THE WAGES OF INCITEMENT TO VIOLENCE

August 28, 2023 -Durt Fibo

As citizens, chained to their homelands by labor, passports, and the walls of other lands, assay their own nation’s maze of bullets, they do so blindly bouncing off echolocations of their enraged compatriots. But, as we have so painfully come to learn, the acts of those around them are the direct results of incitements to violence.

And, we have seen, those constant incitements come not from timid and anonymous nullities, but from identifiable persons in positions of power. -Politicians, in short, of every conceivable import, who are actually paid for sparking wildfires of murder.

One unfortunate fact is that the majority of politicians have -and can summon up- no other idea or program in their minds. This explains much of why they strive to enter the profession of politics at all. With such entertainment as simply convincing numerous people to enact their visions of preemptive vengeance being rewarded with a paycheck, bodily security, kickbacks and pensions, it is an irresistible onramp for sociopaths of no navigational skills.

This calamity is of long history and covers the globe like poisoned topsoil. Rare whirlwinds of social risings have sometimes blown it away, but its intractability brings us more horrors than we can count each day. Historically, the politicians’ encouragement has been deflected by weak sighs of laws -very ex post facto, but formed into hedgerows meant to delimit the harsh winds of hate and shelter the population from what is accepted as a force of nature itself. But nature is not rewarded in riches for its work.

Cities, counties, states and nations are the concentric zones which first erect these defensive laws. On the tailwind of WWI attempts were made to outlaw slaughter, organized by the League of Nations, building up from the Geneva Conventions and Hague Conventions of 1864 and 1899 through their additional codicils throughout the life of the League, which perished amidst mockery in 1946. Shoveling its ashes into another bulwark -the United Nations- even before the League had been buried, the U.N. persisted and as of today is comprised of 193 member states.

Acknowledging the correlation between political incitement and murder, the U.N. saw its own blood draining out of crossfire wounds even as it created more and more bandages of principal, having immediately established the International Court of Justice as one of its six foundational charter organs, then moving notions of political mayhem closer to its psychological center by creating more targeted rules like the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and the International Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Racial Discrimination.

Unfortunately, not all countries -or even members of the U.N.- are signatories to these basic precepts of law and life. In 1993, the U.N. pushed it members to follow the organization’s direction and established the International Coordinating Committee of National Human Rights Institutions, perhaps to make it easier for nations to remember their legal obligations for longer than ten minutes. In 2016, the ICC altered its name to the Global Alliance of National Human Rights Institutions. Few politicians comprehended or cared about the specifics or message of the nearly quarter of a century of dissuading them from soliciting slaughter, so that, by 2019, the U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres actually had to say aloud: “Addressing hate speech does not mean limiting or prohibiting freedom of speech. It means keeping hate speech from escalating into more something more dangerous, particularly incitement to discrimination, hostility and violence, which is prohibited under international law.”

Eternally desperate to drive the point home, in 1993 the UN General Assembly adopted a resolution for National Institutions for the Promotion and Protection of Human Rights, its annex containing the Paris Principles (formally called the Principles Relating to the Status of National Institutions). This resolution (48/134) called on every nation in the world to set up independent national human rights institutions (NHRIs). Compliance with the Paris Principles is necessary for a country to become accredited to enter the Global Alliance of National Human Rights Institutions, which then grants those nations seats and speaking rights in core U.N. bodies, the most vital of which is the U.N. Human Rights Council.

But the lust for inciting anxious and confused nobodies to commit atrocities on a daily basis is too strong a force for the political classes to repress in themselves, even for the sake of greater geopolitical status. This basest impulse for immediate gratification is actually mapped out in the attached survey. The most recent available, it provides readers with a visual chart of where those politicians rule.