Trump wants to sanction those working for the International Criminal Court who are seeking to uphold international law. He's reached the point where he's saying he has the right to declare what is right to be wrong.
This is the audio version:
This is the transcript:
Donald Trump is saying wrong is right.
I wish I didn't have to make another video about Donald Trump. I'm getting a bit bored by him, but on the other hand, he is, in a very real sense, the man of the moment, in the sense that he is the person who is currently tearing the world apart. And, therefore, I do have to pay attention to him because almost everything he does is changing the map of political economy as we know it.
Political economy is about how power is used to influence the allocation of resources in the world, and it is very obvious that Donald Trump is, even if he doesn't know it, an arch-proponent of the art of political economy because he wields power in a way that almost nobody else has tried to do so for a very long time.
Right now, he's done so by declaring that he is going to impose sanctions upon anyone who is involved with the International Criminal Court.
The International Criminal Court was established by international agreement - and the UK was one of those who helped set it up - and it was created to deal with war crimes. The precedent was obviously set after World War II, and the idea has been continued since, most successfully with regard to those who undertook crimes during the course of the Balkan Wars in the 1990s.
The US has never signed up to the International Criminal Court. That is its right. The vast majority of countries in the world have done so. Russia is the other notable exception.
It has, of course, very recently issued arrest warrants for Benjamin Netanyahu, the Prime Minister of Israel. And it has done so on the grounds that the court has decided - and by that, I mean a series of eminent judges sitting as a court in The Hague, where this court is based, have decided - that Benjamin Netanyahu should answer charges of having committed genocide.
The case has, very obviously, to do with what has happened in Gaza. Let me say for the umpteenth time that what Hamas did on the 7th of October 2023 was unjustified, unwarranted, and in itself a war crime. They should not have undertaken the attacks that they did into Israeli territory. Of course, that was a crime.
But the response since then has been utterly unjustified. Israel was allowed under international law to defend its borders. It did not have the right to invade Gaza. It did not have the right to undertake ethnic cleansing. It did not have the right to destroy the infrastructure of Gaza. It did not have the right to kill, at the very least, well over 40,000 Palestinians.
But it has done that. And the International Criminal Court has decided that the actions of Benjamin Netanyahu and others in ordering this are potentially criminal.
They have also, incidentally, decided that those who ordered the attack by Hamas were potentially criminal and have issued arrest warrants for them, although that is now a little technical because it is thought that all of those involved are now dead, killed by Israeli security forces and armed forces.
So, the International Criminal Court has viewed this case with impartiality. It has tried to bring charges against both sides. It is trying to hold people to account for their wrongdoings, and wrongdoings have happened on both the Hamas and Israeli sides of this dispute.
But Donald Trump doesn't see it that way. He has decided that the issue of an arrest warrant on Benjamin Netanyahu is itself a criminal offence. We are having to get used to the idea that Donald Trump is one of those people who believes that black is white and thinks that he can legislate for that to be the case. In this situation, he seems to think that genocide is okay and those prosecuting it are the criminals. And he's actually trying to make them criminal. He wants to impose sanctions on them in the USA, so that he might bring charges against them. This is how perverse his judgement is on this issue. He literally wants to undermine the rights of those who are trying to bring those who have killed, contrary to international law, to justice.
I don't actually understand why he would want to do that. I think Benjamin Netanyahu has got a case to answer. I'm not condemning him. I am saying he has a case to answer. And it should be heard in court.
Why doesn't Trump want that heard? That can only be about political economy. He wants to use his power as a superpower, as an agency able to threaten around the world because of the military and economic power of the country that he is now president of, to prevent the natural course of justice, which would seek to establish the facts and determine whether a penalty is due by the perpetrators.
But he doesn't want that. And in the process, what he's doing is saying, “I am going to suspend the rule of law. I am going to say what is right and wrong. I am going to dictate to the world what they may or may not do. I am going to prosecute those who seek to bring justice to the world.” And that is intensely dangerous.
This isn't just the action of a madman, although it's entirely reasonable to think that he is out of touch with reality. This is the action of a person who wants to destroy reality as we have known it, where ethics matter, where right and wrong are instinctively known to most of us, including the fact that killing, contrary to the law, is most definitely wrong. And yet, he wants to change that.
Trump is a threat to everything that we know. He's using political power to make that threat. If the world does not wake up and realise very soon that they have to stand up against him, united in their opposition to the evil that he represents, then we really are in danger.
But we still have people like the UK, desperate for a trade deal with this man as if he would honour any deal that he signed, as if the lessons of Munich in 1938 have not been learned. But that's where Starmer stands, and so he won't condemn Trump on anything.
It's time all the world's politicians - those who oppose Trump inside the USA and all those outside the USA who stand up for human rights, for the principle of the rule of law, for justice - to say, “Enough. We, the 7.7-odd billion people of the world, are going to stand up against the 300 million in the USA and say, You cannot do this. This is wrong.”
It is time for right to prevail and for Donald Trump to be put back into the box where he belongs. That box being wherever Trump Tower might be that he wants to live in, or Mar-a-Lago, or whatever else.
I wish no more harm to him than that, but he has to be constrained because the threat to us all is too great if he is not.
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I am starting to winder if the Biden Presidency was a strategic mistake by The Democrats.
Had Trump had another 4 years in office he – or more likley his backers, would not have had the opportunity to learn from his first term so they can now do so much damage in his second.
I guess many of us have asked ourselves what we would have done in Germany during the Nazi takeover, or in France during the occupation. Pretend it’s not so bad? Keep your head down for the sake of your family? Fight, fight, fight? For many Americans, those are now painfully real, urgent questions – but what of us Europeans? Have we elected representatives so weak and deluded they will not even defend international law, their own law, let alone the rule of law in America?
Excellent estimate.
Starmer is a full blown appeaser. That we do know.
What would I do in Nazi Germany? Would I be courageous enough to resist, against all of the rhetoric and violent threats? Would I be swept along by the charismatic periodic fervour, or at least pay lip service in an attempt to survive? Or would I try to flee? I don’t know.
What might have happened if France and Britain had moved to counter Germany remilitarising the Rhineland in 1936? But neither country was prepared for conflict, militarily or in terms of public opinion. A fair case can be made that Chamberlain’s appeasement bought time for Britain to prepare for war, and the failure of Munich in 1938 showed once and for all that there was no way to reach a compromise with Hitler.
America today is not Germany in 1933. Much of what Trump is trying to do is unlawful. Congress and the courts may support and uphold it anyway, but it is important that the Republican senators and representatives also bear their responsibility for what happens. The American public needs to oppose and mobilise all of the checks and balances in the US constitution. Not least the powers of the states themselves. And the midterm elections are less than two years away.
I have to disagree with you
I think America today could very easily turn out to be Germany in 1933.
An elected fascist is staging a coup in both. The strategies are similar. A night of the long knives might well follow.
It’s a good question.
I was born in Jersey in 1946. My parents and family were not there during the war. My grandmother evacuated to England with one suitcase. My father and his brothers all served in the armed forces. My mother and brother left Hong Kong before the invasion with a suitcase and were given refuge in Australia. In that sense they were refugees. My father was a Prisoner of War of the Japanese and it may have contributed to his early death.
The Germans were keen to appear reasonable to the wider world and in a six by ten mile area, the scope for violent resistance was limited. Food was short and by 1944 people were starving. The Swedish Red Cross set a ship with food for the Islanders. The Germans could have taken it for themselves but did not.
There are comparisons to be made with Gaza. My sympathies are mainly with the Palestinians. But the underlying causes are a form of aggressive nationalism supported by junk theology. These have to be opposed. We are seeing McCarthyism again in the US. It was challenged by ‘have you no decency?’ It is what this is about. We are seeing evil in a way I once thought was in the past and we had learnt from it.
You are right; this is evil at work.
Well said, and it is sickening. A small point, that what is Israeli territory is not simple. Hamas invaded occupied territory. (Taking hostages is still a crime.) The resistance/Nazi comparison is very strong, but the resistance committed horrible crimes. The question “What do you do?” is a bit artificial at this distance of time, or actual distance. But our governments have been happy with the status quo, which is also sickening.
This sounds to me like one of Trumps infamous ‘deals’ – bargaining with Bibi so that he does not look like a chump – you could just imagine the conversation –
‘Look Ben buddy, if I get you off your indictment from that God-damned ICC, and you – as a ‘gesture’ – Yeah?- allowed foreign input into the reconstruction of Gaza, you’d make a lot of people rich – er I mean happy – you understand Huh, huh ?’.
What I could not get over was the look on Netanyahu’s face – it was a cross between ‘What an arsehole’ and ‘I can’t believe my luck’.
Starmer – the Neville Chamberlain of the 21st century?
He certainly doesn’t have the guts to stand on any principles. He will say “Trump is the democratically elected president, we must do business with him”. But that’s what people in the 1930s said about Hitler.
There is an aphorism on the lines that when any discussion gets to comparisons with Hitler, it has become exhausted. But we are at a point now where such comparisons, esp. to 1933, are apposite.
An elected leader deliberately using the organs of state to overturn democracy is not normal, and should never be treated as such. Polite conversation is not always the right course.
As another example of Starmer’s spinelessness, it seems that Labour focus groups or whatever have concluded that people are “concerned” about immigration, so the government must ‘toughen up” their approach. I.e. ape Reform. But the prime cause of this “concern” is Reform & Farage’s endless toxic rhetoric.
The right thing to do would be to promote a humane approach, and challenge Reform’s ideology head-on. But no, can’t do anything confrontational can we?
The 1933 comparison iOS totally appropriate now.
A person democratically elected is staging a coup. The comparison is entirely appropriate.
My inner former history teacher prompts me to point out , pedantically, that after Hitler broke the Munich agreement and took the rest of Czechoslovakia, Chamberlain introduced conscription and gave guarantees to Poland to defend their border. Which was an almost impossible task due to geography.
The question is …will Starmer also realise he needs to change course? What would it take?
I wish I knew
I’m reminded of a fairly short song by Warren Zevon about a baseball player called Bill Lee.
You’re sposed to sit on you ass and nod at stupid things
Man that’s hard to do
But if you don’t they’ll screw you
And if you do they’ll screw you too
Live performance here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9hq7zXtvuSI
Full lyrics here:
https://www.lyrics.com/lyric/27967045/Warren+Zevon/Bill+Lee
“I’m a Democrat politician. This is why I sterilised myself after Trump’s election
Laurie Pohutsky, 36, opens up on decision to voluntarily forego having children rather than raising them under new Republican government”
This is a headline from the Telegraph.
This woman is a Representative in the Michigan State House of Representatives. She fears that, in future, US women may not be able to access contraceptives at all under the Republican government. Michigan already recognises women’s rights to abortion but she fears the states will be over-ruled by Trump’s executive orders. There are calls by pro-life Republicans to enforce a nationwide ban on abortions.
Coupled with a ban on contraceptives, women’s bodies would not be under their control. They will be under the control of a particularly nasty group of men and they would be forced to give birth against their wishes.
Since Trump and his henchmen are off the wall crazies, I think her worries are well-founded.
Trump is dangerous! A bully who must not get his own way. He is emboldening the right across Europe. The spectre of the 1930s is before us: Orban, Le Pen hail Trump at far-right ‘Patriots’ summit in Madrid https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/orban-le-pen-hail-trump-far-right-patriots-summit-madrid-2025-02-08/
The ICJ arrest warrants for Netanyahu and Gallant do not actually accuse them of genocide. They stand accused of the war crimes of using starvation as a method of warfare and of intentionally directing an attack against the civilian population; and the crimes against humanity of murder, persecution, and other inhumane acts from at least 8 October 2023 until at least 20 May 2024. It is the ICC which has ruled it is plausible that Israel has created the conditions in which genocide can be committed.
Israel has not signed up to the International Criminal Court either. Hence its statements that the Court has no jurisdiction. However, the Court has ruled that it does have jurisdiction. The UN itself is a target of both the U.S. and Israel, who accuse it of antisemitism and attacking the “only Jewish state” and “the only democracy in the Middle East”. Israel may be the only Jewish state, but it can certainly no longer be considered a democracy. We should also remind ourselves that the UN and the Geneva Conventions were created as a direct result of the Holocaust. The irony.
Gaza and the West Bank are Occupied Territories – occupied by Israel since 1967. Under the Geneva Conventions an Occupying Power has very clear responsibilities for the population of the territory it occupies. Israel has fulfilled none of those responsibilities during the nearly 60 years it has occupied Palestine.
Netanyahu was friends with Trump in the 1990s when Netanyahu worked in the U.S. I believe that Netanyahu has deliberately extended the war on Gaza in the hope that Trump would become President. Trump has filled his cabinet with pro-Israel, pro-Settler individuals, many of whom are also supporters of Christian Zionism. Netanyahu must be beside himself with glee. It was Netanyahu who persuaded Trump to withdraw from the nuclear treaty with Iran.
Trump “struts and frets his hour upon the stage” but sadly the next bit about being “heard no more” is not the case. “It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury” but it signifies everything, not nothing. I genuinely fear that Trump is intent on disembowelling what is left of the international rules based order and replacing it with overwhelming US domination. The combination of the tech moguls’ financial and economic might with Trump’s political power will not end well for the rest of the world.
Chamberlain ‘Appeased’ Hitler to allow Britain to rearm, both using our own resources and from abroad.
The UK bought huge stocks of small arms ammunition from abroad just prior to WW2 including from the Chaco war between Bolivia and Paraguay which could not have been done if we had been at war prior to 1939
My main fear about Trump is the way he is currently perceived around the world. Obviously, many, including me, are disgusted by him and regard him as a pox on decency and humanity. But…. and it’s a big but…. we are rational people on the whole, and people are already trying to rationalise his madness. This is not possible in a serious debate. However, I notice many commentarors and people phoning in to various radio stations are saying that there is method in his madness which is indeed very dangerous. Comparisons with Hitler seem justified although that is history rather than living memory for most people. What happened in 1933 and the following decade will be a dark continent for the majority who will have next to no knowledge of how events proceeded. As Richard says, we are all very worried about what will happen, but powerless to do anything decisive. Just keep warning people and pointing out the clear danger Trump poses to the world.
The international criminal court was created under the Rome statute in1998, signed by 125 countries, 79 of whom have registered objections to Trumps sanctions so far. There seems to be widespread reluctance to speak up against Trump in case you are the next country to be targeted in some way… which is shameful from both ends of the perspective. Sanctioning the court in order to protect Netanyahu from possible charges of war crimes/genocide undermines the whole international legal order that was, as someone pointed out ironically put into place mostly after WW2 to ensure “never again”.Israel argues that the court has no jurisdiction over it because its not a member but neither was Russia who was charged enthusiastically by the west for its war on Ukraine. The Trump sanctions have wide application not only on the actual members of the court but anyone linked in some way to the court or who works for them as well as their family members, travel and banking links. Apparently the EU has the power to pass a “blocking statute”… I don’t really know what that is and apparently also Article 70 of the Rome statute indicates that there is a possibility of charging Trump with obstructing justice. Does anyone have the cojones? Sadly the global community has not got its act together yet to opposes this gathering lawlessness from the trump Government.