THE most prophetic book title of the century may have been Nothing is True and Everything is Possible. Peter Pomerantsev’s little book was, when it came out in 2014, an account of the way in which President Putin had corrupted the possibility of democratic politics by destroying trust in the public sphere and replacing it with the fear of arbitrary power.
Life under the Roman Empires must have felt like that. Now, it turns out that life under the American Empire in its decadence has much in common with it. The way in which the Trump gang has bullied and lied to Ukraine is a large-scale example; but I want to pick up on a story reported only in Le Monde and a couple of technology publications, so far as I can tell.
Nicolas Guillou is a distinguished French judge who serves on the International Criminal Court (ICC) in the Hague. This is an institution that embodies the dream of a post-Nuremberg international order, at least to left-wing imaginations. To “end up at the Hague” has been a fate wished on everyone supposed to be a war criminal, from Slobodan Miloševic to Tony Blair.
Last November, the ICC issued arrest warrants against Benyamin Netanyahu and his then defence minister, Yoav Gallant, for their conduct of the Gaza War, and, in particular, for their deliberate starvation of civilians. It was Nicolas Guillou who signed off on the warrants, and, on 20 August this year, President Trump had his revenge.
Judge Guillou was one of the two judges, along with two prosecutors on the court, whom the American government decided to treat as serious criminals who are banned from any interaction with any US company.
In an interview with Le Monde last week, he explained what this means: “The sanctions affect all aspects of my daily life. . . Any banking transaction involving an American individual or company, or conducted in US dollars, or in a currency that uses the dollar for conversion, is prohibited. In practice, you are effectively blacklisted by much of the world’s banking system. On top of that, all payment systems are American: American Express, Visa, Mastercard. Overnight, you find yourself without a bank card, and these companies have an almost complete monopoly, at least in Europe.”
He continued: “All my accounts with American companies, such as Amazon, Airbnb, PayPal and others, have been closed. For example, I booked a hotel in France through Expedia, and a few hours later, the company sent me an email cancelling the reservation, citing the sanctions. In practice, you can no longer shop online because you do not know if the packaging your product comes in is American. Being under sanctions is like being sent back to the 1990s.”
These measures were originally designed to deal with mafiosi and terrorists. There are nearly 15,000 people on the list now, among them nine judges on the ICC. They are there not because the American authorities have any opinion on Mr Netanyahu’s guilt or innocence, but because they deny the power of any external body to stand in judgement over the actions of their own soldiers or allies.
As Judge Guillou told Le Monde: “Some people believe that power should serve the law — that is the very principle of international law. Others, on the contrary, believe that the law should serve power. For them, international criminal justice is an obstacle. It is an obstacle to empires.”
It is a bit of a shock to realise that, for most of my life, I had taken for granted that we lived under governments that tried, at least, to give power to international law. You might call it the myth of Nuremberg — and then remember that the Russian judges at Nuremberg worked for Stalin and were just as ready to condemn the innocent as the guilty, if that was what their master demanded.
THERE are other ways in which the notion of truth was eroded last week. One was a delightful meltdown on Twitter/X, which added to the information available about users a line showing where they were based.
To no one’s astonishment, this revealed that a whole lot of Trumpist agitators, with names such as “MAGANationX” (with 400,000 followers) and “America First”, were run from Bangladesh, Morocco, or Eastern Europe. Other similar expressions of American patriotism are run from Thailand and South Africa.
This is a natural market-driven response to the economics of X/Twitter, which, like YouTube, rewards content-producers with a cut of the advertising that they attract. To make the story entirely perfect, it turned out that some genuine accounts were located falsely by the system. It really is Peter Pomerantsev’s world that we live in — and Putin’s, and Trump’s.