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Notes -
Are you similarly surprised about nation states caring enough to kill separatists and terrorists abroad in the first place?
Because it's pretty much the same thing, one implies the other. The state*, in the crudest analysis, is a stationary bandit who claims ownership of a turf, a parcel of profitable land. This means maintaining the monopoly on legitimate violence within its borders, particularly mortal violence. Killing someone on the soil of another state is tantamount to diminishing that state's sovereignty; putting your dubious claim to «prey» above the state's claim to its legitimacy in its own domain, as if some ape's body moving around projects the qualitatively prioritized extension of yours; it is not so different in its corrosive effect from a direct attack on a local citizen, from using intimidation to intervene in local politics, indeed from supporting separatism. States, of course, exist in the condition of anarchy where might makes right and yadda yadda [realpolitik edgelording], but when such act is performed by «normal» states, ie bandits who profess to abide by some semblance of a code commonly agreed upon, as opposed to disreputable rogue shitholes with poor impulse control (or, I suppose, invincible Hegemonies), the exposure leads to apologia and compensation for damages – because it is a grave attack, even if nobody of the attacked state suffers directly.
*One of the sad things in learning languages is thoughtlessly swallowing words as one to one correspondences without pondering their etymologies and connotations, indelibly relative and path-dependent positions in the web of meaning, I believe. (This is not so much an endorsement of Sapir-Whorf as a weaker claim that different peoples use different ways to speak of the same things, same ways to speak of different things, and confuse this in translation). For example, in English, the token for «state» as in a nation/polity/unified territory is shared with an abstract, impersonal, elementary logical notion of a mode of operation maintained over some set: «the particular condition that someone or something is in at a specific time», the dictionary says. Hence, Balaji's «network state» is not an absurdity, «failed state» is a compact expression of a rather profound idea, and «state as a stationary bandit» might sound edgier than it should.
In Russian, however, the token for state-abstract is состояние, «condition» (itself different from условие which corresponds to a condition as in «term»), while state-nation is Государство. Государь means «sovereign» or «Prince». So, to a Russian ear, all states are principalities, dominions of an implied specific prince or equivalent; perhaps a conspiracy, at least a Deep State or a Cathedral, but not anything less, not anything that simply exists without expressing some de facto agent's coherent will.
As the honorary Russian Brodsky had uttered through the character of Marcus Valerius Martialis: «Surely, his view is barbaric, but yet candid».
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