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Andriy Melnyk, Ambassador of Ukraine, visiting Anne Will, May 5, 2022
Photo:
Jürgen Heinrich / IMAGO
terminology
This column is not actually concerned with the Ukraine war or, as it should be called politically and historically correct, "Putin's criminal war of aggression".
The "criminal" in this term is a mixture of legal sophistication, contemporary ethics, and archaic incantation.
Section 13(1) of the Code of Crimes against International Law stipulates that anyone who wages a war of aggression that is a manifest violation of the United Nations Charter shall be punished with life imprisonment.
The legal heading of Section 13 is "Crime of Aggression."
From this it follows that a "criminal war of aggression" is conceptually located roughly in the middle between a deadly and a criminal murder: the first is a white gray horse,
The logic of the regulation shows us that there must also
be non
-criminal wars of aggression.
One type of this is the prophylactic
humanitarian
war of aggression, for which Foreign Minister Fischer was once thrown red paint to the horror of the public, another type is the prophylactic
defensive
war of aggression, for which Ambassador Andreyev has now had red paint thrown at him to the jubilation of the public.
Times are changing!
This is true - before the next shock of indignation runs through you!
– not to conclude that everything is the same, but that the state and military bureaucracy of Russia, to which “the West” has given the name “Putin”, wishes to speak to the world on the basis of international law.
After all!
So the analogies to Genghis Khan are a bit premature.
Instead, if the deeply felt insult about Russian in the world gives you time, you could think a little about the declarations of war by Great Britain and France on Russia in March 1854, about the fascinating escalation logic of the (in this country) so-called Crimean War and the siege of Sevastopol, which could remind one or the other of the siege of Mariupol in a way that is as depressing as it is enlightening.
Liverwurst
What is an offended liverwurst?
Is it an insult to call someone that?
As always, it comes down to it again.
It's not the fault of the liver sausage as such, namely because, insofar as it contains parts of liver in addition to fat and flavor-enhancing ingredients according to a centuries-old family recipe, it mainly uses liver pieces from pigs, cattle and calves, and to a lesser extent pieces of liver from all kinds of poultry.
I don't know how the liver sausage suppliers are doing with Mr. Galen's theory of four juices, although many a fighting bull, fighting dog and fighting cock have had lice on their livers.
In any case, as every experienced alcoholic knows, the human soul, i.e. the feeling, resides in the liver.
Nowadays, western man suffers from permanent hyperfunction of the liver,
i.e. exaggerated release of emotional juice, and the resulting galloping hyposociality, i.e. dulling, which disguises itself as so-called empathy, but mostly has the form of a mirror directed at one’s own bile.
How else are you supposed to endure the world, the price of gas, the viruses and the medium-heavy weapons?
An offended liverwurst (b.L.) is someone who feels offended for a supposedly trivial reason.
The designation is therefore itself a disparagement, because it denounces the defamation of the person concerned as socially inappropriate, disproportionate and irresponsible.
One can underestimate the injury of the liver sausage, because it is inherently dubious: the person concerned "plays" the b.
L. Because if he were actually seriously offended, you would have to start a discussion about his entitlement.
And experience has shown that this is much more difficult than most people think.
Humid?
narrow-minded?
Putin friend?
"Gay": Is that actually an insult?
Or "lesbian"?
Or "miscellaneous"?
As soon as it comes to things related to sexuality, it becomes difficult from a human and communicative point of view, because the sexual is considered »intimate«.
In fact, most people are quite careful in hiding their own sexuality-related actions and thoughts from the (gradual) public, while at the same time an anonymized sexualization of everyday life is pervasive.
Criticism of the latter or the claim of being "offended" by it is seen by the majority of the local population as backward, illiberal or hostile, which can be observed in the conflictual clash of so-called images of women and ideas of masculinity.
But the "insult" is a socio-psychological bottomless pit, meaning infinite, imprecise, always in motion.
This description does not agree with the everyday view that the insult – like »pornography«, »aggression«, »crossing borders« – is an object that is self-explanatory, that one »recognizes when one recognizes it sees".
However, that is not true at all.
On the contrary, "insult" is an extremely complicated social event.
Sexual of any kind lends itself particularly well to being offended;
but it also works with almost everything else.
That alone speaks for the fact that it is once again extremely important.
Many people think of sanctions when they hear the term »insult«.
"Is that punishable?" is the question as soon as someone feels "offended" by someone.
If the matter is dealt with publicly (especially in the media), all sorts of camps form.
Some are of the opinion that honor is protected far too little, others believe that it is far overrated.
In between, there are currents of opinion that are more or less distanced from what is happening: One should "don't behave like that," "don't be so sensitive," on the other hand, "don't put up with everything," etc. People who take legal action against "insults." (or even with violence) are quickly regarded as "respectful", which in turn is a rather derogatory attribution, see "trial hansel", etc.
"Honour" is therefore an extremely dazzling legal asset that is sometimes even viewed as somewhat irresponsible.
This is amazing inasmuch as most people you know in everyday life feel "offended," offended, neglected, ignored, or otherwise not treated with due respect, almost continuously, by, by, or by something or anyone.
The inferiority of the condition worthy of protection, "honor," is stated almost exclusively in others, almost never in oneself.
That too is specific to the subject.
It is very popular to loudly expose people who have previously been reviled as overly sensitive mimosas at the slightest objection.
All relative!
A proper insult requires three people: an offender, a victim, and a third party.
This latter person is particularly important, although not necessarily real and present;
in most cases it is simply thought of as such.
However, this is absolutely necessary: because where there is no "neutral" third party, the most beautiful disparagement is of no use.
The victim, too, is offended not because someone uttered the sounds of "nazis" and "babblers," but because he knows, assumes, or fears that the world may believe that the symbolic meaning of these phonetic signals is correct.
In other words, without a social reverberation of meaning, there is no offense.
In language and in the language-replacing signs, this reverberation space is always already thought of;
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That is why it does not really make sense, for example, to look for a hundred examples from case law in a thick commentary on criminal law in the commentary on Section 185 of the Criminal Code (»insult«) in order to find out what (»already«) is punishable and what (»still«) goes through.
Everything is relative, and insults change with the times, with social classes, and with occasion.
30 years ago, even more so 50 years ago, calling someone “gay” was a fact of life.
Today, depending on the context, this is considered more of a compliment, and even the Cologne Higher Regional Court recently (Az. 15 W 15/22) had to use the epithet "bastard" and the generally derogatory, non-sexual meaning of "gay" in the so-called youth language, for potential criminal liability.
Good examples of changes in meaning are "bull" (policeman) or the good old "stinky finger", about which probably only chief police officers on duty, Audi drivers or "Bild" editors get excited.
As is well known, the prosecutors and judges who decide what is punishable come predominantly from a social class known as the “upper middle class”, in which one is firmly convinced that one's own taste happens to be exactly the center of the known world.
Very interesting are attributions that only have a derogatory, excluding meaning in the (confused or hostile) imagination of the perpetrator: "Jew", "Communist", "Radical".
If one were to pursue such (intended to be insulting) designations as an insult, one would adopt the erroneous assessments of the perpetrator as one's own.
sausage salad
If, just as an example, someone says about a foreign president that he »prefers to fuck goats«, a surprising number of people consider that a very successful joke.
When someone else, about whose ancestors one should perhaps not remain silent, says about a German sociologist that his ancestors murdered 10 million Ukrainians, a surprising number of people conclude from this that the ivory professor should do so in order to settle the debt, and 80 years later as many Russians as possible should wanting to be killed.
You can see both, but you certainly don't have to.
It could also be serious insults.
Both presumably, in different ways, consider themselves highly moral.
The last-mentioned, as a representative of a state to be taken seriously, clearly unsuitable moral bully, 2015 Laying a wreath at the Munich grave of the war criminal and
Prowidnyk (leader) , revered as a »hero« in western Ukraine
Banderas, whose UPA, which emerged from the OUN, actively helped the Galicia SS division to murder 800,000 Jews and murdered 100,000 Poles on its own initiative, someone recently said that he was "simply narrow-minded."
The reverberation room for this academically reserved rebuke was as powerful and frightening as the "Twilight Valley" on Mr. Knopf's trip to China, and countless reserve officers of the hearts from the General Staff for Valorology advised the sociologist, if he loved his life, from the withdraw from the battlefield.
One would only have to correctly translate "narrow-mindedness" with "narrow-mindedness" and the so-called ambassador might be happy.
We don't know and we first imagine what would happen to the ambassadors from South Korea, Angola or Romania
Well, that's all hypothetical, of course.
What the reader interested in insults and legal fan can learn from this is, as is so often the case in science, disappointingly multidimensional.
Only difficult questions instead of heavy weapons, only sausage salad instead of foie gras!
And with this dish, we are now really getting dangerously close to the solyanka, whose imminent Europe-wide ban on consumption could, I think, be a nice project for the chairman of the Bundestag's Europe Committee.
From now on, the Saxon national dish should be »borscht with quark balls«!
