but he doesn’t want his stupid old rights anyway, so there. A tour de force of statist brainwashing. No wonder you chumps are so downtrodden.
Anonymous[129]: “If you ever took four minutes to Read the Fuckin Manual, you would find the justification of human rights in the central instrument, the UDHR: you get these right cause you have recourse to rebellion.”
That’s not the manual I’m referring to, nor the one most American “conservatives” use. They follow Christian theologian John Locke, whose idea of human rights is most notoriously expressed by Thomas Jefferson in the USA’s Declaration of Independence.
There’s a kernel of truth in your otherwise uninteresting and ill-informed screed though. It is indeed the state that sets itself up as the final arbiter of “human rights”. This also is reflected in Jefferson’s Declaration, as he continues:
The ideas expressed in the Locke/Jefferson view are the origin of the UDHR, in historical terms. The UDHR doesn’t mention God, but it’s just a secular re-phrasing of the same Christian ideas. In this view, these “God-given” rights exist whether or not they are formally recognized by a government. But if that’s so, it’s strange that the state can expand or contract them according to the situation, or even cancel them altogether, as in the examples I gave above. Anyone who takes an honest look at this will instantly perceive that, at bottom, it’s just more Christian hypocrisy. The rights either exist and are “inalienable” because they are given by God, or they are quite alienable because in practice they don’t really exist independently of state approval. The phrasing in the Declaration of Independence is a transparent attempt to have it both ways.
Made me think of the 7-year-old who drew “All Lives Matters”, and the school punished him/her. Judge affirmed school’s right to do so: after all, s/he is TOO YOUNG “too have Free Speech rights”.
Now, think about all the SCOTUS rulings that public schools can indeed punish/discipline its pupils over, say, a minor yelling “Fuck you!” to a teacher. I mean: otherwise, public schools can’t work at all, they’d become JUNGLES (no doubt).
(So, I suppose, pupils not having (full) Free Speech rights is just a pragmatic decision by SCOTUS.)
This just shows another dilemma of public schools existing at all. They shouldn’t. If one is concerned with logic and principles over pragmatism.
Now, finally:
Minors have no (full) Negative Rights and can only vote when they’re 18…
But, MENTAL AGE is better/more accurate metric than chronological age!
If Mental Age (IQ-based, IIRC) is used instead, then more Blacks and “Latinos” are rightsless than Whites.
Fascinating, huh?
Morgan, some interesting notions in there amid your feckless condescension!
No, Doctor Feelbad, reread what you wrote, “These [human, in ¶ context] rights are supposed…
Locke is natural rights, not human rights. Human rights are H.G. Wells or W.E.B. Dubois, or the whole milieu then, there’s no one great inventor you can point to but they were formalized by Chang, Malik, Humphrey, ER et al. With human rights they dropped the creator business you don’t like, so no, it’s not Locke’s IP, it’s DIFF-er-rent! I admire the befuddled pertinacity of your unsupported assertion, though! Like your hermeneutics too, Harumph, the UDHR says that but it doesn’t mean that, it means this.
Your problem is your fake alienable/inalienable dichotomy: if the state can derogate rights in breach of its commitments, then they don’t count. Like there’s no such thing as civil society. Or international suasion and pressure. Or resistance or rebellion. Or the whole institutional and procedural mechanism for holding states to their commitments, the world standard law which you can’t bear to think about because it’s Not Invented Here.
Nobody gives a shit about the founding fathers. Their half-assed rights are obsolete, no country has used them as a model for 100 years. So of course constitutional rights are bullshit. That’s why the civilized world dropped them for human rights. You pretend they’re all the same and none of them are any good, then you can sit and take it like some politically helpless old fart at the home.
You conservatives are losers because you keep taking your breeches and periwig and bodkin to a gunfight. You turn up your nose at world standard rights and rule of law and your failed state laughs and fucks you over. You don’t care, cause all you want to do is cosplay Burke at Beaconsfield with a glass or po-ahhht.
This is an excellent essay by Prof. Sunic, one reason being it is not excessively long. Some contributors here at TUR often seem to be writing just for the sake of being verbose (I am looking at you, Andrew Anglin).
There is not much to add, except that the US system was only meant for the founding population and their posterity; it was not, is not, and never will be for sub-Saharan Africans, Asians, or any type of aboriginal peoples, such as the “American Indians”. But since befuddled Americans (just like the W. Europeans and Japanese) are not even willing to reproduce, the anachronistic idea of “equality before the Law” will pretty darn soon be not just spurned but forgotten, and “rights” will belong, as they always have, to the people who exert the most force.
Anonymous[386]: “Locke is natural rights, not human rights.”
A distinction without a difference, because unless I’m very gravely mistaken, Locke was concerned exclusively with the so-called rights of humans, not any other animals.
Anonymous[386]: “With human rights they dropped the creator business you don’t like, so no, it’s not Locke’s IP, it’s DIFF-er-rent!”
Oh, yeah, WAY different. LOL. That the UDHR repeats almost verbatim the ideas expressed in the USA’s Declaration of Independence and a modern interpretation of the Constitution is a total accident! Also, it reads like a sermon. Its Christian cultural origins practically leap off the page, but apparently you are too stupid to see it. The very first line urging “recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family” is Christianity in a nutshell. Who says all humans have dignity? Who says they have equal (and inalienable!) rights? Where did the UN get this crazy idea if not from Christianity? Note well that these are all bare assertions. They make no attempt to justify or prove any of them. They rely on the Christian cultural influence to be accepted without question.
Anonymous[386]: “Human rights are H.G. Wells or W.E.B. Dubois, or the whole milieu then, there’s no one great inventor you can point to but they were formalized by Chang, Malik, Humphrey, ER et al.”
The point you insist on missing is the Christian origin of the cultural notion of inalienable rights, whether called by the name natural or human. They can only considered to be inalienable if they are God-given, not state awarded. I laugh at your “world standard” rights as enumerated in the UDHR, and adjudicated by the ICJ. Without the pretense of some kind of supernatural origin and inalienablity, “human rights” become anything the courts say they are. Of course, that’s a problem now too, but to admit it so frankly to themselves would shatter man’s delusion that he’s a special creature very much different than all other animals. His self-esteem would be gravely injured by thinking he has no inalienable rights that exist independently of what any court says. Also, as a practical matter, it would interfere with American imperial ambitions. If Americans admit rights don’t come from God and can be defined in other lands any way a foreign court sees fit, then the pretext for invading other countries to correct abuses of those rights goes away. The American regime must pretend that it is “the exceptional nation” with exclusive insight into what is a “human right” and what isn’t. The technical requirements of empire demand it.
Human rights are not ‘conferred’ either by imaginary deities, governments or political systems, they are innate, we have them by virtue of existing, of being part of nature. Natural law/natural justice are the closest thing we have to human rights and they are common to all societies. All animal species have an innate code of conduct, human beings are no exception, they have an inbuilt sense of right and wrong, assuming otherwise simply doesn’t pass the laugh test.
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MarkU: “All animal species have an innate code of conduct, human beings are no exception, they have an inbuilt sense of right and wrong, assuming otherwise simply doesn’t pass the laugh test.”
Speaking of laugh tests, if all humans have the same opinions about what is right and and what is wrong, they’d never disagree. Yet they obviously do. LOL
Also, nowadays most people will say they think that slavery is wrong, yet it wasn’t considered wrong for thousands of years. In the Bible, even Jesus himself doesn’t say it’s wrong! But according to your theory here, that’s impossible. How do you explain this? Is slavery right, or wrong?
Ah, you laugh, do you? I sneer at your ribaldry.
Pro tip: repeating your opinion over and over doesn’t really make it more convincing. My compliments though, on your huffy conflation of all that rights stuff, and the willful obtuseness of ignoring (or never reading) economic, social or cultural rights – or any of the detailed interpretive guidance of the General Comments, or the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties, even. Why clutter up your considered opinion with subject matter? Full marks, too, for intently ignoring every institution, procedure, organization, and mechanism in the world except courts. US rubes get amusing remedial education in all that whenever they venture out into the wider world.
Humphrey’s job was in fact to make the UDHR a carbon copy of the bill of rights but he failed, Malik ran rings around him. The US had more luck with the bowdlerized ECHR they stuffed up Europe’s ass. Now that’s a carbon copy.
So, Doctor Robert, you’re clearly proud of your Doctorate, Tell us, What’s your story? Is it in political science? J.D. billboard law? Podiatry? Where’d you get the horny-drunken-Bloom affectations, Liberty U. or National Review? Ironically, you sound exactly like the cognitively diverse US delegates who get body-slammed in international fora and get promoted because they didn’t know what happened.
Anonymous[169]: “Ah, you laugh, do you? I sneer at your ribaldry.”
And that’s all you can do. Obviously, you can’t refute my main point, or you would have done so, and in fact, you were afraid even to try. The Christian ancestry of all of your “human rights” nonsense thus stands exposed, plain for all to see.
Oh, good plan, just declare you win the argument. This is why you can’t organize your way out of a paper bag and immigrants wipe the floor with you. This is second nature for them. But you’re too lofty for it.
I’m thinking, podiatrist.The Dunning-Kruger is redoubtable in this one.
Anonymous[197]: “Oh, good plan, just declare you win the argument.”
What a snappy comeback! LOL I like this one too:
Anonymous[197]: “The Dunning-Kruger is redoubtable in this one. ”
Ouch! So original! Keep ’em coming, and maybe I’ll make you head of my fan club.