POWER THROUGH PEOPLE: When Power Forgets People

Kevin Michael Brown

9d • Challenge Accountability Posts

🌍 POWER THROUGH PEOPLE: WHEN POWER FORGETS PEOPLE

We sat down today to watch a dramatisation of the 1988 Lockerbie bombing.

270 human beings died.

And something kept bothering me long after the television should have been switched off.

Nearly 38 years later, justice is still pursuing individual human beings allegedly involved in that atrocity.

But what happens when terrorism doesn’t originate with an isolated individual?

What happens when the trail leads towards the machinery of a sovereign state?

In 2003, Libya formally accepted responsibility for the actions of its officials in relation to Lockerbie, renounced terrorism and agreed compensation for victims’ families.

Yet our international criminal architecture remains far better at placing individual human beings in the dock than placing sovereign power itself there.

And that took my thinking backwards.

Past Lockerbie.

Past 9/11 and the 2,977 innocent people murdered there.

Back to World War II.

Some 70–85 million human beings died.

Soldiers became expendable.

Civilians became expendable.

Entire populations became expendable.

And from the ashes of that catastrophe humanity created the United Nations.

Its Charter didn’t begin:

WE THE GOVERNMENTS.

It began:

WE THE PEOPLES.

Its founding promise was extraordinary:

to save future generations from war, reaffirm fundamental human rights and the dignity and worth of the human person, and establish conditions in which justice and international law could be maintained.

But here’s the paradox I’ve been sitting with today.

We the peoples created an international system that ultimately has to operate through sovereign states.

The very states whose power that system sometimes needs to restrain.

The UN Charter recognises their sovereign equality while simultaneously requiring them to settle disputes peacefully and refrain from the threat or use of force against other states.

So more than 80 years after World War II, perhaps one of humanity’s unfinished questions is this:

Who holds sovereign power accountable when sovereign power itself makes human beings expendable?

Because terrorism exposes the problem particularly brutally.

A bomb doesn’t declare war.

The passengers don’t know they’re entering a battlefield.

The children don’t choose a side.

Ordinary people simply become instruments in somebody else’s political, ideological or strategic objective.

And somewhere during this conversation two SoulShiftSounds songs suddenly connected in a way I hadn’t fully recognised before.

🎵 THEY ARE EXPENDABLE?

https://suno.com/s/67kE3LfIu4XEhksT

asks what happens when systems of power stop seeing individual human beings and start seeing numbers, soldiers, populations, enemies, acceptable losses.

And:

🎵 POWER THROUGH PEOPLE

https://suno.com/s/wQXYw7OajNWU1tYA

or choose genre via EP: https://suno.com/s/rSd3OqEEJSxNYeHL

asks the question from the opposite direction.

What happens when we recognise the human being again?

Not power over people.

Not even simply power to the people.

POWER THROUGH PEOPLE.

Because perhaps preventing the next catastrophe doesn’t begin with stopping the missile after somebody launches it.

Perhaps it begins much further upstream.

Before person becomes population.