Invited by the friends of the “Barbadillo” to express my opinion on the sanctions imposed by western countries to Russia I said Apertis Verbis that seemed absurd to me. With the “unfair sanctions” – to mention the good soul, who served in propaganda against the western powers – a country in war tries to bring the other to their knees, as well as with weapons, with the economy: the growing discontent of the subjects, increasingly in difficulty, would have caused the collapse of the front and therefore of the state (as in Russia in 1917).
In fascist Italy, in reality, they only served to strengthen the consent to the regime and also bring old opponents closer to it that could not bear the “cowardice outrage” especially by a friendly nation such as France (‘Bligny’s fallen would extend under the land that covers them .. “). In fact, I remembered, The penalties have never served anythingif not to enrich speculators and black bags. If the country with which you are at war, for example, cannot provide us with its gas (at costs lower than those on the mountain market), certainly goes to a loss-provided that you do not find other customers, which is not unlikely-but not least, the same loss is suffered by the sanctioning country.
In my opinion, objectively countercurrent, I manifested my wonder due to the fact that the Taliban of libertarian liberalism forgot so easily that Liberalism is the art of separation And that culture and economy should not be subjected to the “reason of state”. If the markets are closed, everyone is impoverished, if culture, art, science, music produced by the enemy are censored (this has also happened), we all regret. If the embargo also concerns medicines (see the Iraq of Saddam Hussein and the hundreds of children who died in pediatric hospitals for the embargo on chlorine) the sanctions, as well as an error, become a war crime.
And yet it would be foolish to demand that it becomes universal law of the ban on exchanging goods with the enemy, also because in history this exchange occurred not infrequently (the Dutch merchants were enriched by selling the weapons to the unable to be invented by Philip II with which the United Provinces were at war). Although unproductive, not to mention counterproductive, they can be, to the proof of the facts, sanctions, the great illusion of hitting opponents on the economic level He will never fail and politics, when the cannons thunder, will always continue to impose his diktat to producers and consumers.
If in this case – and it is my addition to the considerations carried out on the ‘Barbadillo’ – the economic moment of liberalism is in question (the need precisely to keep the economy and politics distinct), in another case, is in question its legal moment. I refer to the project of Emmanuel Macron – Perhaps, with Nicolas Sarkozy, one of the most questionable presidents of the V Repubblica – to exproper the assets (bank deposits, real estate properties, various company sharing) of the Russians to allocate them to the Ukrainians in war with Putin. Scholars who see their enemy in the State, have looked at each other well from denouncing this legalized theft, remembering that private property, in the triad of John Locke, is the foundation of the ‘social pact’, together with freedom and life.
As a disappearance of misunderstandings, a country at war has every right to ‘freeze’, in its territory, the heritage of the enemy, preventing, for example in Putin, to use it to continue buying vehicles, planes, missiles intended to put Ukrainian on their knees and knees. But those assets remain unavailable, they were purchased in a legal way: the national seller made a lawful gain and the foreign buyer paid them to his pocket. If between the two states the hostilities cease, the Russians must fall into possession of their bank funds and their properties: the ethics of the ‘open company’ requires it. But above all, the spirit of the laws of the modern state requires it which does not provide, unlike the ancient one, any form of proscription. As can be read in the Treccani encyclopedia. “Proscription par excellence” It is the measure with which first Silla, then the second triumvirate (Augusto Lepido and Marco Antonio), affected the enemies, putting them out of law as high treason and therefore not only allowing the chicchessia to kill them, but also confiscating (that is, proscribing) the goods.
The legal principle to which the proscription was recalled in this form was the sacredio capitisthat the oldest costume sanctioned for perduollio, that is, precisely for high betrayal. Silla in 82 a. C. regulated the proscription procedure with great precision, which was then imitated in 43 BC. C. from Antonio, Ottaviano and Lepido. Lists of proscripts were published in regular succession (Tabulae Proscriptionis), and a sum was promised, two talents, for the killing of each proscribed. The children and grandchildren of the proscribed were affected by infamy: those who gave asylum to the proscribes affected.
Often the assets of the proscripts were not sold regularly, but given to friends of the winners. The proscription of Silla, being prior to his appointment as a dictator, would not have had legal value, but he obtained it when his acts preceding the dictatorship were validated by the rallies. The validity of the analogous triumviri procedure was given by their own charge “. There is no need to remember that German citizens were victims of the proscriptionof Jewish religion, at the time of the most ruthless totalitarianism that history remembers, the Nazi one. In his imperial delusions, Emmanuel Macron, therefore, wants to extend to the ‘foreigners’ an institution that the Romans had put in place to defeat their enemies. I go back to asking me, why nobody has scandalized? Why does it appear normal, or at least indifferent, a political measure that recalls the terror of ancient civil wars and that of totalitarian regimes? Where are libertarian, liberals and marketists who see an attack on private property in every government fiscal measure?
If private property is one of the ‘natural rights’ and indeed it is the architrave, why can that of the Russians in Europe be reset without lifting any protest? I am a liberal statuerist And I don’t believe in natural rights but I believe in the rule right and in the principle Pacata Sunt servanda: It is mine all that I have legally purchased and the ban on making use of it can only be temporary and dictated by superior war needs.
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