My new Substack blog which discusses the eternal conflict between law and violence as we see it in the world today

I have started a new Substack blog in order to explain on a day-to-day basis the ongoing conflict between law and violence. It is called RussiaLaw, and you can find it at this link. 

This is a subject which far too few people understand. Most people in the West take law for granted, and most of the leaders of the axis of autocracy - Russia, China, North Korea and Iran - consider that state-sponsored violence is a legitimate way of enforcing the will, status and their power of their own hierarchy. 

There is no scope for compromise between these two principles - either society is co-ordinated by law or  it is co-ordinated by force or command, which ultimately means violence. 

The only way the world can accommodate two incompatible systems would be through negotiations. But status does not negotiate because to do so would be to accept the equality of the other negotiating party. That would be a derogation of status as it believes it is in charge because everyone else is inferior to it and beholden to it. 

A good illustration of that is the way President Putin refuses to negotiate directly with President Zelensky to end the war in Ukraine. How could he when that would mean treating Zelensky as an equal? 

This is the sort of question I will be addressing in my Substack blog. Clues to all such issues are in my book, Russia and the Rule of Law. I hope I have explained the principles clearly with reference to the long history of Russia and the West. I will use Substack to explain how these principles apply on a case-by-case basis.

I hope you will want to subscribe!

And here, apropos of the Russian leadership's love of violence, is the great Lenin who started it all. The photograph was taken outside a science centre near Zelenograd, just north of Moscow. The brainy leader comes complete with an exaggerated forehead, a tatty building in the background which looks almost unused and the obligatory fir trees to show we Russians are really hardy "Siberians", a designation which intended as an implicit threat to "bourgeois decadence" in the West. Threats, of course, are the "foreplay" of violence, much resorted to by Putin.