Lindsey Graham's last laugh

I had an article at Unherd over the weekend about the “adult grooming” crisis that has shaken the International Criminal Court to its core — almost certainly neutering it for the foreseeable future, and perhaps even delivering a final death blow, both to the ICC itself and “international law” writ large.

Irrespective of whatever one thinks about “international law,” or the mechanisms purporting to enforce it, that the institutions under its umbrella can be held hostage by this convoluted “allegation” chicanery — and in the case of the ICC, paralyzed for several years before self-immolating into oblivion — should probably not be greeted as any sort of cheerful outcome. Because the demolition of the ICC on these grounds will have done nothing to illuminate any fallacies of “international law,” or accomplish anything else that’s remotely constructive. Instead, it will only validate and accelerate the pathologies that gave rise to the “allegation” mayhem in the first place, which means the formula could soon be replicated at a more cherished institution near you, likely in some freshly mutated form.

My personal view: the only real “solution” to reverse this shambolic trend would be to cultivate an ethos whereby such utter nonsense as an “adult grooming” crisis is treated with the open ridicule it deserves, and not coddled every step of the way, whether by bureaucrats throughout the chain of command professing their “deep concern” (almost certainly fake), or journalists granting specious anonymity to the alleged adult grooming survivor. Without a robust political and cultural counterweight — unbowed by mealy-mouthed platitudes that virtually everyone involved does not actually privately believe — this bubble of hyper-sensitive official moralism is never going to be popped.

Based on the gap that plainly exists between what people profess to believe in public about this stuff, and what they actually believe in private, there is enough of a potential constituency out there for some emerging sanity-caucus to insist on some version of the following: anyone who participates in the manufacture of sole-crushing, institution-wrecking “allegation” frenzies — where no clear sexual misconduct is even alleged, and the only misconduct even being vaguely alleged exists exclusively by reference to the latest recalibration of abstruse “power dynamic” theory — should themselves be viewed as abusive, manipulative, wasteful of finite resources, and almost psychotically selfish.