Sovereign equality of states

Actually, everything ought to be clear: According to today’s general legal opinion, all states enjoy sovereign equality. They have the same rights and obligations and are equal members of the international community, regardless of any differences, be it of economic, social, political or other nature. After a whole series of Western states weakened the prohibition of violence after the end of the Cold War, they are now undermining this principle by claiming privileges for themselves. They communicate this openly. The results of two world wars are at stake.
  Part of this effort is reversing the roles of victims and perpetrators. If you study the number of victims of the Second World War, you come to clear conclusions: In some of the “Axis” countries, especially Hungary, Finland, Romania and Bulgaria, the civilian population got off relatively lightly.
  And these countries were never properly pilloried for their role in the war, largely because the Soviet Union did not want it.¹ In Germany, too, the number of soldiers killed outnumbered the number of civilians killed by a factor of four. The relationship would be even more clearly at the expense of the military if it had not been for bombing raids of the Western Allies.² On the other hand, Poland, the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia and Greece paid dearly for their armed resistance against National Socialist Germany.³
  Today, all of the aggressors of the Second World War – with the exception of Japan – are NATO member countries.⁴ Another group of member countries consists of those countries that came to terms with the Wehrmacht in those years.⁵ But that does not stop them from belittling the merits of the Red Army, which suffered almost half of all soldiers killed in the entire Second World War.
  With the founding of the United Nations on June 26, 1945 in San Francisco, the 51 founding members drew the consequences of two world wars: They tried a second time to found a league of the peoples of the world and appointed five victorious powers as “watchdogs” of the new world order.⁶ During the Cold War, the opponents among the five permanent members of the UN Security Council blocked each other for ideological reasons. In the ten years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the West began to act as it pleased. In recent years, three of the victorious powers of 1945 have joined forces with a number of aggressors and collaborators from back then and are acting as initiators of the “rules-based order”

Old sense of purpose
and mission …

For centuries, the European colonial powers moved around the world with the claim to be able to exercise rule in the areas that interested them. The Spaniards and Portuguese were essentially on papal orders to convert the pagans to Christianity. In their eyes, the Treaty of Tordesillas of 7 June 1494, in which the Pope divided the earth into a Spanish and a Portuguese sphere of influence, confirmed this order.⁷ And because Spaniards and Portuguese, in contrast to the people in Africa, Asia and Knowing that South America had the key to entering the kingdom of heaven, they transported entire peoples there. This was their form of caring.
  The basis of British exercise of rule was a civilizational sense of mission, which was based, among other things, on indisputable achievements of the English constitutional law such as the Magna Carta Libertatum and the Habeas Corpus Act.⁸
  The bard of this sense of mission was the British-Indian writer Rudyard Kipling, who was born in Mumbai in 1865 and lived in England until 1936⁹ In his books and stories about India he postulated the mission of the educated white man, whom God had chosen to educate and civilize the colonial peoples. From this perspective, the British Empire appears as a kind of guardianship for the colonial peoples who have not yet reached maturity.
  Italian colonialism developed late but particularly aggressively: Benito Mussolini drew on the legacy of the ancient Roman Empire. This is very telling, because the ancient Romans were very consistent in their principles: Strangers had to become Romans. Those who did not want to be Romanised, however, faced war and enslavement.

… and the new sense
of purpose and mission

The tasteless circus at the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games in Paris a few weeks ago was particularly telling. Here, today’s France showed its face very clearly.
  It was foreseeable that France would use the Olympic Games to celebrate itself as a Grande Nation. By celebrating the French Revolution, it built on the sense of mission that had once taken the French Republic all over the world, where it was supposed to bring the blessings of the Revolution closer to the peoples. Incidentally, the French Revolution put around 20,000 people on the guillotine and probably claimed 200,000 victims in general.¹⁰ That the young republic after the deposition of King Louis XVI. It is clear that Queen Marie-Antoinette, who came from the House of Habsburg, could not simply be sent back to Austria. The fact that she was beheaded after a show trial and that her son  was tricked or forced into incriminating his mother in the trial and then left to rot in prison was undoubtedly a crime.¹¹
  We Swiss in particular have an ambivalent relationship with the French Revolution. On the one hand, it brought an end to serfdom and servitude in the Old Confederation. On the other hand, French revolutionary troops brutally suppressed uprisings in central Switzerland. Later, Napoleon was wise enough to be informed about the nature of the Confederation and its inhabitants and imposed the Act of Mediation on the Confederates in 1803.¹² Although Napoleon made Switzerland a French protectorate, there was some enthusiasm for him in the Confederation. What a shame that the organizers of the opening ceremony in Paris did not find time to point out the positive aspects of the French Revolution …
  However, the connection between LGBTIQ+ and the French Revolution, which was made in the opening ceremony in Paris, is ahistorical and propagandistic: the proportion of homosexuals and lesbians in the total population today is probably around 5 % and not 90 % like that of serfs in the corporate state 18^th century, and they are not restricted in their choice of work and place of residence like the serfs were back then.¹³
  The combination of images from the French Revolution and LGBTIQ+ contains a very clear message to the world: France, together with other Europeans, has found a new awareness of its superiority. On the basis of LGBTIQ+ and “tolerance” it reserves the right to lecture everyone else about this. Today’s France is once again ready to cut off heads and carry out bloodbaths. That is the message from Paris.

Military-backed lecturing?

And so the Europeans’ sense of purpose and mission is once again celebrating its merry origins in new clothes – also with tangible military consequences. Western warships are traveling around the world to enforce freedom of navigation and to implement a UN treaty on the law of the sea that the supposed leading nation of the West, the USA, has not even ratified. Right or wrong? Might!
  France’s allies and NATO member countries have more than 40 % of global economic output and more than 50 % of global military spending¹⁴. Without exception, these are countries that have not been attacked on their own territory for 80 years, but which have attacked numerous other countries on their own territory since the Second World War and have had the audacity to present this as legitimate self-defence. NATO as a whole or individual members have no right to declare other countries a threat to their security or a threat to global peace. Nor do they have the right, under the Helsinki Final Act of 1975, also known as Helsinki Accords or Helsinki Declaration, to pursue their safety and comfort at the expense of those on whose territory they are waging war.
  After complaints, the organizing committee of the opening ceremony of the Paris Olympics apologized for hurting religious feelings and offending certain groups of people. Regret is not enough where modesty would be called for: modesty by renouncing privileges to which one is not entitled, as a guarantee that there will be no military-backed attempts at lecturing.  •

¹ Of all the “Axis” allies, Hungary had to pay the highest blood toll with over 10 % of its population, with the majority of the killed civilians being Jews, most of whom were deported in 1944 before Hungary left the alliance. The majority of Germany’s fatalities were Wehrmacht and SS soldiers – about 80 % of the total casualties. In the cases of Finland, Romania and Bulgaria, soldiers made up the vast majority – over 95 % – of the fatalities.
² Today it is generally assumed that around 1.2 million German civilians died in the Second World War, around 600,000 of them as a result of Anglo-American bombing raids. Of the 210,000 Jewish Germans, around 15,000 were still living in Germany at the end of the war. The vast majority had been displaced or murdered.
³ During the course of the war, Poland lost over 17 % of its population, including around 3 million Jews, and Yugoslavia lost over 10 %. The Soviet Union lost about 14 % of its population.
⁴ Japan lost about 5.2 % of its population.
⁵ The Netherlands lost about 2.5 % of its population, Belgium 0.8 % and France 0.9 %. A good half of the civilian victims consisted of deported Jews.
⁶ The founding of the League of Nations was one of the 14 points in US President Thomas Woodrow Wilson’s 1918 program. It was intended to promote international cooperation, mediate in cases of conflict and monitor compliance with peace treaties. The delegates met for the first time on November 15, 1920. The League of Nations formally existed until 1946.
⁷ The Tordesillas Treaty was digitized and published on the Internet by the Spanish Ministry of Culture. See “Tratado de Tordesillas. Versión portuguesa”, original in Portuguese, online at https://pares.mcu.es/ParesBusquedas20/catalogo/description/121026?nm. The border between the Portuguese and Spanish territories was to be on a north-south line 370 Léguas (about 2,282 kilometers) west of the Cape Verde Islands. According to today, this corresponds to the meridian of 46° 37’ west longitude. All islands and countries in the Atlantic west of this line were to belong to the territory of the Spanish crown, and those east of it to the Portuguese crown.
⁸ The Magna Carta Libertatum of June 15, 1215 guaranteed fundamental political freedoms for the nobility vis-à-vis the English king and restricted his arbitrariness. In particular, the famous Article 39 (in later versions Article 29) establishes procedural law by stipulating that no free man may be thrown into prison without a court verdict. It is still the basis of the Rule of Law, Anglo-Saxon constitutional law. The English text is published online on the Yale Law School homepage, The Avalon Project, Documents in Law, History and Diplomacy at https://avalon.law.yale.edu/medieval/magframe.asp. The Habeas Corpus Act grants every arrestee the right to a judicial review and thus protection against arbitrary deprivation of liberty. See “Habeas Corpus Act 1679”, The National Archives, online at https://www.legislation.gov.uk/aep/Cha2/31/2/data.pdf.
⁹ Kipling’s biography and an overview of his works: “Rudyard Kipling, British writer” at Encyclopædia Britannica, online at https://www.britannica.com/biography/Rudyard-Kipling/Legacy
¹⁰ see Winfried Schulze. “The number of victims of the French Revolution”, in: History in Science and Teaching, 59 (2008) 3, pp. 140–152, abstract at Fachportal Pedagogy, online at https://www.fachportal-paedagogik.de/en/literatur/vollanzeige.html?FId=2962185. See “Arrests and Executions in the Reign of Terror during the French Revolution from June 1793 to July 1794,” at Statista, online at https://de.statista.com/statistik/daten/studie/1087169/umfrage/verhaftungen-und-exekutionen-in-der-terrorherrschaft-der-franzoesischen-revolution/.
¹¹ see Silvia Dethlefs. “Marie Antoinette, Archduchess of Austria,” in: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 16, Berlin 1990, online at https://www.deutsche-biographie.de/gnd118577905.html#ndbcontent. For her son Louis Charles see “Genetic researcher: Louis XVII. died in fortress confinement», in: Der Tagesspiegel of 19 April 2000, online at https://www.tagesspiegel.de/gesellschaft/panorama/genforscher-ludwig-xvii-starb-in-festungshaft-672124.html and Laurent Dandrieu. “Les morts mystérieuses: 6. Louis -ou-lindicible-martyre, in French
¹² see “Epoch of Change: Switzerland between 1798 and 1848”, on the homepage of the Swiss Federal Archives, online at https://www.bar.admin.ch/bar/de/home/recherche/recherchetipps/themen/die-moderne-schweiz/epoche-des-wandels–die-schweiz-zwischen-1798-und-1848.html and Andreas Fankhauser. “Mediation Act”, in: Historical Lexicon of Switzerland (HLS), version of 8 December 2009, online at. https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/de/articles/009808/2009-12-08/
¹³ see L. Graefe. “Sexual identification in selected countries 2023”, at Statista of 20 June 2024, online at https://de.statista.com/statistik/daten/studie/1414281/umfrage/sexuelle-identifikation-in-ausgewaehlten-laendern/
¹⁴ see “SIPRI report; Global military spending at an all-time high,” on ZDF Today of 22 April 2024, online at https://amp.zdf.de/nachrichten/politik/ausland/sipri-militaerausgaben-waffen-100.html. English version here: https://www.sipri.org/media/press-release/2024/global-military-spending-surges-amid-war-rising-tensions-and-insecurity

(Translation Current Concerns)

* Ralph Bosshard studied general history, Eastern European history and military history, completed the military leadership school at ETH Zurich and general staff training for the Swiss Army. This was followed by language training in Russian at Moscow State University and training at the Military Academy of the General Staff of the Russian Army. He is familiar with the situation in Eastern Europe and Central Asia from his six years at the OSCE, during which he also worked as special advisor to the Permanent Representative of Switzerland.