Cultural Opinion

Status Naturae. Felix qui potuit rerum cognoscere causas.  I. Introduction Les hommes sont donc égaux par nature. Dans le Léviathan, Hobbes est clair en établissant la maxime que "la Nature a fait les hommes si égaux dans les facultés du corps et de l'esprit que, bien qu'un homme soit parfois manifestement plus fort de corps ou plus sagace d'esprit qu'un autre, lorsque cela est considéré dans l'ensemble, la différence entre un homme et un autre n'est pas si importante qu'un puisse réclamer, sur cette base, pour soi-même, un bénéfice quelconque auquel un autre ne pourrait aspirer tout autant. En effet, en ce qui concerne la force corporelle, le plus faible a assez de force pour tuer le plus fort, que ce soit par des machinations secrètes ou en se confédérant avec un autre qui se trouve dans le même danger que lui[1]". Dans ce travail, je propose d’analyser et de comparer les théories politiques de Hobbes et Rousseau en me basant sur les textes « Dis...

Forrest Gump et le rêve américain Cadre théorique et Introduction Le philosophe français Paul Ricoeur, dans son essai "Le Socius et le Prochain", indique au lecteur les deux attitudes possibles pour repenser une relation sociale différente et abandonner la structure artificielle de la société moderne. La première est une attitude anti-moderne, caractérisée par la vision d'un monde déshumanisé où il n'y a plus de place pour le prochain (la société ne valorise pas celui qui se lie aux autres sans rien attendre en retour). La seconde est la vision moderne qui considère le prochain comme dépassé. En conclusion de cet article, Ricoeur établit la fausseté de la dialectique prochain-socius. Ce monde moderne se comprend mieux si l'on se rappelle ce qu'Arendt expose dans "Condition de l'homme moderne" : la vie contemplative ou traditionnelle devient absurde pour les modernes. Cette aliénation du monde implique de le sacrifier et de perdre la liberté créat...

  I woke up today thinking about those who suffer, about the ones that cannot speak and the ones that we don't see. I'm not interested in naming them because I know that you already know of their existence and if you are reading this text I'm sure that you are not one of them. This group of disconnected people doesn't share anything but their lack of representation, they are the ones that history books do not concern about, the ones that have passed their whole life without voice and image, the ones who suffer and cannot complain.  You will never find between their lines a famous or powerful individual, power for them it isn't something real and reachable it's an old joke that they never laughed about. Be aware of pretending to know who i'm mentioning cause if you ask me to explain them i wouldn't be able to do it but nevertheless we all know of them. All the cities of the world are built by them and all the cities of the world reject them, the things yo...

Throughout history there have been lots of memorable units within world armies; these units not only distinguished themselves because of the quantity of deployments and wars fought under the same banner but also and mainly because of their courage, will and determination to defeat the enemy, establishing a high standard that follows them into eternity. We have to take into account that these are the exceptions in the battlefields throughout history because fear more often than we believe makes cowards of men and haunts them taking the soul of every fighter. One of the units that has proven to be exceptional in the battlefield and willing to face fear is the well known Foreign Legion.  It is easy to understand why this group of fighters is well known in the military world, the legion is commanded by french officials and ruled by the republic but it is composed by foreign members that take the chance to fight for another country and to die for causes that are not their own. We are no...

  The hell on earth in the XX Century The evolution of the Ethiopian state, one of the oldest in the world located in the Horn of Africa, was historically marked by the interplay of ethnic, regional and religious factors that sometimes acted in harmony and sometimes in conflict.  In the last century, neither Emperor Haile Selassie's "national integration policy" nor the Dergue military regime's "Ethiopia First" slogan, which hybridised Ethiopian nationalism with Marxism, helped stem the rising tide of ethno-nationalist rebellion.  The Emperor's regime faced ethno-national and regional armed movements in Tigray (1942-43), Bale (1963-68), Gojjam (1967) and Eritrea since the early 1960s. While it successfully suppressed the first three, the Eritrean movement was intractable, mainly due to external support that the others were unable to acquire.  The Dergue also had to contend with another wave of ethno-national movements, some of them "inherited" ...

  The state as an international player, characteristics and limitations. A subject of public international law is any entity capable of acquiring rights and contracting obligations within the international legal order. That is to say, they will be a centre of imputation of international norms, contracting obligations and rights within the legal system. It is legally asserted that the subject lies in the capacity of that entity to create, modify or extinguish legal relations. When they participate in the creation of norms, we can affirm their subjectivity.  We must be clear that international law is based on the recognition that it has multiple subjects. The original subjects are the states, on which the whole community agrees, and from them other international subjectivities are affirmed.  The multiplicity of subjects raises the question that the subjects of public international law are not necessarily all identical because states do have identity from the point of view o...

History of the financiation of the united nations  The United Nations (UN) is a complex organisation with several budgets funded in different ways. The UN Secretariat General manages a regular budget, another for peace missions, and a third for the UN tribunals: the International Criminal Tribunals for Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia, and the International Residual Mechanism of the International Criminal Tribunals, the successor body to those two courts.  Within the UN there are specialised agencies such as the WHO, and funds and programmes, such as UNICEF, which have separate budgets. The UN's regular budget is funded by mandatory contributions and approved by the General Assembly. Until now it was for a two-year period, but since 2020 budgets have become annual. For 2020, the General Assembly approved a budget of more than USD 3 billion.  The Assembly's Committee on Administrative and Budgetary Questions is in charge of establishing every three years what percentage of...

A name problem  State recognition is the unilateral act by which a state admits that, as far as it is concerned, another subject possesses subjectivity or international legal personality.  The case of the Republic of Macedonia is particular, since Modern Macedonia was born in 1945, as one of the six constituent republics of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. When Yugoslavia disintegrated in 1991, Macedonia declared its independence. Although today the prevailing trend in the international community is that the act of recognition has a declarative effect, therefore, if the states meet the 4 constituent elements - territory, sovereignty, government and population - that state exists, beyond the fact that the set of states within the international community recognize them progressively; it is important to note its recognition by the international community.  Unlike other former Yugoslav republics, Macedonia enjoyed a virtually unopposed and comparatively peaceful ...

  If you have been following up military history you will see that most guns and military equipment are constantly developing and changing in front of our eyes pretty quickly but also there are weapons which are used in a different variety of wars and these ones for me are the most interesting.  One of the usual suspects is a friendly drink who is being used at this moment to defend Ukraine and was used by the Finns to stop the Soviets, this friendly drink is called  Molotov  and you have to be careful if you are a drinker because sometimes it can get very hot. The drink was used for the first time in the Spanish civil war but the famous name comes from people that don't speak spanish. Where does the name come from?  The  Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact was a treaty between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union where they see eye to eye and firm an non agression treaty which involved dividing half of poland for each party, the Russian diplomat that helped to make this ...

The line between disorder and order lies in logistics  – Sun Tzu What is General mud? If you read history you should come to the conclusion that an invasion towards Russia never ended well. Both Napoleon and Hitler failed with their respectives invasions to this enormous country and both have in common that the winter and the mud made their plans fall apart.  Rasputitsa or better known as "General Mud" in the west is the name given to two seasons of the Russian year, spring and autumn that also take place in Belarus and Ukraine. You can say that Rasputitsta takes place when the mud invades the roads and makes it practically impossible to transport almost anything without a good preparation for it because the rain melts with the snow. This makes logistics very difficult on account of the fact that troops and tanks must slow down and expose them to attacks and extreme hunger; here even the rivers become obstacles for the invaders and make their attacks a living hell. The thing ...

  Eternal peace lasts only until the next war.  Russian proverb On February 24, 2022, days after our article "the Putin Gambit", Russia announced the start of its "special operation" in Ukraine and launched the war that is now shaking the world. The first thing that came to my mind when I saw the footage of the war in Ukraine was an old phrase that my old and wise grandma used to tell me "if you poke a bear you will get an answer and probably not a good one".  In this article we will try to understand the bear, not by judging him but by putting ourselves in the bear skin and trying to comprehend what are the motivations and causes that made the bear lose his temper. We are going to focus on two main issues, the first one is the expansion of the NATO in the area of influence of Russia and the second one is the growth of neo-Nazi movements in Ukraine. The expansion of NATO in the Russian backyard.  Now if you been following the events in this part of the wor...