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Supreme authority. I could see it and so will you upon reading these words for words are images formed in letters, a form of painting to the untalented like myself. Now you see it, the clash of rusted steel and the screams emanating from the pierced bodies fading ever so quickly into a past as if long forgotten, as if it has never happened as the present shifts into the future, then a long flowing mantle comes, dripping blood, dragging the scarlet viscous paint across a battlefield bereft of hostiles, regal boots descend from horseback in the post-battle deathly silence crushing pale white skulls of fallen enemy warriors knowing full well the victor did not partake in battle but sent his pawns, and by the end of it all the king moves in victorious for the king is not the king in body, but the authority figure, the mystical metaphysical man, or as medievalist Kantorowicz describes him as have a “corpus mysticum” a person separate from his person that grants him the obedience of the masses for man in flesh and blood could be corrupt, weak, imperfect, cruel and unjust, but the concept of a man could grant him everlasting mystique through published prose, lies, propaganda or half-truths, his legends may just become everlasting, outliving him and his entire bloodline.
This form of sovereignty has come to a halt, the vox populi could no longer tolerate the anciens regime and through violence they have begotten rights they could only dream of from the sovereign, granted to them without their permission as the regicidal walked away from the guillotines, they walked as equals, they walked as sovereigns, though as immoral as it may seem to the deontological crowd, for them, for the peasants who walked with the head of their decapitated lords, the end did verily justify the means.
Much to the dismay of philosophers like Hobbes or Bodin who considered the sovereign to be, I’m putting it simply here, but not simplifying the matter, above the law. No one now, in our civilized times, is above the law (supposedly, one look at Assange or Snowden makes you wonder if that’s really the case) and there has been a shift in the justice scale, as the weight levitated slightly from the side of the “sovereign” and some weight was placed on our end, us commoners are now (again, supposedly) equal to the ones in power, they suffer the same penalties if they commit the same crimes, they have the same obligations to the state following certain laws and if they were to change the laws they cannot do so without the consent of the masses, furthermore, there shall be no or little outside interference regarding matters from for the people within certain borders as scholar Alan James explains in his book “the Practice of Sovereign Statehood in Contemporary International Society” the people make the state and the state’s freedom as well as the freedom of its individuals are threatened by the intervention of outside forces.
So now you may have concluded that we have become sovereign, all of us and unlike the prior image of the murderous tyrant painted in my mind and yours there is a right in sovereignty as it is explained by the philosopher R. P. Wolff “the right to command and correlatively the right to be obeyed”. The key word here is “right”, it has certain implications regarding the legitimacy of authority and in our present day the most obvious and ubiquitous solution to political chaos and dissidence is voting.
And here comes a person no one has voted for; you are probably familiar with the name “Alexander Lukashenko”. One search for his name and countless websites claiming fraud for his electoral results in Belarus back in august 2020, I don’t blame you if you don’t remember it for our world is moving at breakneck speed, the information rushes through the web like water through a firehose, but his name has resurged once again recently with him threatening Poland to send all migrants that he has granted shelter and send them their way.
Belarus violates the borders of Poland threatening in return the rest of the E.U and its stability by opening the floodgates of migrants when legally as well as morally it has no right to do so. Legally because every country has the right to defend its borders from unwanted visitors who were not granted entry to its territory, and morally because it is abhorrent to weaponize and use the destitute and demoralized wayfarers left with virtually nothing to lose to fight Lukashenko’s battles for him, and it was a brilliant pick on his part for none can beat a soldier who has no past to return to, just a hope of a potentially prosperous future. He is waging war, and his proxy soldiers are weaponized yet unarmed vagrants. They have lost their value as human beings and have the “honor” to fight for a king, a king with authority, not one of those dusty old museum relics the rest of Europe has but an actual one, or as he refers to himself “Europe’s last dictator” a person no one voted for and he has to go. This is not a call to violence, this is a call for justice. To violate borders is to violate a people, to violate a people is to violate their sovereignty, and to violate sovereignty is a jus ad bellum.