Over these several days of the conflict with Russia, we have received many quite instructive lessons. I will focus on those that, from my point of view, demonstrate the complete futility of the system in which we still have to live.
“International law”. It turned out that the hopes many placed in various written documents were greatly exaggerated. Law, and “international law” in particular, does not operate automatically, as many would like it to. A piece of paper obligates no one to anything. On paper, one can record a certain state of affairs and promise heavenly punishments to whoever violates it. But the paper will only “work” when, for the participants in the process, preserving the status quo is more expensive than violating it. For the guarantors of Ukraine’s territorial integrity to take up its defense, this very integrity must have value for them—measurable, at the very least, by the amount of investment per square inch. Yet Ukrainian governments over all these years did everything possible to devalue the corporation “Ukraine” as much as possible. Over-regulation of the economy, dead last in ease of doing business rankings, and the inevitable result—corruption and the utter unpredictability of state behavior—these are the reasons why this entire setup serves no one except Ukrainian officials. The guarantors, meanwhile, are solving the issues that actually concern them: what will happen now with the spread of nuclear weapons, and where Putin will stop. And they are solving all this without Ukraine’s participation, since Ukraine itself has no value.
“International relations”. We have once again confirmed that “international relations” is simply another term masking reality. No “relations” between peoples can exist by definition. What is called “international relations” are relations between private individuals (officials) with all their weaknesses and quirks, which we have been observing with interest all this time. This circumstance has another side: private individuals act on behalf of “peoples,” whose interests are then attempted to be realized by other private individuals, to whom they, generally speaking, are at best indifferent. After all, it is not Dugin and Kiselev who go to war, buying weapons and ammunition with their own money. Completely unrelated people go to war, appointed for this by their superiors. After all, the medieval system, when no “peoples” appeared in propaganda, was much more honest. The little king would sit on his horse and ride off to war. He had to personally lead the troops into battle, which created understandable risks, and there were no doubts in anyone’s mind about exactly what was happening and in whose interests.
“Raiding”. We saw how the state system is, generally speaking, in no way connected to the interests of those for whom, as we are told, it exists. It turns out that if you stick a flag in the right place and capture the right building, you can transfer ownership of an “administrative-territorial unit” with all its state infrastructure, taxation, and little people to yourself. The problem lies precisely in the existence of such magical places for sticking flags, and not in the number of little green men you have. This is easy to understand if one imagines that on some territory, say, in Crimea, there exist no concentrated points of state power. If “state” services are provided by private companies, then there is simply nowhere to stick a flag. If the territory consists of private estates and the “infrastructure” is also in private hands, then raiding becomes impossible; the little green men would have to deal with each property owner separately. They have no “command post” whose capture would allow them to “legitimately” give orders. The little green men would have to wage a full-scale war with property owners and the troops they hired.
“Serfdom”. We also once again confirmed that we live in some version of serfdom. Not only do Ukrainians work off their tax corvée for at least half the year, but they can also easily find themselves in the role of little people who will be transferred along with their pots and hoes to another master. And the trouble here is not so much the evil Putin as the system that allows this to happen.
“The army is a public good”. The example of defense as a “public good,” the financing of whose production is allegedly possible only through compulsorily collected taxes—this is one of the last bastions of statists. Now we have witnessed with our own eyes how this bastion has fallen and saw how this system does (not) work. Kolomoyskyi fueling the tanks was a rather vivid illustration. And the matter here is again not that “too few funds were allocated” and “the army was being dismantled,” but that the forms and methods of the army’s very existence, the amounts of “funds” and how they will be “absorbed” are determined by the private opinions of private individuals—that is, by the opinions of politicians and officials—and not by consumers. You are unlikely to hear that “too few funds were allocated” for the production of rolls, and you are unlikely to read in a newspaper horrors about how “the roll-making industry was being systematically dismantled.” This is impossible because the production of rolls is regulated by the consumer, and the consumer determines the “amount of funds” he is willing to allocate to this “industry.” “Defense” is no different in principle. The thing is that the forms of such an army, financed by consumers, will most likely be different; it will be, rather, a set of coordinating efforts of armies, rather than a single centralized system. However, even if we imagine that the army is financed, for example, by insurance companies, then even in this case a situation would be impossible in which, as our military told us, the threat from Russia was never considered real. I think that an insurance company that would write in its policy that defense services are provided based on the security conditions of the northeastern direction would have no clients in Ukraine.