Civilisation Means Exterminating Barbarians by Using Barbarian Methods

This an adapted rewriting of Heinrich von Treischke’s statement.

“International law becomes meaningless when any attempt is made to apply its principles equally to barbarian nations. The only way to punish the Palestinians is to make them pay tens of times for what they did; it is the only sort of example they understand. For the Israeli state and its backers to apply international law in cases like this would not be either humanity or justice; it would be shameful weakness.”

The original quote:

In 1898, the German political scientist Heinrich von Treischke stated what many of his contemporaries would have regarded as the obvious: “International law becomes meaningless when any attempt is made to apply its principles equally to barbarian nations. The only way to punish a black tribe is to burn their villages; it is the only sort of example they understand. For the German empire to apply international law in cases like this would not be either humanity or justice; it would be shameful weakness.”

Related

• The notion of a Right to go to war, cannot be properly conceived as an element in the Right of Nations. For it would be equivalent to a Right to determine what is just not by universal external laws limiting the freedom of every individual alike, but through one-sided maxims that operate by means of force.

—Immanuel Kant

• [W]ar is simply the continuation of policy with the addition of other means.

—Carl von Clausewitz

[A]ll who benefit from the structural violence of the state are implicated in its cruelty."

 —Karen Armstrong, Fields of Blood – Religion and the History of Violence

• Tzvetan Todorov questions Claude Levi-Strauss’ definition of the barbarian as “the man who believes in barbarism” and suggests: “It is someone who believes that a population or an individual is not fully human and therefore merits treatment that he would resolutely refuse to apply to himself.” In his recent The Fear of Barbarians, Todorov develops an argument he presented in earlier works such as On Human Diversity (a thought-provoking book that deserves to be far more widely read). “The fear of barbarians,” he writes now, “is what is in danger of turning us into barbarians. And the evil that we do will far exceed what we initially fear.” [It did turn ‘civilised Westerners’ barbarians a few times – think the genocide of the Indians and the Holocaust, think two world wars, think standing by and doing nothing when the genocide in Rwanda was being carried out at a high speed …

—Tzvetan Todorov, La peur des barbares. Au-dèla du choc des civilisations, Robert Laffont, Paris, 2008. Also On Human Diversity: Nationalism, Racism, and Exoticism in French Thought, Harvard University Press, 1998.

• ‘International law’ in Between Equal Rights by China Miéville