tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-44155775620840740222023-06-20T05:39:36.148-07:00Swinging the PossumTo swing the possum: To engage in empty chatter until closing time.Michael http://www.blogger.com/profile/17596457110530754431noreply@blogger.comBlogger10125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4415577562084074022.post-16157527530628068282012-11-17T14:47:00.000-08:002012-11-17T14:47:53.753-08:00Pity the 1%<br />
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What is truly pathetic is the sad state
of the 1%. Imagine, for a moment, that you are the billionaire, B. G.
Your multiple dwellings are vast and carefully tended. You can go to
many cities and be home. Your yacht has not one but two helicopter
pads. It burns one hundred gallons of fuel per mile. Important
people meet you in the middle of the ocean, then fly away. Back on
land you almost never touch ground, always arriving via the roof,
except when you step upon manicured lawns in gated communities within
gated communities. Carefully arranged flowers decorate every room you
enter. Bodyguards accompany your every step. When you walk from one
crowded room to another you are on high alert, for you fear
kidnappers. Every move must be planned, every venue thoroughly
vetted, and all this done with the utmost secrecy. Much of your time
is taken up with the precautions the security guys assure you it is
absolutely essential that you take. You enter rooms from side
entrances; often make your double take your car; and find it
necessary to pop up unexpectedly at gatherings of the movers and
shakers.</div>
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<br />
</div>
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You have long ago passed on operational
control of the source of your wealth. You were tired of keeping up
with the waves of innovation, and anyway you simply didn't have the
time. When you make a surprise appearance at company headquarters
everybody ohs and ahs. Then they go on with what they were doing.
Nothing you say is ever contradicted. Nor does any of it any longer
affect company policy, though everyone makes an enormous effort to
make it seem as if it did. Nobody dares to note how thoroughly out of
date you are.</div>
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<br />
</div>
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You like to pop up in the news cycle in
occasional interviews. You like the way interviewers defer to your
wisdom. Aside from business they talk to you only of the subjects
everyone knows interest you: your horses, golf, the good things you
do for children, and pictures by Van Gogh, whom you adore. You lead a
vibrant life, full of energy, everybody avers. Your passion for golf,
especially, is truly astonishing for a man of your age. Of course
when you do drop pearls you are careful to always remain banal or off
the record for fear of stirring up a hornets nest. When you depart
you invariably get an obsequious grin.</div>
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<br />
</div>
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You have a mistress, but fearing the
tedium of scandal, must transport her through roundabout routes to
secret rendezvous. Never can you appear together in public or you
would spook a stampede of image thieves. Although those photogs are
great for making moments of fame, and at the same time make fame seem
not to be worth it, they really are a pain. Your girl is, of course
beautiful with the current standard of beauty, but when you kiss her,
you read, on her lips, her knowledge that she will not even be known
as having been your mistress. In the end, she knows, you will just
drop her with a gold tiara, and that is why she soaks you for
everything she can get now. She pretends to adore you and that's
fine, indeed necessary given how hurried are the meetings you must
share. Admittedly, she executes a wordless blackmail. But you know
it is not her. Any other mistress would do the same, and this one is
quite a gymnast. You do fear that she might write a memoir. You chose
a girl who would be too stupid to do so, but if an agent and a
ghostwriter ever got a hold of her...</div>
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<br />
</div>
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Sometimes they put you on TV to make
wise pronouncements to the investment scavengers who dog your heels.
Then you merely paraphrase the words of Michael X, a whizz with
numbers and a trusted retainer. Your billionairiness has deprived you
not just of the ability to keep up with developments, but of the
leisure to ever use your mind beyond what is necessary to form
completely unfounded opinions. Cleverly, you have hired other very
wise men, like Michael, to form wise opinions for you. For you simply
haven't got the time to think, what with all the thising and thating
you do and the security guys always around warning of whatever.
</div>
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</div>
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About the big things, like global
warming, you'd rather not say. It is beyond your area of expertise.
Among serious people such a thing is never mentioned, for what does
it have to do with business? That it portends human destruction is
dubious. In all honesty you can say you really don't know anything
about it and you're not worried. It would be better not to say you
really haven't had the interest to find out. That might antagonize
people. And anyway, among the people who matter that is understood.
The mere fact that the little people care about this problem proves
that concern is overblown. Though, you remind yourself to add, if the
occasion ever comes up, that you too are concerned about the
possibility of human extinction. Anyway, the interviewers, who are
good at their job, have long ago learned what to ask you and what
not.</div>
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<br />
</div>
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Of course you are aware that a growing
number of people are blaming you and people like you for things that
are going wrong. Well, what can you expect. The lower orders are
always scapegoating for their own failures. Do they expect me to
propose something as absurd as ending all hydrocarbon use? Why I
would be laughed out of my own boardroom. They would think I had gone
completely bonkers. People don't realize how really powerless I am
when it comes to these extra-business concerns. And they just don't
understand how the system works. The really important people, like
me, and the really top people in government, can actually do far less
then anyone outside the beltway can realize. In fact, we powerful
ones are really quite powerless to do anything that matters about
global warming even if we wanted to. I mean be realistic, preventing
human extinction is just not on the agenda. It's not even on the
radar.</div>
Michael http://www.blogger.com/profile/17596457110530754431noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4415577562084074022.post-53804785153007382672012-08-30T07:26:00.002-07:002012-09-03T16:03:49.620-07:00Marx's gift to the 1% or What is to be Done?<br />
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<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><i>The
February days originally intended an electoral reform by which the
circle of the politically privileged among the possessing class
itself was to be widened and the exclusive domination of the
aristocracy of finance overthrown. When it came to the actual
conflict, however – when the people mounted the barricades, the
National Guard maintained a passive attitude, the army offered no
serious resistance, and the monarchy ran away – the republic
appeared to be a matter of course... While the Paris proletariat
still reveled in the vision of the wide prospects that had opened
before it and indulged in seriously meant discussions of social
problems, the old powers of society had grouped themselves,
assembled, reflected, and found unexpected support in the mass of the
nation, the peasants and petty bourgeois, who all at once stormed
onto the political stage after the barriers of the July Monarchy had
fallen.</i></span></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><i>Karl
Marx “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon”</i></span></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;">In
this apparently unremarkable passage, Karl Marx, with his
descriptions, illustrates a conceptual step that, in my opinion,
freed the Bourgeoisie from restraints and thus permitted the
barbarism of the ruling classes that was the twentieth century. What
Marx does is convince us that there was a bourgeois revolution and
that there will be a proletarian one. The difference between the two
types of revolution is decisive, for the first Revolution, that of
1789, is a revolution for universal human equality. The desire to
transform the hierarchical world into one consisting of equals
inspired the revolutionaries. Marx made it into the bourgeois
revolution. The Bourgeoisie, a surprising number of aristocrats, the
peasantry, and virtually all of the intellectuals, with the very
notable exception of Edmund Burke, supported a revolution for
equality, a word whose meaning in this context is completely vague
but worth exploring. Be that as it may the word “equality,”
bearing no clear meaning, inflamed the common mind with a hope of
dignity and opportunity, and gained a strong measure of support from all classes. Marx insists that this was nothing but
window dressing, and the revolution but preliminary. The real revolution would be a class war. </span></span></div>
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<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;">Marx
describes, in class terms, how the revolution of 1848 started
out to simply expand and perfect the achievement of universal human
equality. Until February, 1848, the bourgeoisie was on the side of
the revolution. Marx dramatizes how everything changed in
February, 1848, the fateful moment. The government fell into the
hands of the Paris proletariat. They declared the “social
republic.” What Marx is saying, in so many words, is that the
bourgeoisie, those who owned the means of production, became the
enemy of the revolution at that moment. Prior to that event they had
been part of it.</span></span></div>
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<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;">A
class war replaced the revolution for universal human equality. The
comrades of the revolution broke into factions and the nature of the
revolution altered decisively. The proletarian revolution involves a
betrayal of the revolution for universal human equality, for in class
warfare we are not fighting for all humans, but just one class who is
seeking victory over another.</span></span></div>
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<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;">Marx's
skillful prose leaves us with no doubt who the hero is in this class
war-- the working class. It's really quite wonderful how Marx, after
declaring dramatic language in politics as nothing but spectacle to
cover a boring reality, manages to make the Paris proletariat the
hero of a melodramatic story of a prize grasped and lost, but
destined in some future to be won again. For Marx holds out hope that
next time the revolution will succeed. Here is how he ends the story:</span></span></div>
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<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;">The
cult of the Holy Tunic of Trier he [Louis Bonaparte] duplicates in
Paris in the cult of the Napoleonic imperial mantle. But when the
imperial mantle finally falls on the shoulders of Louis Bonaparte,
the bronze statue of Napoleon will come crashing down from the top of
the Vendôme Column.</span></span></div>
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<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;">In
rather colorful language Marx describes here what Louis Napoleon's
ascension means in class terms. Louis Napoleon is a member of the
lumpen-proletariat, the “flotsam and jetsam of all classes.” As
such, when in power, he tries to please everyone. He wants to make
France into a gift he gave to the French people. When Napoleon's
mantle settles on his shoulders (being that it is the second time, as
farce), the first Napoleon's statue will fall from the Vendôme
Column, or, in plain language, the proletarian revolution will defeat
the bourgeois revolution, that for universal human equality, and the
class war shall be won.</span></span></div>
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<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;">It
seems unavoidable to conclude that Marx believed Louis Napoleon,
without any loyalty to the proletarian revolution, was, nevertheless,
its key revolutionary instrument. For it is precisely his achievement
of imperium that will cause, or at least herald, the victory of the
proletarian revolution. Louis Napoleon's rule is incoherent and
farcical because he has no class affiliation. Marx must have thought
that this incoherence and farce would doom his rule. Buffoonery in
high places would reveal the true contradictions of capitalism. No
doubt Marx would be surprised at the American parade of buffoon
presidents following one another into the abyss without anyone even
able to see their clownishness. But even if one of these clowns were
to usher in the new world, that would only get the revolution back
where it started in 1848. For the revolution of 1848 failed because
the proletariat, after it won power, could not think of what to do.</span></span></div>
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<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;">The
revolution of 1848 did not start as a class war, and only became one
after February, or perhaps only after Marx described it as such.
Class war is, of course, ancient. The Peloponnesian War was, in large
part, a class war. The revolution of 1789 can, of course, be seen as
a class war, but it was the idea of classlessness, however
chimerical, that inflamed the minds of those who manned the
barricades and later followed Napoleon. Edmund Burke wrote for the
English aristocracy, fearing, with cause, that many of them might be
swept away in the giddy flood towards the sea of equality. His
arguments, so influential, were against the rights of man, that is,
universal human equality, for which he wanted to substitute the
“Rights of Englishmen.” He would substitute a passion for
patriotism for that for equality. Not a few Aristocrats were
sympathetic to the cause of equality, apparently in conflict with
their own interests. Burke wrote because he feared this infection
within the aristocracy itself. The Bourgeoisie, as Marx himself
attests, saw themselves as on the side of the revolution for
classless universal equality until 1848.</span></span></div>
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<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;">Marx
describes a period of shock the February revolution caused. Everybody
just stood as if frozen. Then he describes how various class-based
parties gathered themselves together and, farcically falling
backwards over one another, all landed in Louis Napoleon's lap to
escape the “social republic.” Marx describes all this in terms of
classes, but it seems more than likely that these classes, though
they had always existed, first understood themselves as having
politically different interests at that moment. Since then we take it
as a matter of course that, at bottom, all is class war. Marx has
convinced us that “equality” was just window dressing, stage
play, or simply propaganda to cover class war. Whether tragedy or
farce it was window dressing. Equality is an ultimately meaningless
word used to fool children. Class war, the underlying truth, is real.</span></span></div>
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<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;">In
abandoning the revolution for universal human equality, Marx abandons
entirely the justice of his cause. Universal human equality is a
noble goal, victory in class warfare is not. Marx attempted to repair
this problem with his idea of “the labor theory of value.” The
task of “Das Kapital” is to persuade us of the labor theory of
value. He argued that the Bourgeoisie only possessed their wealth
because they stole it. Thus class war was nothing more than the
proletariat revenging an ancient wrong, also noble. This no doubt
assuaged consciences among the revolutionaries, but it was self
delusion. In a branded world where the Adidas swath added value, the
labor theory of value is tendentious. Bottom line: class war meant
that the working class wanted to despoil the bourgeoisie.</span></span></div>
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<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;">There
can be no doubt that owners, the Bourgeoisie, exploited the working
class horribly. The monstrous conditions in the “dark Satanic
mills,” and the tales of literal starvation of the English working
class were real. There is also no doubt that the working class, with
many notable exceptions, allowed this to be done to them. As long as
they retained their allegiance to “equality” the bourgeoisie had
to be suffering from a bad conscience. Dickens, Blake, and many
others raked them over the coals. Byron supported the Luddites in the
House of Lords. The remaining aristocracy humiliated them socially to
the point that the American founding fathers felt like country
bumpkins when they came to Europe. There was not just a little of
Madame Bovary, which also comes from this mid-century, in all of
them. The grim and boring reality that Marx describes as being hidden
by the Roman trappings of the French Revolution is Bourgeois life.
What was the point of getting all that money? No matter how much you
had, the society of “real” people, the aristocrats, will
humiliate you, your employees will hate you, your enterprise will be
objectively hellish, and you will be bored out of your gourd.</span></span></div>
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<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;">Marx
relieved them of all that. All that was but stage play. What was
real, at bottom, was commodities, the means of production, in Marx's
terms material, in ours, money. Now of course Marx was by no means
the first to think that money was everything. The Greek poet Theognis
left a fragment that says just that, but he did not have an audience
like the embarrassed Bourgeoisie.</span></span></div>
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<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;">The
class war supplied the bourgeoisie with arms against their sea of
troubles. All the refinement of the Aristocracy, their “talent for
living” and ability to humiliate the poor bourgeois, was but stage
play, pomposity, farce. Bottom line: who controlled what was all that
mattered. Of course your workers hated you. They were soldiers of an
enemy army. It was a dog eat dog world. You killed, confused,
terrified, and tortured if you had to. You had a perfect right to
squeeze every drop of blood from them and then move to China. War was
hell; no wonder your factory was. That was the nature of war.
Boredom? Are you kidding? You are at war. You and your kind must
always be alert. No telling what that inhuman scum, the 99% might do.
War required all your cunning and an exciting cold ruthlessness that
sent shivers down your spine. War is war. It's exciting.</span></span></div>
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<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;">Marx
also had gifts for the proletariat. They were, after all, the hero of
his fable. In the end they were to triumph. But what then? In
February, when they did triumph, they had no clue. So they did
nothing while forces, not only the bourgeoisie but also the
peasantry, gathered against them. This period of cluelessness is at
the heart of the book. The tragedy-farce narrative that strips the
Revolution of 1789 of its theme of “equality” and transforms it
into the bourgeois revolution, leaves the proletarian revolution
without a template to follow. Marx insists that the revolutionaries
will have to make it up as they go along, taking nothing from the
past or, more to the point though he does not say so, from dramatic
form. No wonder leftist art is chaotic and abstract, and no wonder
the elite calls it decadent. From their perspective it is. The
proletariat was clueless in 1848 because they thought to seek a
pattern from the past. Now they knew they would have to unleash their
own creativity. The proletariat will create entirely new forms of
life. The proletariat, as a whole, is an artist.</span></span></div>
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<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;">Thus
Marx conceals, with a pat on the back and a glorifying name , the
proletariat's big problem—that it doesn't know what it is doing. No
need to worry. We'll figure it out later. It is not hard to see how
the left has fallen from this “later” to “never.” The absence
of a program is not really open for discussion. Proletarian political
cluelessness is not that surprising, since it takes some skill and
practice to rule. The idea that cluelessness is “theoretically”
correct is, it seems to me, odd. But judging from the present parade
of buffoons, the Bourgeoisie has simply accepted their rule as that
of farce. The world will die neither with a bang nor a whimper, but
with a fart.</span></span></div>
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<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;">Marx
also gave a gift to the new class of intellectuals the Enlightenment
turned out. These intellectuals, most with petits-bourgeois
backgrounds, were a class that mushroomed in the nineteenth century.
They were poor potential Raskolnikovs and Marx's class war allowed
them to employ their new intellectual gifts for political action.
Marx gave them a technique for analysis. You brush away everything
except class interests. “</span></span><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><i>Erst
kommt das Fressen, dann die Moral.</i></span></span></span><span style="color: black;">” </span><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;">History
reveals itself in a lowest common denominator, money. Intellectuals
plunged into analysis and journalism that exposed the class-war
nature of everything under the sun. In other words Marx gave the
left Marxists.</span></span></div>
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<span style="color: black;">“</span><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;">Equality”
is a word to conjure with. Marx freed the bourgeoisie from its spell.
Bourgeois education, with its emphasis on certain classical models,
such as fifth century Athens, repeatedly makes the distinction
between “the few” and “the many.” Only the “few” actually
matter. It is a valid distinction except that having more money makes
a person one of the few only in the Marxist climate where money is
all. The Bourgeoisie, now Marxists in all but class loyalty, as Marx
predicted they would be, could turn their attention to the class war
with vigor and a clear conscience. The many don't matter.</span></span></div>
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<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;">Human
beings have been horrible to one another from time immemorial, but
the idea of “equality” seemed to have put something of a damper
on it. For example, the “wrongness” of slavery came from this
source. Humanism mitigated man's inhumanity to man.
Burke's </span></span><span style="color: #222222;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="background: #ffffcc;">counter</span></span></span></span><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"> attack
made this partial at best, for nationalism conferred humanity only
upon the </span></span><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><i>Volk,</i></span></span></span><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"> and
specifically excluded others. The class war freed the Bourgeoisie
from whatever “humanist” restraint remained, and the horrendous
wars of the twentieth century were the result. Europe unleashed its
barbarism not only on Africa, but on itself.</span></span></div>
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<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;">The
embrace of Enlightenment science combined with the rejection of
Enlightenment equality allowed for the twentieth century wars. Class
war deflated the bubble of Enlightenment “equality” that had
extinguished slavery through moral force, and justified a stream of
barbarism-with-a-clear-conscience that knew no boundaries. These are
the wars the Bourgeoisie, having control of the unharmed USA, won.</span></span></div>
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<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;">The
Proletariat was less fortunate. Although they did have Marxism to
rally around they could not entirely free themselves from an
enthusiasm for universal human equality. Marx's justification for the
class war, the labor theory of value, is unconvincing and relies upon
two wrongs making a right. The class war retains pizazz, but it is
not an exalted pizazz, and is touched with the criminal. Universal
human equality remained the emotional center for the left. For
example, it retains the salutation, “comrade,” it lifted from the
first French Revolution, an expression, clearly, of equality, not
class loyalty.</span></span></div>
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<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;">So
the left wavers between announcing a class war and berating the 1%
for their inhumanity, a natural result of any war. The idea of
inhumanity flows from the idea of a common humanity and that what we
thus share should give us all dignity possible only with some vaguely
defined equality. In a war, of course, the enemy is frequently
dehumanized. Websites such as </span></span><span style="color: #222222;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="background: #ffffcc;">Counterpunch</span></span></span></span><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"> consist
primarily of exposes of elite barbarism and illegality and occasional
forays into class analysis. The left's inclination to think about
class war but feel the solidarity of universal human equality has
paralyzed all action and undercut any attempt to solve the left's
real problem, it's lack of a post-revolutionary plan.</span></span></div>
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<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;">The
1% has no doubt that it is working for its own power in a class war,
though they always fear that their children might succumb to the
siren song of universal human equality. In spite of having been
bashed for two centuries now, that passion for universal equality
seems again to flame up even as patriotism to the obviously
class-based nation state wanes. After a century of capitalist use of
nation state resources in imperial bloodbaths that nation states,
whose raison d'etre is to be a refuge for a natal people, had no
business launching against other peoples, the calls for patriotism,
though still heard, are more and more often met with scorn. If
governments are supposed to reflect the will of the people it is hard
to find a legitimate government in the northern hemisphere. Everyone
despises his own leader.</span></span></div>
<div align="LEFT" style="border: none; margin-bottom: 0.21in; margin-left: 0.46in; margin-right: 0.16in; padding: 0in;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;">But
the passion for universal equality still stirs hearts. Because of
this passion for equality the 1% must hypocritically profess their
allegiance to “democracy,” a word that suggests equality without
actually naming it. They are forced to live as hypocrites. The young
rich might not notice that their elders profess human feelings for
those outside the isle of the “people of the clouds” with a wink
and a nod. The left's successes-- female suffrage, civil rights
advances, social security-- are all bows the 1% had to make because
they could not openly deny their allegiance to universal human
equality. When the passion dies down they try to recoup their losses,
for they are fighting a class war. Romney's declaration that he was
not interested in the poor produced outrage, though everybody knew it
was true beforehand. Gaffs on the campaign trail are often such
accidental revelations of true class allegiance. Bush admitted his
base was “the haves and have mores.” That Romney got into hot
water and Bush didn't, shows how the Bourgeoisie, so confident under
Bush, are now shaky, and have to again go on an hypocrisy offensive.</span></span></div>
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<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;">This
confuses the elite young. With minds not yet stripped of logic, they
are in danger of putting two and two together. But children learn
fast and soon distinguish public from private speech. Their parents
all lie, except...but just where is the exception? The children first
think they learn what to say in public and what in private, but
quickly learn that nothing is really private. Since money is
everything it is hard to be sure just who might reveal your secrets
for money. So they learn to use a code in private that seems to say
what they say in public, but actually says the reverse. New-speak
fills the elite organs of opinion and leaders must learn an ever
denser code. They carry on the class war with a wink and a nod. This
effort has so paralyzed thought that the Bourgeois elite are all
stupid. Their actions lead towards human extinction to quickly follow
on the heals of their victory in the class war, but they cannot see
it. Mesmerized by Marx, they are all dialectical materialists, seeing
only money.</span></span></div>
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<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;">What
might have happened had the revolution remained one for universal
human equality? At the very least some clarification of just what
such an expression means should have been expected. In my opinion, as
I have mentioned, it should have produced an equality of opportunity,
an educational program that fostered the development of talent from
whatever source. The Bourgeoisie might have been able to live with
that, for they needed talent and intelligence to carry forth the
industrial revolution. The need for talent forced the liberation of
the Jews in the nineteenth century. It would have given their rule a
noble purpose.</span></span></div>
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<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;">It
is far too late now. The idea of universal human equality has been
under attack for too long. The rich will not seriously embrace the
sentiment of universal human equality again, though they will
continue to claim hypocritically that they do. With their blinkered
view they believe the class war has been good to them. The recent
extraordinary expropriation of the poor and middle class all but
brushed the humanist mask away, and yet they still wear it and gain a
surprising amount of credit for doing so. Forced mendacity of the
rulers is the system we live within, to paraphrase Brick in </span></span><a href="http://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/69862" target="_blank"><span style="color: #1155cc;">Cat
on a Hot Tin Roof</span></a><span style="color: #222222;"><span style="font-size: small;"><i>.</i></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;">The
only remaining hope is to persuade the rich that they can only harm
themselves in their pursuit of the class war. This is certainly true.
Their obsession with the class war and the hypocrisy they use to
cover their intentions have rendered them incapable of seeing that
they will not survive the coming catastrophe no matter how much money
they have. They cannot see it because they can no longer think
straight. Years of hypocracy carried on even in private has left the
American political elites stupid beyond belief. That they could
actually contemplate a war with Iran is sufficient proof. A glance at
a map should render that idea void.</span></span></div>
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<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;">Were
Fukushima #4 to collapse or begin to leak, the radiation released
would poison the air of the entire northern hemisphere. Where are the
rich without air? Will they live in domes? Where will the food come
from. What will the money saved by pretending there is no problem be
worth when the very air is deadly? Or again, do they think their bank
accounts will save them when the planet is mostly desert? Who will
deliver food to those walled enclaves? What will they give of value
in return?</span></span></div>
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<br />
<br /></div>
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<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;">How
about war with Iran? A war with Iran will become a nuclear war. It
takes no student of war to see that the Fifth fleet in Bahrain is
trapped. Roughly 150 miles from Iran, it will be subject to
intense </span></span><a href="http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4261181,00.html" target="_blank"><span style="color: #1155cc;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;">missile
and torpedo attack</span></span></a><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;">.
Ships have no real defenses against such an attack, and most of them
will be sunk. Also, Iran can easily close the Straits of Hormuz. With
a mere five mile channel in either direction, the 400-foot-long,
unarmed and unarmored tankers that pass through it are easy pickings
for a couple of kids in a canoe with a </span></span><a href="http://www.businessweek.com/news/2011-07-06/million-barrel-tanker-on-fire-off-yemen-after-grenade-attack.html" target="_blank"><span style="color: #1155cc;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;">rocket
propelled grenade</span></span></a><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;">.
A couple of tankers sunk in the Strait will render it impassible. It
will also cut all supplies to whatever remains of the Fifth fleet and
even more importantly cut the food source for Saudi Arabia and
Kuwait. In the food riots sure to follow these governments will be
sure to fall and turmoil will reign. Will the United States, devoid
of any conventional response, faced with such extraordinary chaos
that will leave Iran as the sole power in the area, refrain from
using atomic weapons? No, it is already preparing to use them.</span></span></div>
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<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;">The
United States is encircling Russia and China with what look to them
and to me like preparations for war. The Russians have sent a fleet
of</span></span><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/11/world/middleeast/russia-sends-warships-on-maneuvers-near-syria.html/" target="_blank"><span style="color: #1155cc;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;">warships
to Syria</span></span></a><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;">.
They know that if Syria falls Iran might be vulnerable, and if Iran
falls the United States and its allies, already preparing for war
with them, will be much strengthened, unless, as I think certain,
World War III intervenes. Having fumbled in Libya, Russia and China
will hold the line in Syria with their ships and troops. A superpower
confrontation looms. The class war, the 1%'s raison d'etre, is
beginning to look ever more like a death wish.</span></span></div>
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<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;">On
top of that, this. Global warming is really beginning to barbecue the
planet. Both arctic ice and virtually all the coral reefs are toast.
Drought destroys the harvest. Deserts spread. Beatles chew up vast
forests. A food crisis looms and can only get worse as the earth
heats, drought spreads, and the oceans die. We can address none of
this as long as the rich pursue the class war. Class war means
imperialism, means struggle for resources, means war with Iran, means
war with Syria, means war with Russia, means world wide atomic war,
means species extinction.</span></span></div>
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<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;">Only
an honorable peace in the class war can save both sides. To continue
to pursue this war is certain death for civilization, and in all
probability, for the human species itself.</span></span></div>
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<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;">The
left must renounce class war themselves. The edge of the cliff is far
too close for there to be any hope in building movements, so much
more difficult now. The left must address the universal peril that
seems to come from all sides, and decide what to do about it, thus
also forcing a solution of the left's eternal problem, their lack of
a program. What must b done is so extraordinary that only a truly new
idea, as Marx predicted, will do. Thus all movements such as
“Occupy,” are futile if not counterproductive. Only peace in the
class war offers any hope for humankind, and that peace is only be
possible if we realize the universal peril.</span></span></div>
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<br />
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<br />
<br /></div>
Michael http://www.blogger.com/profile/17596457110530754431noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4415577562084074022.post-10279188170745683032012-04-30T05:00:00.002-07:002012-04-30T07:31:01.545-07:00Cabbages, Kings, and Leo Strauss<br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Sometime during the dark abyss of the
Bush Administration, Leo Stratus's name became attached to the
doctrines of the Neocons. Whether Strauss actually advocated the
regime these doctrines describe no one will ever know, for Strauss
was careful not to let the wrong people know what he was thinking. In
any case the doctrines were not his brainchild. The regime it
outlines is the philosophical solution Plato offers in the Republic
to the problem of protecting philosophers from Socrates's fate. The
doctrine is this: the best government is one run by philosophers and
fronted by aristocrats. It's purpose is to allow real human life, the
life of the philosopher, to flourish. It flourishes in a soil of
slaves, sometimes called “the people.” The aristocrats have a
talent for commanding authority and, if the philosophers so direct,
are warriors who control the slaves through force. But otherwise they
exert control through culture, the shadows on the cave wall, which is
one thing for the people and quite another for the aristocrats in
their business-class cave. "The people" are children mesmerized by flashing lights. The philosophers carefully control the
flow of culture so that it serves to make “the people” docile and
the warriors ferocious and hypocritical. Low culture and high each does its job.
Niceties require that the philosophers pretend the aristocrats are in
charge.
<br />
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Kings have always had advisors chosen
for their cleverness. From the time of Plato, philosophers have
advised rulers, as Plato did, with nearly disastrous results, in
Syracuse. Though the king seems to rule, he does, if he knows what's
good for him, what he is advised to do. For life at court does not
really prepare him to think about international affairs. Courts are
stages upon which dramas of personal ambition play out, and personal
ambition distorts all information through the prism of self interest.
Someone smart, without the possibility of such ambition, is needed.
Enter the philosopher. Besides, the job of king leaves no time to
think. It's a busy life. Though the king might develop a good ear for
intrigue, he has no time to calculate and judge the mood of either
the mass of people whom he rarely sees or that of his neighbor king
and potential enemy. He needs advisors who have spies. So the
Platonic politics Strauss was blamed for was commonplace. That others
can use adherence to this doctrine as an accusation shows that a
newer alternative challenges it.
<br />
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
The political content of the
Enlightenment, the doctrine of universal human equality, exploded
the European mind and with it the Platonic political structure. The
doctrine of universal human equality contains no idea of enemies. It
breaks up traditional hierarchies and brings rulers down to a level.
At least in theory, the former rulers are not the foe, for we are now
all equal. Of course as soon as the rulers move to retain their
position, they become the foe, first of all in their own eyes. It is
interesting to speculate what might have happened had the defenders
of the enlightenment refused to recognize the foe and continued
simply to insist on equality in day to day commerce. What would the
Duke have done when a peasant came by and said, “ Hi, Joe?” The
storming of the Bastille was, in fact, superfluous. The entire
revolution had already been completed when people decided they were
“equal human beings.” People suddenly discovered that they had
been in chains, and that those chains were chains of the mind. They
stood up, and the <i>ancien regime</i>
was over. The “people” were in the strange position of having
suddenly discovered, with human equality, that throughout their
entire lives until that point they had been in chains without knowing
it. That this strange idea did not trouble them (or many of us) shows
that equality is intoxicating. <i>Citoyen!</i>
Universal human equality gave birth to a new man, the freed prisoner,
and soon, a new woman. But, by condemning all previous experience as
“mentally chained,” it also left judgment up the creek without a
paddle.
<br />
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Plato
thought his Republic fair to everyone, for the craftsmen, the people,
are craftsmen by nature, not mentally chained to it as the
Enlightenment doctrine insisted. Except for the actual slaves, he did
not think anyone was exploiting anyone else, and he specifically
allowed for the talented offspring of the demos to rise. The
Enlightenment negated all prior experience and caused people to see
everything through the tinted glasses of “equality.” But what
were they equal to? Of what had the chains deprived them? Apparently,
of being treated as an equal, that is, like one of the aristocrats,
whatever that meant.
<br />
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
The philosophers of the Enlightenment
had trouble with the exploded hierarchy. Where does the political
structure come from? Rousseau's General Will and Locke's Social
Contract didn't work, for they require a community before there is
one. With the old hierarchy gone where was the new one to come from?
Nobody thought of the possibility that there wouldn't be one, that
day to day life might provide structure quickly at times of need
through all manner of human interaction including the use of force.
Of course no single person could possibly muster the force to
overcome even three other people, even people considerably weaker
than he. So only speech could really dominate, as it should. The only
way to use force to dominate, say, a government, is to have others
willing to obey, that is, people who are not equal. Were people
simply to refuse to give up their equality, hierarchies would come
into being only through a willing choice to embrace them. And this
would happen only in the face of an emergency. But, Enlightenment
Revolutions always foundered when they tried to create new
institutions, for universal human equality supplied none and
undermined leaders who did.
<br />
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
The Straussian philosophers, those who
wanted to retain the Platonic political structure, devised ideas to
combat universal human equality and re-enslave the demos. We need not
assume they were in bad faith. They believed their system was best.
Burke countered with the “rights of Englishmen.” The Rights of
Man, equating everybody, Burke said, were an airy nothing. What was
solid was the rights of Englishmen, their habits, customs, and in
particular, their having a king. This idea seemed to restore
equilibrium to the English aristocracy, some of whom had obviously
listened to the wrong philosophers, even though this idea was roughly
equivalent to saying, “ the shacks and sheds on this land are real.
Your plan for a new building is merely a plan.” Herder invented
nationalism, a state that was home for a <i>Volk, </i>an
appeal to us against the awful them, and not much different from
Burke's idea. The main point was to restore obedience and by so doing
end equality. The trick was to make the slaves willingly slip back
into chains.
<br />
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Nationalism insists upon something,
almost anything, that distinguishes us from them. Since the idea of
universal human equality, life without hierarchy, requires universal
trust that there is no us and them, it was only natural that many
would fail to retain this trust. Fear creeps in from we know not
where. We mistrust. The fearful first fear they are alone and
powerless against the unknown. “Us against them” allows them to
retain the fear they could in any case not escape, and at the same
time feel that they are not alone, that they have allies. So who the
“us” is matters little as long as I am one of them. For then I am
not alone.
<br />
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
And the one who describes the nature
of the “us,” a philosopher, will rule. But anyone who first
embraced universal human equality and then nationalism out of fear,
embarked upon a trackless journey into criminality where we, because
we are we, are good and they, because they are they, are not. Since
the distinguishing characteristic of the “we,” that you are
American, German, Basque, or what not, does not confer goodness,
especially to one who had once embraced universal equality, the
justification is practical, and honesty remains the best policy only
until it isn't, when it becomes more practical to become a crook. But
since the “we” fluctuates, at times being a country, at others no
more than ones own family, one's loyalty is eventually only to
oneself, which is the recipe for petty crime. Since falling away from
universal human equality is cowardly, done out of fear, honor, and
therefore all principle, is sacrificed. Nationalism scooped up many
of the fallen who, as a result had become stupid as Socrates
predicted they would.
<br />
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Fear, of course, rules slaves and so
anyone who has succumbed to it is slavish. The slave chooses life
over honor. Since honor depends upon acting correctly without being
influenced by “necessity” (hunger, tiredness, fear, pleasure), to
act from fear is to act slavishly. Honor, freeing oneself from
necessity, is a prerequisite for human life, since to act from
necessity is to act like a stone. And once someone has cut himself
free of honor, and plunged into life for “survival,” committing
atrocities is like aggravating a toothache with one's tongue. Of
course to act for survival is to choose life over everything else,
like a slave. If survival of the fittest is the law of life then life
is the life of slaves. Not surprising that Europe embraced Darwin,
proving Nietzsche right. Nation states with their hierarchies scooped
up the loyalties of the Enlightenment's freed slaves because these
people retained their slavishness. Though they had stood up and
demanded to be treated equally, this was more or less a hollow
posture as long as they retained their fears and joined “us”
against “them,” and acted from necessity. They needed only to be
told they were free and they would remain slaves in a new upright
posture.<br />
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
The Founding Fathers, that is to say,
Alexander Hamilton, the philosopher behind the Constitution,
employed a different idea. Hamilton wanted a central government that
could supply an army that could conquer an empire. He dreamed of
being a new Caesar, and said as much to Jefferson in a famous
exchange. The culture that would control the slaves was not
nationalism, but “the system.” an idea that was in the air during
those heady Enlightenment days. Made plausible by the
Enlightenment's fascination with rules, which no doubt come from the
Enlightenment fascination with and belief in science, the
Constitution's checks and balances would protect freedom. Although Hamilton, who had declared to Jefferson that only force and interest could control men, had no belief in "the system," he used Madison to argue for it in the Federalist Papers to push through the Constitution. Those
checks and balances would protect against the constitutional tyranny
that Patrick Henry and the other antifederlsits feared. Madison went along for he wanted that
army to repress uprisings like Shay's Rebellion. He tried to calm
his friend Patrick Henry's fears with assurances that the spider web
of checks and balances would control the army and protect the
freedoms they had fought for. Almost immediately, seeing Hamilton's machinations in creating the Federalist party, and fearing he had been
wrong, Madison broke with Hamilton and pushed through the “Bill of
Rights,” designed to offer protections against the tyrannizing
structure of the Constitution bare of them. But this came to nothing when the Supreme Court arrogated to itself the right to
interpret the Constitution ( Bill of Rights). For then they were were put under the structure of
the original constitution which they were meant to amend and protect
against. The checks and balances, ostensibly to protect freedom,
offer an incredible maze to anyone who might want to change anything.
Since the regime the Constitution sets up is oligarchic, in practice
the Constitution served primarily to thwart those seeking more
equality. It is a bulwark against freedom. as Patrick Henry saw, rather than a protection of it.<br />
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
“The system” stood in the way of
those who actually wanted universal equality. For the system only
allowed one to object to this or that manifestation of inequality and
then made the path of cure arduous. Two party system, congressional
committees, a Senate of gentry, presidential vetoes, and the Supreme
Court made victory difficult and Pyrrhic. Later, the Supreme Court
could reverse themselves and chip away at any gains, as they have
with civil rights. The new notions of “jurisdiction” and
“standing” made it possible for the courts to turn their backs on
injustice with equanimity. One needed constant vigilance to prevent
Supreme Court reinterpretation. New legislation could circumvent, for
example, labor laws, with new concepts, for example, “independent
contractor.” But universal human equality, which had already won
socially, was so powerful, that these countermeasures had to be taken
in its name.
<br />
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
The two devices, nationalism and "the
system" mixed on both sides of the Atlantic, and Western post
Enlightenment regimes used elements of both to thwart the desire for
universal human equality, which, in any case, was more a feeling than
anything that might consist of a policy, but no less powerful for
that. The terror associated with the French Revolution was a Godsend
to the Platonic rulers. This terror, and the Napoleonic Wars, they
blame upon the idea of universal human equality. There was some
justice in these accusations, for surely a huge country couldn't run
without hierarchy and the revolutions could not supply it. People
would fight and squabble. Perhaps true, perhaps not, but so what?
What's wrong with fighting and squabbling other than it doesn't
support legalistic hierarchies?<br />
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Because the Enlightenment idea was so
powerful, these countermeasures, nationalism and “the system,”
both had to be justified as protecting enlightenment freedoms rather
than limiting and even extinguishing them. The philosophers went to
work and wove from words not the robes of truth, that these were
measures opposed to equality, but a cloak of propaganda extolling
nationalism and “the system” as supporters of enlightenment
freedom. However, reality kept showing through this threadbare
garment. Revolutions popped up throughout the nineteenth century.
When nation states launched imperialist ventures they contradicted
their own justification as protection for an “English” or
“French” way of life. How justify the nation of England ruling India? Minds not yet
fully clouded wondered. The Dreyfus case exposed the legal system as
Kafkesque wheels turning within a penal colony of torture without
rhyme or reason. Behind it other forces determined the outcome
in the courts. The case revealed that rules on rails were no
protection against anything. The American claim that the Constitution
protected freedoms came crashing down in the civil war that exposed
the United States for what it was, a growing and unlimited repressive
army hiding behind a charade of procedure, just as Patrick Henry, in
his anti-federalist speeches in the Virginia legislature, foretold
that it would become. The sovereign states were sovereign no more.<br />
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Since the real revolution was in what
a human being was, how he carried himself, how he addressed others,
and how he expected to be treated, imperial ventures with their
enlightened soldiers themselves infected with the idea of universal
equality and now serving in far off lands, spread the virus of the
idea of universal human equality far and wide. Thus each imperial
venture carried within it the seeds of third world revolution in the
name of freedom and its own defeat. Ghandi's nonviolence could not
have worked without the idea of universal human equality. The
ancients thought nothing of slaughtering everybody. The Melian
dialogue, an essential piece of elitist education, ends with the
Athenians declaring that the powerful will do what they will and the
weak suffer what they must. Then the Athenians killed all the Melian
men and sold the women and children into slavery. Though the English
were ready to slaughter many, they needed a moral vacuum to do so. When slaves refuse to be slaves it is game over. Since “we,“ the “us,” expands and contracts as needed, from
oneself to one's family, tribe, race, nation or what have you, rule
based upon it is a shape shifter, a “drunken boat” in Rimbaud's
poem.
<br />
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
The history of Europe (and the United
States) since at least the beginning of the nineteenth century, has
been the history of this war between the Enlightenment and the
counter-Enlightenment masquerading as the Enlightenment. Today the
justice of the claim of universal human equality is deep in our
blood, and most of us take its truth as a matter of course whenever
we look into one another's eyes. Most of us do, but certainly not
all. The philosophers and aristocrats retain the idea of their
superiority, even if they hide it in public. Their actual masked
loyalties allowed them to be ruthless. No one aided them more than
Karl Marx, whose persuasive argument in the <i>Eighteenth Brumaire of
Louis Napoleon</i> convinced everybody that the original French
Revolution, that for human equality, was but a preliminary revolution
to be followed by the real revolution that was a class war. This gave
the bourgeoisie free rein without moral compunction. For all is fair
in love and war. Prior to that the doctrine of universal human
equality, in which there is no foe, weighed upon them, and their
obvious inability to become aristocrats however rich they were,
embarrassed them. Marx, the loudest, though not the only, voice of
class war, allowed them to turn with clear consciences to this
struggle. When at war nothing else matters.
<br />
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
The tools of the counterrevolution
were themselves ideas, “nationalism” and “checks and balances”
which were, somehow, supposed to protect freedom. Through bogus
identification with the idea of universal human equality, these ideas
hitched a ride on that idea and drew on its energy to support
nationalist and systematic regimes. The mentally unchained demos,
the freed mental slave, whose prior experience was now all false,
were no match for the philosophers, so democracy, to the extent that
the philosophers could pour propaganda into the public ear, supported
the anti-Enlightenment regimes. Behind the professed embrace of equality is the real embrace of class warfare, Marx's gift to the bourgeoisie. Only when some harsh reality breaks
through the ideology does anyone see the class war clearly. But that the world seen in terms of class war favors the bourgeoisie revolutionaries cannot see.<br />
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
So the philosophers, betraying their
own God of truth, wove a web of ideology attributing freedom to
nationalism and “the rule of law.” Since this cotton candy of
ideas had to conceal what nationalism and law really were, the
philosophers had to constantly spin more of it whenever some sharp
fact tore through the threadbare fabric.
<br />
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Prior to the Enlightenment, political
regimes did not need to go anywhere. They could be stable ways of
life. But nationalist and systematic regimes had to profess adherence
to freedom, which was not yet realized, and so had pretend to
“progress” towards the goal of true freedom while working in
reality to thwart this goal. Political regimes donned the motley of
movements. To justify themselves these regimes had to be forging
ahead, not merely wandering along like hobos. They had to be
advancing the cause of freedom. Markers along the way— women's
suffrage, civil rights acts promoting racial equality, social
security, and the like, lent plausibility to claims for these
advances. Equally important were material improvements that
Enlightenment science could provide like nothing else. For wasn't
freedom simply having money and things? And weren't we all having
more and more? That was progress. A running battle to protect the
freedoms in the Bill or Rights was a good distraction. Any grinding
away of the system was a plus. We all know the fight for freedom is
long and arduous and for every two steps forward there is one step
back. Since freedom, for most people, meant freedom to be like the
aristocrats, and in general people saw that as freedom to make money,
freedom meaning freedom to get rich had a lot of plausibility.
Behind it all, the Platonic political structure remained intact if
held together with a tissue of ideology.
<br />
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
But, while all this was going on, the
Enlightenment, over and above the political revolutions it sparked,
changed the world picture itself. The world became scientific.
Nihilism, here in the form of the scientific world picture, is, if
not an Enlightenment baby, one the Enlightenment adopted. Science is
an engine to power the ride on the highway of progress to nowhere.
Industrial production, using scientific methods, creates a cornucopia
that will make every proletarian into a patrician. It's geared to
turn out the newest thing. While the philosophers were trying to
drape dame equality with lies to protect the rule of the aristocrats,
the industrial revolution was undermining them far more decisively
than universal equality managed to do. Science, that cookbook of
repeatable procedures, created industry that generated wealth and
broke down aristocratic authority within the new bourgeois industrial
state.
<br />
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Within the new world picture mankind
traveled along, acquiring more and more labor saving devices, but
traveled towards what? Science and the scientific world picture has,
as an axiom, purposelessness. We never ask why the planets do what
they do, just what they do. Science throws out the question of why
from the start. Science supplies procedures for generating
predictable results, that is all. It's theories are, in the end,
proposals for new procedures. Nietzsche saw nihilism as growing from
something far deeper than the Enlightenment, but the Enlightenment
was a perfect expression of it. Science's content, a catalog of
repeatable simple procedures, fit perfectly with the abilities of the
confused, mentally-liberated, slave. They could be made to repeat
mindless actions again and again. The union of the politics of the
enlightenment with its scientific world picture sold production line
work life as a step on the road to freedom. Resistance to industrial
production, strong at the beginning, faded into a steady incoherent
rumbling discontent. Progress towards real human life, conceived as
having a lot of stuff or the power money could impart, justified this
mindless work. The children will have it better. Freedom meant
freedom to be an Horatio Alger character, or the mythic Abe Lincoln
in his log cabin. Everyone was free to choose— between
production-line misery with a distant, next-generation, cotton-candy,
hope of escape, and starvation. The Enlightenment revolution, in part
because of the counterrevolutions, but only in part because of them,
had enslaved rather than ennobled human beings. In addition it had
unleashed the philosopher's engine of deception to hide the
pointlessness of the activity. Instead of truth he worked away at
propaganda, justifying himself by his need to support the rich to
protect himself against “the many” who killed Socrates.
<br />
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Since the scientific world picture
claimed to be a description of what was real, not just a catalog of
repeatable procedures, its purposeless was a purposelessness of the
whole. It was an explanation of the whole as a mechanism without
purpose. Thus nihilism. Whereas the philosophers might be able to
recognize their own political deceptions, as Alexander Hamilton
surely did, they were less able to resist the scientific world
picture. Its power was undeniable, and it soon became apparent that
science determined the outcome of war. No one could afford propaganda
in science. It had to really work.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Purposelessness was not a
philosophical pose. Overcome by the scientific world picture,
philosophers embraced it. T<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">he
imperialism of the nation states punctured the balloon of
nationalism; the Dreyfus case punctured the notion of the rule of
law; the US civil war shattered the notion of a social contract; and
the devastating depressions deflated Horatio-Algerism. When
industrial production burst into the conflagration of imperialist
war, a world without purpose marched people without purpose into wars
without purpose in the name of a progress towards nowhere. </span></span></span>
<br />
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></span></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"> The
philosophers, now intellectually bankrupt, could do nothing but
continue to chatter. Only the very stupid believed them. Huge chunks
of reality falling on people's heads had woken many of them up. The
ritual of elections, the speeches of politicians, the rigmarole of
law are all, as Kafka saw so well in his story </span></span></span><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><i>In
the Penal Colony</i></span></span></span><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">,
the workings of machines without purpose, wheels turning aimlessly
and grinding up people. In the story, the machine's now obscure
workings, contrived by a previous generation to give justice, only
torture with a thousand needles and then kill. Like Kafka's foreign
visitor, more and more people could see this empty murderous ritual
for what it was. But what of it? The empty machine of civilization
grinds on and the aristocrats or gentry, or those who made a lot of
money, continue in control. The Enlightenment has been turned into
porridge, but, for the philosophers, that is all to the good. So what
if the machine of government grinds away chewing up people to no
purpose? Those who should rule do.</span></span></span><br />
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></span></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"> The
Platonic philosopher's loyalty was first to the aristocrats. Burke
and Friedrich von Gentz, both of this social philosopher class,
blunted the first revolutionary impulses to protect the rule of the
English and Germanic princes they admired and lived with. But the
industrial revolution, rather than the political one, toppled them.
When the bourgeoisie gained control they had philosophers advising
them. The philosophers just needed someone to extract wealth from the
slaves and give some of it to them. The cared not who ruled, as long
as they could rule. When Marx justified the class war he lent purpose
to the bourgeois progress to nowhere. The regime's purpose was to
fight the class war. </span></span></span>
<br />
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></span></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"> The
fight to determine which system was better, or really just which
would win, was on. A class war of “us against them” supplies more
than enough purpose for a lifetime. This was, of course, a civil war
between the rulers and the ruled, and could go on forever thus
lending purpose to purposelessness. And since all is fair in love
and war, unspeakable practices were justified. But these practices
were justified only for the rulers. For the slaves fought in the name
of universal human equality even as they fought the class war. Their
justification for fighting the class war, and demanding what,
according to the rules of property belonged to others, was
unfairness. But to the extent that the freed slaves fought a class
war, they too could engage in ruthless butchery to eliminate “class
enemies.” Such butchery was not a new thing, except for scale. </span></span></span>
<br />
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></span></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"> The
philosophers rode the rich, the rich the system, and the system the
slaves. The bourgeoisie were able to create, manage, and guide giant
industrial and legal systems that harnessed the procedures of science
and law. Rulers held offices law created that gave them specific
powers they relinquished when they left office. Wealth also bestowed
power that disappeared when wealth did. None of it was personal; all
was system. Industrialists mechanized and routinized as much of their
operation as they could, including their own parts in it. Even at the
highest levels of industry the officers did procedures that others
might just as easily do. CEO's came and went. They were as
replaceable as the workers. The rulers were not so much people as
offices in both politics and the economy. Inevitably, philosophers
found new loyalties to the system itself, to the offices rather than
the people. Max Weber argues that this is the essence of the modern
state. The system, rather than any particular person, supplied
philosophers with the protected leisure they so craved. Their loyalty
was to the offices and their advice was about how to win them. Plato
had metamorphosized into Karl Rove. People were, indeed, the infamous
cogs in the machine. </span></span></span>
<br />
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></span></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"> Universal
human equality had lost, but the scientific world picture had won.
Humankind busied itself in building a structure out of repeatable
procedures in which human beings, since many could do the procedures,
were replaceable parts. Procedures went round and round. There was
the political cycle and the business cycle. </span></span></span>
<br />
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></span></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"> The
rich seem to rule, but actually, the system does. The rich merely
voice system's command for more system, for a world of system as the
scientific world picture demands. The money they extract builds
system, and destroys all outside system in “environmental”
degradation, whose very name denotes something outside. For if system
is what is real, the environment is outside what is real. The rich
no longer work in their own interest. How does making the planet
unlivable benefit them? Do they think the radioactivity spewing from
Fukushima won't get into their air? Where will the food they will
need in their protected enclaves come from? Everyone clings to the
hollow jabber and empty offices of the system, for it promises life
and strange pleasures as it's endless procedures gut and poison
everything. Having chosen life in system over honor, all can pretend
they are fighting the good fight-- within the system. </span></span></span>
<br />
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></span></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"> The
final irony for the philosophers is that Socrates did not think his
trial was a disaster. On the contrary, he welcomed it. If one reads
Plato's </span></span></span><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><i>Crito
</i></span></span></span><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">carefully,
one reads this: </span></span></span>
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: 1in; margin-right: 1in;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">...that
the really important thing is not to live but to live well.</span></span></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: 1in; margin-right: 1in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: 1in; margin-right: 1in;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Crito:
Why, yes.</span></span></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: 1in; margin-right: 1in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: 1in; margin-right: 1in;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Socrates:
And that to live well means the same thing as to live honorably and
rightly...If it becomes clear that such conduct is wrong, I cannot
help thinking that the question whether we are sure to die, or to
suffer any other ill effect for that matter...ought not to weigh with
us at all in comparison with the risk of doing what is wrong. [48
b-d]</span></span></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: 1in; margin-right: 1in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"> And
in the </span></span></span><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><i>Apology:</i></span></span></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: 1in; margin-right: 1in;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">No
one knows with regard to death whether it is not really the greatest
blessing that can happen to man. [29a]</span></span></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: 1in; margin-right: 1in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: 1in; margin-right: 1in;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">I
am quite clear that the time had come when it was better for me to
die and be released from my distractions. [41d]</span></span></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: 1in; margin-right: 1in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"> So
if western political practice was a philosophical enterprise to
protect Socrates from his fate, it was misguided. For Socrates wanted
no such protection, and would not have accepted it. </span></span></span>
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"> </span></span></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"> </span></span></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"> </span></span></span></div>Michael http://www.blogger.com/profile/17596457110530754431noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4415577562084074022.post-18060019732655003782012-02-29T06:27:00.000-08:002012-02-29T06:27:37.420-08:00Jousting at Windmills:Intelligent Design<title></title>
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Liberals and scientists who object to
intelligent design in the school curriculum are jousting at
windmills. The incorporation of a theory of intelligent design into a
science curriculum will not influence or harm the education of any
budding scientist. This is because the theory of intelligent design
cannot be a scientific theory.
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Scientific theories are mnemonic
devices for both remembering procedures for experiments and for
suggesting new experimental procedures and predicting the results.
Experiments are repeatable procedures that produce predictable
results, though they lose the name of experiment (except in
classrooms) once we know what the result will be. When a theory
suggests an experiment, predicting a result that turns out to be
true, we call the theory true. Later, when its predictions fail, we
supersede it with a new theory but retain it for use in recalling the
procedures it earlier revealed. We discard it as theory without a
qualm and yet continue to use it to produce the old results though it
may contradict the new theory. It lasts as long as it is useful as a
mnemonic device.
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
The solidity, and only real content,
of science, is these repeatable predictable procedures found through
experiment. These endure the demise of the theories that spawned
them. The rest is, at best, reminders and suggestions for more
experiments, and at worst, dangerous overreaching hubris like the
scientific assurances of nuclear reactor safety where no science
could guarantee any such thing. The whole of real science is
identical in form to a cookbook. Theories are ways for remembering
and generating recipes. They are equivalent to a line at the end of
a cookbook that reads : Now use your imagination and the recipes you
have learned to make up new recipes of your own! The cookbook can
tell us how to do many things, but has no predictive power with
regard to unforeseen events, like tsunamis, that violate the
experimental procedures. Science is a compendium of ways of doing
things, not a collection of knowledge about nature, except to the
extent that nature mimics repetition.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
The theory of intelligent design does
not suggest an experiment whose result we can predict. It offers us
no recipes. It's complete lack of connection to any procedure rules
it out as a “scientific” theory. Scientifically, it is empty.
Whether some intelligent designer did or did not make the world is
scientifically irrelevant. What experimental procedure does it
suggest, what result predict? If someone wanted to introduce it into
a, say, biology course, he could only mention it and thereafter
ignore it. For science is not in the business of producing airy
unfounded explanations, it is in the business of cataloging
experiments whose results we can predict ahead of time. Such
experiments can be of use. Not so airy explanations. Newton offers no
explanation of why gravity works as it does. His theory predicts the
location of bodies at given times. That's it. Why they are there is
not a scientific question. To understand the nature of an experiment
is to dismiss the theory of intelligent design as beside the point.
The budding scientist, once he grasps the nature of experiment, will
find no use for intelligent design regardless of how often his
unscientific teachers have drummed it into his head.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
The theory of intelligent design does
not fail because it is nonsense. After all, it's not nonsense, it is
just not scientifically relevant. Logically, many scientific theories
are nonsense. Scientists are poor at logic. For example, let us
consider theories about light. Light is thought to behave sometimes
like a wave and sometimes like a particle. These are incompatible
theories. That light sometimes behaves like a wave rules out the
theoretical particle, and vice versa. Logically, the experimental
evidence rules out both theories. Instead a physicist accepts both,
using each where it is convenient. And he is quite right to do so,
once we realize that the purpose of theory is only to indicate the
procedures for experiments, theories need not be logically coherent.
Kuhn's work on scientific revolutions shows just how reluctant
scientists are to yield to logic and give up fruitful theories. The
physicist solves his logical problem with a smug smile that he
substitutes for logical thought. For such thought is really not part
of his business.
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
I mention one more silliness, though
there are many – space-time. Both “space” and “time” are,
scientifically, measurements. Measurements too suggest procedures,
but do not predict results except in one important way: With the
exception of measurements of time, a measurement predicts the result
of a remeasurement. We all know procedures for measuring distance—
laying out yardsticks and such. Measurement of time is quite
different. It is simply a rhythmic counting, best done mechanically,
or, even better, electronically. A period of time, once counted can
never be recounted. Remeasurements of time are impossible. We can
remeasure the same space because we ignore the ways in which it is
different, just as we cannot remeasure a period of time because we
ignore the way periods of time are the same.
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
The procedures for measuring time are
quite different from those with which we measure space. Taken
together these procedures do not form some kind of invisible four
dimensional cube that fills up the nothing of space for all time.
They are what they are, human activities, counting on the one hand
and laying out rulers on the other. Space and time do have a link
because we can do both procedures at the same time. We we can find
out just how long it takes us to go from here to there, or how far we
can go in an hour, both by counting while we walk. But there is no
“something” called space-time, no matter how intricately they can
be tied together mathematically.
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Through theory, science has puffed
itself up far beyond its true size. It's pretensions to tell us of
the past all rest on assumptions we may or may not think plausible,
but which have no ground. All scientific theories, without exception
are, and can only be, interpretations of experiments we do in the
here and now. For everything we do, we do here and now. Scientific
theories about the past gain scientific validity, like any other
scientific theory, if they successfully predict the result of some
experiment we can do. Such a theory is like a connect the dots
picture. We know some dots, our theory accords with them and predicts
the location of other dots. If we find dots where we expect to, we
believe the theory until some dots turn up missing. So the form of a
scientific theory about the past is this: Procedures this picture
“implies” produce accurately the results of certain experiments
and this picture also suggests another experiment predicting a result
that was correct, therefore the implications this picture makes about
the past are true. The problem with this is that the last part of
this argument is an unscientific statement unless it means that we
might find some experiment that would disprove it. If so, the real
meaning falls back again into the here and now.
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<br />
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<br />
</div>Michael http://www.blogger.com/profile/17596457110530754431noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4415577562084074022.post-54205949779485042462012-02-23T05:38:00.001-08:002012-02-23T05:38:33.299-08:00Shi'ites and Jews<title></title>
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<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Iran is not making an atomic weapon and
if it had one would not use it against Israel. Anyone with any doubt
on this score should read <span style="color: navy;"><span lang="zxx"><u><a href="http://antiwar.com/archives.php?author=Gordon%20Prather">Gordon
Prather's</a></u></span></span> articles. Iran is a threat to Israel,
but not a military threat. The real danger to Israel is quite
elsewhere.
</div>
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<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Within the states of the Middle East
are people with other, far-older loyalties, religious and ethnic,
that reassert themselves when states collapse. Iraq, as we have seen,
was a marriage of three entirely different communities held together
with a tyrannical state structure. Saddam Hussein was a tyrant,
though that did not make him Hitler. All history acknowledges that
Peisistratus, tyrant of Athens, benefited the city. Saddam, though he
repressed dissent harshly, did much to improve life in Iraq, which
was, until the United States destroyed it, the most advanced and
secular state in the region. But, abetted by the US, he launched the
Iran/Iraq war that, when he lost, sealed his fate.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
In any case Saddam, if he was to hold
Iraq together, had no choice but to be a tyrant. Democracy is not
automatically a good thing, in spite of American opinion to the
contrary. His party, the Ba'ath, was a secular, socialist party. Iraq
could not afford sectarian political religious affiliation, and
Saddam repressed it. Under him Sunnis and Shi'ites, both then more
secular than religious, mixed freely. Saddam did favor Sunnis over
Shi'ites, and homeboys from Tikrit over other Sunnis. All politicians
favor their loyal retainers. Only in that way can they maintain
power. He repressed opposition, especially religious and ethnic based
opposition, brutally. Michael Aflaq, the Ba'ath founder, was western
educated and formed a party whose purpose was secular Arab unity.
Given underlying religious hostility this was only possible under a
tyranny. With its persuasive secular success, the Ba'ath sapped
religious affiliation of Sunnis and Shi'ites alike. They intermarried
and thought little of their religious differences, just as ethnic
non-religious Jews think little of marrying outside Judaism in the
United States. The war and the demonization of the Ba'ath Party,
discredited secularism and sectarian religious affiliation returned
with a vengeance. The Ba'ath Party, or something very like it, was
necessary to hold Iraq together in a secular unity bridging and
weakening religious affiliation. Iraqi unity depended upon Ba'ath
success. The American destruction of the Ba'ath party made the
disintegration of Iraq into constituent communities almost
inevitable. For the baby of secularism was thrown out with the
Ba'ath. The brutality of the secular Shah had similarly discredited
secularism in Iran.
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Iran, of course, is the modern heir to
the ancient Persian Empire, but Shi'ism, in particular “Twelver”
Shi'ism, of Iran, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and the other Arab kingdoms
of the Gulf, rules Iran after the revolution. Shi'ism is a branch of
Islam seen as a spiritual journey guided by an <i>Imam</i> <span style="font-style: normal;">
(now in seclusion), who, as a spiritual leader, is on a par with
Mohammad himself</span>. In his place is a council of Ayatollahs who
dwell throughout the Persian Gulf. The supreme leader of Iran is
chosen by these Ayatollahs, that is not only the Iranian, but the
entire Shia faithful. As we have seen in Iraq, al-Sistani, one of
these Ayatollahs, had authority over Al-Sadr is spite of al-Sadr's
military force. The US cannot end the Ayatollahs' authority through
military means, and still less through sanctions. Since Shi'ism does
not promise secular success, deprivation of it does not discredit it.
The only power that might be ranged against it is increased secular
success, and the US bungle in Iraq ended any belief that the US could
provide that.
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
With the destruction of the Ba'ath
party and the end of secular pan-Arabism, the Arab Shi'ites in Iraq
are more Shi'ites than secular Iraqis. A similar transformation would
probably happen in Kuwait, Bahrain, and Saudi Arabia if secularism
failed for them. Their ultimate loyalty will be to the <i>da'wa, </i><span style="font-style: normal;">not
the nation states whose boundaries they would scarcely recognize.
Kuwaiti Shi'ites have in the past proven themselves </span><span style="color: navy;"><span lang="zxx"><u><a href="http://www.jadaliyya.com/pages/index/1603/shiaphobia-hits-kuwait-"><span style="font-style: normal;">loyal
</span></a></u></span></span><span style="font-style: normal;">to the
regime, revealing that they too are secularized. But, this is now
strained. With the Arab spring the same pressures that inspired
religious revival in Iraq are working in Kuwait, Bahrain, and Saudi
Arabia. For when people are deprived of the material benefits of
secularism they abandon it. </span>
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Prior to the Iraq War, its Shi'ite
communities were never able to organize politically, and they all
remained either secularized Arabs, Shi'ite in name only, or
suppressed religious Shi'ite minorities in <i>taqiyya</i><span style="font-style: normal;">,
a Shi'ite term that means “concealing their true allegiance from
the worldly</span> authorities lest persecution wipe out the faith.”<sup><a class="sdendnoteanc" href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=4415577562084074022#sdendnote1sym" name="sdendnote1anc"><sup>i</sup></a>
</sup>But with Iran's independence and now Iraq's disintegration,
these Shi'ite communities have become religious. The hostility
between Sunni and Shi'ite, dating back many hundreds of years, is
flowering again. Given the hierarchical nature of Shi'ism, religious
Shi'ites <i>must</i> be loyal to that hierarchy. Practicing Shi'ism
is an education the hierarchy leads. It, like Orthodox Judaism,
involves all of life. The expanding Shi'ite religious/political
structure will probably look to us like an expanding Iran, but will
really be an Shi'ism, retaking its ancient form. Since all the
Ayatollahs chose the Iranian Supreme leader it is clear tht Iran is a
province of a larger entity, the <i>da'wa</i><span style="font-style: normal;">.
And</span> it will control most of the oil producing regions.
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
The US can do very little about this.
Given its loss in Iraq it is obviously not able to war conventionally
against Iran. Changes in US war fighting doctrine <span style="color: navy;"><span lang="zxx"><u><a href="http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175505/tomgram:_andrew_bacevich,_uncle_sam,_global_gangster/#more">acknowledge</a></u></span></span>
this. Iran's grip on the Straits of Hormuz traps the whole fifth
fleet in case of war. If the strait were closed it would be locked
into the Persian Gulf, making its resupply onerous. To extricate
itself from this vise, the US would have to use atomic weapons,
ending oil shipments from the gulf and throwing every advanced
country into political chaos. Political chaos throws fanatics and
crackpots into power. We see what kind of crackpots even the present
depression throws up. And once the taboo against atomic weapons was
gone, none of these crackpots would hesitate to use them in any war.
Candidates for president have even said so. By far the most rational
policy for the US is recognition of the <i>impossibility</i> of
maintaining hegemony over the Persian Gulf and <i>rapprochement</i>
with Iran.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Israel's survival depends upon, above
all else, its relationship to the United States. It is under no
serious military threat. A tiny country like Israel would never have
been able to develop to its present level, however ingenious its
people, without this close economic interaction with the US. Direct
US <span style="color: navy;"><span lang="zxx"><u><a href="http://wrmea.org/component/content/article/245-2008-november/3845-congress-watch-a-conservative-estimate-of-total-direct-us-aid-to-israel-almost-114-billion.html">aid</a></u></span></span>
is only a small part of the story. Israel's high tech firms do a lot
of business with US security departments. American Jewish political
strength, and the close connection between American and Israeli Jews
is essential for Israeli existence. Israelis can move easily into
positions of power in American High Tech and Financial Corporations,
and even into government which includes many Israelis with duel
citizenship.
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
The economic and political connection
is important, but the connection between American and Israeli Jews is
more important than mere economic or even political advantage. For
the economic and political connection between Israel and the US
depends upon the close connection between the American Jewish
community and Israel. Most American Jews pay little attention to
Israel, as opposed to the organized Jewish community that gives
Israel enormous support. They give this support because they believe
Israel is important to them.
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Israel, for all its Judaism, is part of
western civilization. Were there to be a break between America and
Israel, ending the ease of Israeli penetration of American life, it
would be a break between Israel and western civilization itself.
Orthodox Jews, who do nothing but study the Talmud, are not that
different from religious Shi'ites who do nothing but study the Koran.
Judaism and western civilization intersect in the United States now
that European Judaism no longer really exists culturally. A breach in
this connection, inspiring the flight of westernized Jews, would
turn Israel, in all likelihood, into a Middle Eastern state. Were
Israel really to sink into rigid medieval Jewish Orthodoxy,
westernized Jews would abandon it, and it would be overcome by the
medieval logic its laws, rabbinical commentaries on laws, and
Rabbinical commentaries on commentaries on laws so completely
illustrate.
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
American Jews tend to assimilate unless
tightly held within this Jewish community. They then do not pay
attention to Israel and do not really believe they themselves are in
immanent danger from antisemitism. An American Jew, with the almost
complete end of American antisemitism in the fifties, is an
American, like any other. Essential to continued American Jewish
community support is the belief in Israel's importance to Jewish
life, something these assimilated Jews obviously do not feel. Indeed
it is this belief that holds these communities together. Since the
belief in Israel's importance to American Jews is identical with the
belief in eternal implacable antisemitism, and since most American
Jews have never experienced serious antisemitism, their belief
reflects Jewish historical fears now focused entirely on the image of
the holocaust. That Jews are always embattled, always threatened with
extinction, must be beyond question or its absence in experience
would undermine belief. Israel is the Jewish refuge, and its
existence, as a doomsday machine, protects Jews everywhere from this
ever present menace. The holocaust justifies the fears and, with
them, Israel's existence. Israelis often assert that assimilation
endangers them more than warfare, and it is true.
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Such assimilation is a real danger. For
Israel is having a hard time persuading western Jews of Israel's high
purpose. Aliyah (immigration) from North America is up from 3720 to
4070 <span style="color: navy;"><span lang="zxx"><u><a href="http://www.haaretz.com/weekend/anglo-file/aliyah-numbers-up-from-n-america-1.386171">last
year</a></u></span></span>, but this is piddling given the American
Jewish population of over 6,000,000. Until 2008 Aliyah had shown
yearly declines so Jews make aliyah more for economic reasons than
for loyalty to Israel. Many of those who make Aliyah from other
countries, especially Russia (the source of a large number of
immigrants), soon seek to <span style="color: navy;"><span lang="zxx"><u><a href="http://www.fmep.org/analysis/analysis/the-million-missing-israelis-israeli-emigration">leave</a></u></span></span>
Israel for the West and better opportunities. Israelis of European,
especially German, descent often seek <span style="color: navy;"><span lang="zxx"><u><a href="http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/88b9e7d0-8f8e-11e0-954d-00144feab49a.html#axzz1l2YtEHuj">duel
citizenship</a></u></span></span>, revealing that Jews do not really
fear returning to Germany and do not feel safe in Israel. They do not
fear another holocaust. Almost all American Jews in Israel retain
their American citizenship and often do not make Aliyah when moving
to Israel in spite of the tax advantages, fearing to risk loss of
American citizenship. More Israelis <span style="color: navy;"><span lang="zxx"><u><a href="http://www.cbs.gov.il/reader/shnatonenew_site.htm">emigrate</a></u></span></span>
than immigrate. The point is not so much demographic as it is an
indication that Israel, for most Western Jews, is not a holy place,
but simply an opportunity to be taken when it seems advantageous and
abandoned when it doesn't.
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Iran's conference in 2006 examined the
holocaust. Not denial of the holocaust, but simply exposing it to
<span style="color: navy;"><span lang="zxx"><u><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ykd-syzZ4ZY">scholarly
study</a></u></span></span>, challenges Israeli existence. Horror
vanishes under scientific scrutiny. It begins to take its place
alongside other comparable horrors, of which there are many. Such
study must be “beyond the pale,” and any regime that would allow
it, illegitimate.
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Hostility between Israel and Iran is
not new. Israel has had hostile relations with Iran since the
revolution. Prior to the revolution, Israel, Peacock-throned Iran,
and the US formed a close alliance to control the Middle East and
undermine efforts at Arab unity. Naturally, when the Islamic
Revolution came in 1979, Israel supported the Shah against the
revolutionaries, and, with the United States, supported
counterrevolution thereafter. So there is no surprise at the Iranian
regime's hostility to Israel from the start. Iran called Israel the
“little Satan” and later supported the Lebanese Shi'ite
resistance organization, Hezbollah, and the Palestinian Hamas.
Khomeini also challenged the holocaust, but since he was a “nut
case” anyway, his criticism did not invite scholarly examination. A
scholarly conference is quite another matter. It has to be put
“beyond the pale.”</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Israel supported Iran during the
Iran/Iraq war, and took part in Iran/ Contra scheme where the US
funneled arms to the Nicaraguan Contras through Israel and then Iran.
Israeli hostility to Iran, though there, was certainly not
implacable, as it is now. It is not because Iran supports Hezbollah
and Hamas that Israel now threatens it. If Hezbollah and Hamas did
not exist Israel would have had to invent them (and in a very real
way, did). They are props justifyingand illustrating Israel's
embattled state. Israel began warning of the Iranian bomb, without
any evidence, back in the nineties, but made no threats of war. The
holocaust conference is what Israel can't bear.
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-style: normal;">What
would be a crisis for Israel is </span><i>rapprochement</i><span style="font-style: normal;">
between the US and Iran. Were US-Iranian relations to be normalized
the Iranian regime would be legitimized along with holocaust
scrutiny. The demystification of the holocaust would follow.
Hostility towards Jews would fall into context. It would cease to be
universal, implacable, and eternal. Together the US and Iran might
impose an Israeli settlement with Hamas and Hezbollah. Ubiquitous
antisemitism would lose its objective correlative. Nothing could end
American Jewish support for Israel faster than a peaceful Middle
East. For where then would be the threat? Such </span><i>rapprochement
</i><span style="font-style: normal;">is, I believe, somewhat more
likely than it seems, though it would require a sane, courageous,
and intelligent American leader, certainly a long shot. </span>
</div>
<div style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-style: normal;">Again,
The US has lost its hold on the Middle East Gulf Principalities. It
has also </span><span style="color: navy;"><span lang="zxx"><u><a href="http://armedforcesjournal.com/2012/02/8904030"><span style="font-style: normal;">lost</span></a></u></span></span><span style="font-style: normal;">
in Afghanistan. It's current foreign policy is a refusal to admit it,
that is, active self-deception. The US controlled the Persian Gulf
states with threats and unholy alliances with parasitic regimes. But
after the Iraq and Afghanistan fiascoes the United States will not
send another army into the Persian Gulf. The American fifth fleet,
trapped, presents sitting ducks to an Iranian missile and torpedo
attack. Gunboat diplomacy is over. And Iran can close the Straits of
Hormuz, if necessary by sinking tankers within its only
five-mile-wide channel. These tankers are over 300 meters long and
are unarmed. Two children in a canoe could sink one. That would
strand any American ground forces in the area, cutting off their
supply lines. The US could send drones, but could gain nothing
thereby. With all this Shi'ites would only become more religious and
less secular. Were the United States to overthrow one of the Gulf
princes the outcome would almost certainly be, as it was in Iraq, a
reorganization around religious affiliation. And the Shi'ites in
Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Bahrain, certain, because of the nature of
Shi'ism, to join with Iran and the </span><i>da'wa</i><span style="font-style: normal;">,
are in the oil producing regions. So American influence on the Gulf
Princedoms through threats is waning fast. For these threats are no
longer credible. That influence rests now only on habit.</span></div>
<div style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-style: normal;">American
financial influence in the Middle East is also rapidly disappearing
as the Gulf states realize they have nothing to gain and little to
fear from the United States. But their own people now threaten to end
these regimes. The west would like to string pipelines to avoid the
Strait of Hormus and Iran's stranglehold on it. But pipelines that
skirt the strait will not be able to transport food to Saudi Arabia
and Kuwait without large quantities of which they can expect
starvation and massive popular uprisings. To calm popular anger, they
need to reduce food prices and build infrastructure, not buy American
arms. The US has nothing more to offer. China is the country that can
build. The bungling of reconstruction in Iraq discredited any US
claim to be able to build infrastructure. In short the United States
has no real hold over the Gulf Arab states and they are turning to
Russia and China, abandoning the dollar, and doing business in </span><span style="color: navy;"><span lang="zxx"><u><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_x72WCJhyko"><span style="font-style: normal;">yuan
and gold</span></a></u></span></span><span style="font-style: normal;">.
</span>
</div>
<div style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-style: normal;">European
countries will come to their senses and realize their interest lies
with the oil producing Middle East and not with bankrupt and impotent
US. Rapprochement between them and the Shi'ite </span><i>da'wa </i><span style="font-style: normal;">will
soon follow. They too now follow US lead only out of habit. If the US
does not launch nuclear war, it will have to eventually make peace
too, but it will gain little influence thereby, for the brutality,
corruption, and incompetence of the American war in Iraq would taint
anyone with American connections. That, in the long run will be good
for the US, which will soon have to rely upon its own resources in
any case, and the sooner the better. </span>
</div>
<div style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-style: normal;">So if
things just bump along the rutted road our leaders are now dragging
us down, rapprochement, first with breakaway portions of the Gulf
States, then with Europe, and finally with the US itself, is
inevitable. The only alternative is nuclear war or some other means
of human extinction. </span><i>Rapprochement</i><span style="font-style: normal;">
with Iran, inevitable if the world continues, would be a rational
American policy even though it would be painful to the US. It would
require the US to relinquish dollar hegemony and give up its arms
sales to the Middle East, which would in turn impoverish most
Americans. But since a conventional war with Iran is not possible and
growing Shia political strength will eventually dominate the oil
producing regions, the only alternative to </span><i>rapprochement</i><span style="font-style: normal;">
is nuclear war. </span>
</div>
<div style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-style: normal;">World
nuclear war or </span><i>rapprochement — </i><span style="font-style: normal;">which
is the rational policy? Only a realistic and brave leader, knowing
that the United States cannot maintain control, would dare to
relinquish this control rather than try futilely to maintain it with
first, impoverishing self-delusion and, finally, nuclear war,
extinguishing human civilization. But, since tearing away illusion
would reveal bad news, no American run-of-the-mill, shit-faced,
political hack will do it. It would risk his career. He would
extinguish civilization instead. </span>
</div>
<div style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
Were the US to
normalize its relations with Iran, Israel, or at least its present
elite, would be in crisis. Peace would probably break out. Implacable
antisemitism would have no objective correlative. American Jews
would lose interest in Israel. Israel would lose its connection to
the west.
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-style: normal;">However,
not all Jews, and not even all religious Jews, thrive on a spiritual
diet of eternal, implacable, ubiquitous antisemitism. </span><span style="color: navy;"><span lang="zxx"><u><a href="http://www.nkusa.org/"><span style="font-style: normal;">Neturei
Karta</span></a></u></span></span><span style="font-style: normal;">
is an organization of Orthodox Jews actively against Zionism or any
Jewish state. They do not fear living among the goyim, and indeed
they see this as true Judaism. They insist that the Torah forbids a
Jewish state. Jews are a race of prophets, meant to go into foreign
lands, not warriors to protect one. Members of Neturei Karta insist
that real Judaism is diaspora Judaism. All westernized Jews believe
this true, whether they know it or not. It is only because Israel is
westernized, really an outpost of Europe, that they can think it an
extension of who they are. American Jews, in the community and
outside, would not want to return to </span><i>shtetls </i><span style="font-style: normal;">cut
off from the Western world</span><i>.</i><span style="font-style: normal;">
They want to live here, as Americans. The educated Israeli population
feels the same connection to the West, to the US or Europe. Were
American Jews to lose interest in Israel, and Israel thereby lose its
intimate connection to the United States and its image as the
protector of the Jews, Israeli educated Jews would likely emigrate in
large numbers. But what would happen in Israel after </span><i>rapprochement</i><span style="font-style: normal;">
only history would tell. Naturally, the best hope would be that it
would become a state of all its people.</span></div>
<div style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div id="sdendnote1">
<div class="sdendnote">
<a class="sdendnotesym" href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=4415577562084074022#sdendnote1anc" name="sdendnote1sym">i</a>Marshall
G. S. Hodgson “The Secret Order of Assassins” University of
Pennsylvania Press 2005 p 12</div>
</div>Michael http://www.blogger.com/profile/17596457110530754431noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4415577562084074022.post-90554710726788719352011-12-28T12:02:00.000-08:002011-12-28T12:02:59.725-08:00Will he won't he in Iran<title></title>
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<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
American and Israeli animosity towards
Iran is at the heart of Middle East politics. It has nothing to do
with Iran's nuclear program, which is obviously for peaceful purposes
only. The IAEA has found no Iranian violations of the NPT. Anyone
with any doubt on this score should read <span style="color: navy;"><span lang="zxx"><u><a href="http://antiwar.com/archives.php?author=Gordon%20Prather">Gordon
Prather's</a></u></span></span> articles. So what's going on? To be
sure, the US has been hostile to Iran ever since the Iranian
Revolution knocked Iran out of Washington's orbit. They encouraged
the Iran-Iraq war, in part, to get it back. But that has been a
simmering pot for some time. What is the saber-rattling now about?
Obviously, the aftermath of the Iraq invasion.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
It's not entirely clear what the US
intended in Iraq. If the intention was to overthrow Saddam Husein and
install a compliant puppet they seem to have intentionally botched
the job. The dismantling of the Iraqi army and governmental apparatus
at the very beginning guaranteed the disintegration into the present
factions. Perhaps that was the real intention all along, a brainless
application of the principle of divide and conquer. In any case, Iraq
is what Iraq is, a US caused mess and abomination coming apart at the
seams. The US, having dragged itself from Iraq, has taken its last
shreds of influence with it. Iraq, though destroyed, defeated it.
There will be no more US invasions in the Middle East, though the US
is not above trying to control the region with drones and proxies.
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
In the north of Iraq the Kurds vie for
what looks like an ever less viable independent state. The American
presence, and Iraqi central weakness have allowed the Kurds to get
this far. But the Iraqi Prime Minister, <span style="color: #222222;"> </span><span style="color: #222222;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">Nouri
al-</span></span></span><em><span style="color: #222222;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">Maliki,</span></span></span></em><em><span style="color: #222222;"><span style="font-family: arial, sans-serif;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><b>
</b></span></span></span></em>has warned the Kurds not to make oil
deals. Also, Turkey seems no longer reluctant to cross the Iraqi
border to war with the Kurds now that it need not fear bumping into
the US military. If the Kurds did form a separate state it is not
likely Turkey, given the Kurdish uprising within Turkey itself,
would allow the Kurds to use their oil wealth to buy weapons They
would need to invade and gobble Kurdistan up. They couldn't sit idly
by. So Maliki's warning might not be so unpleasant to the Kurds.
Better pro-forma subservience to a weak Baghdad than real
subservience to a strong Ankara. Realism should tell them that they
cannot break from Iraq without being engulfed by Turkey. And Iran
might also invade if it weren't for the United States threatening it
with Atomic weapons.
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
In the south the Shi'ites have beaten
the Sunnis and control the government, but which Shi'ites have power?
Al Maliki, the Prime Minister, is not westernized like our man Ayad
Alawi, or in an case did not spend long periods in the secular west.
He seems to be an intellectual who worked his way up in the al-Dawa
party. Now Americans think political parties are just people who have
grouped together as a strategy for gaining power with no reason for
wanting power other than to have it. Yippee, power! That's the
American way. But political parties can also be alliances for a way
of life, for example, Shi'ism. What kind is al-Dawa? The “Dawa”
is the “summons to allegiance” in Shia Islam. It is not a
political party though our media call it one to give Americans the
wrong impression, or out of sheer ignorance. It is a call, a call to
allegiance to Shi'ism. Are they serious when using it? How could
they not be? Shi'ism is a pretty much all or nothing thing. That
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">Muqtadā
al-Ṣadr can ally with Maliki suggests that Maliki is a “real”
Shi'ite. Alliances of convenience can be part of Shi'ism. but, at
this point, such an alliance would seem superfluous, and anyway, no
al-Ṣadr's style . Both Maliki and al-Ṣadr have spent a long time
in Iran and are probably loyal, not to the government of Iran, but to
the clerical hierarchy. So Shi'ism, probably real Shi'ism, will be in
control both in Iran and Iraq. </span></span></span></span>
</div>
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<br />
</div>
<div style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-size: small;">Now Shi'ism is, in principle, a
rigid hierarchy of clerics culminating in an Imam. Twelver( Iranian
and Iraqi) Shi'ites hold that the Imam is in seclusion, but they
still have a rigid hierarchy of clerics. This is a very solid
structure that does not promise material wealth. For this reason, it
is worth mentioning, it is hard to see how sanctions can hurt it. </span></span>
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
The US lingers on in Shi'ite Iraq in
the world's biggest bunker. The mercenaries who remain in it are
mercenaries. They are careful not to hurt themselves and have
equipped themselves with a shitload of firepower. They will enjoy
hunkering down within the bunker, but they will not venture out .
They are not capable of organized military operations. Fear not. They
will have plenty to do --they probably have WiFi. Hunkered down with
a big mac or two, this apparently large force in the huge compound
will have a political influence of zip. It will just be left there to
rot so American presidents can look like they still have some sway in
the Middle East. Over whom? You tell me.
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
The only military leverage, or leverage
of any kind, remaining to the United States is atomic weapons. A
ground invasion of Iran, impossible with the worn out American army,
would, in any case, be catastrophic. The world has learned a lot
about how to fight invading armies since 2003. Let them in, then
slice them up. Pick them apart with IED's, and make them pay beaucoup
health care for soldiers with permanent brain damage. Armies are
obsolete. Other than executing sponsored assassinations and lighting
an occasional carefully-deniable bomb, the US can do nothing against
Iran except launch atomic war. For once Iran and the United States
are at war, Iran will close the straits of Hormuz and quickly capture
the oil fields of Kuwait and probably Saudi Arabia. Oil will stop
flowing, and the world economy will spiral down like a smoking jet.
A war, even of a few months, will demolish the world economy, and it
will never rise again. The US must annihilate Iran immediately,
launching WW III, or do nothing.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
So after the dust settles, assuming no
atomic war, Iraq and Iran will be Shi'ite dominated states and the US
will have no leverage other than what it can get from continuing to
threaten, less and less convincingly, species annihilation. <span style="color: black;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">This
does not mean that Shi'ite Iraq and Shi'ite Iran will be tempted to
attack Sunni Saudi Arabia and Sunni Kuwait. That might send the US
goobermint over the top. But the Shi'ites already within these
countries are not likely to remain peacefully in their second class
position either. The west, not the natives, made the Middle Eastern
boundaries and the Shi'ites in Iraq and Iran will certainly think of
other (Twelver) Shi'ites across western made borders as part of their
own “body of the faithful.” </span></span></span></span>
</div>
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<br />
</div>
<div style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-size: small;">Since Saudi Arabia and Kuwait are
Sunni family fiefdoms, any yielding to the Shi'ites in these
countries is likely to intensify demands from the ordinary Sunnis,
too. The ordinary Sunnis wouldn't join the Shi'ites, but might try to
turn a chaotic situation into a Sunni “Arab spring” revolution.
This is doubly true because Saudi Arabia's burgeoning Sunni
population, ever more impoverished, is likely to embrace the
“democracy” movements sweeping the area. Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and
the little kingdoms around them are not so much afraid of Iranian
invasion as of the simple crumbling of their regimes. They must
either continue to repress or yield to their own populations, and
they are terrified that any yielding will be a sign of weakness.
Maybe they are right, but with the US gone they will have no choice.</span></span></div>
<div style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">If
they don't, what will they do when IED's start blowing up along Saudi
roads? If not for Americans threatening everybody, the Saudis would
likely already be in a civil war, and their own Shi'ites would be
getting aid from the Shi'ites in Iraq and Iran. The US has several
times accused Iran of aiding Shi'ites in Iraq and have threatened to
use such cross border supplying as a </span></span></span></span><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-size: small;"><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">causus
belli</span></i></span></span><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">.
The threat is always atomic war, or in dippy speak, “leaving all
options on the table.” The image is apparently of a warlike
bureaucrat who has lost his filing cabinet. But how many times can
you make the same threat? For that is all the US can threaten now
that exhausted, suicidal armies can't scare the Iranians, and Russia,
China, and Japan, at least, refuse to employ further sanctions which,
even if employed would not shake the hierarchy of Shi'ite clergy that
extends down to everybody— in theory, but a long way into the
population in reality. For them such suffering is part of the
religion. </span></span></span></span>
</div>
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<br />
</div>
<div style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-size: small;">Saudi Arabia thinks that if it
pulverized Iran it might be able to eliminate the domestic Shi'ite
threat. Of course they dream they would then go back into Iraq and
make it Sunni again. They know that now in any war they will have to
face Iran, Iraq, and their own Shi'ites. They would certainly lose
without US help, which is no longer there. They, like the US, need
the mother of all blitzkriegs, for an Iraq or Iran that would remain
intact even for a few days of war would destroy them. Since they
haven't the tools, they are jumping up and down demanding that the US
blow Iran away. They must imagine that would solve their problem. </span></span>
</div>
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<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">Because
the US is not quite ready to end the world, they have settled for the
destabilization of Syria, a gesture of war with Iran. Since war with
Iran, other than world ending atomic war, is impossible, the US must
go to war with Iran using gestures. </span></span></span></span><em><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">
Presto-chango, you have undermined an ally of Iran. Maybe, just
maybe, the Iranian government will fall? But it will not fall because
Shi'ism promises no walk on easy street. On the contrary, they flay
themselves. Suffering will only strengthen them, as anyone who knows
anything about Shi'ism could tell you. </span></span></span></span></em>
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<em><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">We
pretend secretly that destabilizing Syria is the first step to war
with Iran, as if war needed steps. Of course it does need steps if
you want to approach war but not ever fight it. For war with Iran is
species threatening and absolutely nutty. On the other hand perhaps
the US, knowing the war is nutty, and also that the Empire is kaput
without it, hope to be pushed into it so they don't have to choose a
nuttiness they want in spite of its species annihilating
implications. The layers of denial we hide under are piled high.
Then again, perhaps this is part of O'bama's clever
wait-a-little-longer before doing anything policy? On the horns of a
dilemma, he just settles in. But every day he waits will make pulling
out look more and more like an act of weakness. And we wouldn't want
that. Rather torch the world. </span></span></span></span></em>
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<em><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">There
are, no doubt, people with real grievances in Syria. Bashar Assad's
rule is no doubt harsh, maybe as harsh as it is said, but anyone who
has been paying attention to Iraq, Lybia, and Afghanistan knows Syria
is letting itself in for a lot of murder, mayhem, torture,
humiliation, and destruction if they ever open that can of worms
called NATO. Then after that there will be foreign domination or a
fight against it. Syria is right next door to Iraq. Many of the Iraqi
refugees streamed into Syria. The Syrians saw first hand what
happened— girls becoming prostitutes, boys, thieves and beggars,
men sinking into despair, women, into street whores, everyone fleeing
even worse things. Could any Syrian patriot want that? </span></span></span></span></em>
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<em><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">Will
Assad hold on in Syria? If not NATO backed stooges will vie for
power. I am inclined to think they would fail. Anyone tainted with
connection to the west in an Arab country will be vilified. We will
see what happens in Libya, but that is my feeling. The great plums of
US stoogedom have all been picked. Hunger will overcome fear in these
populations and they will not tolerate another Muburak. I tend to
think Assad will not fall but be strengthened, whatever his faults,
given the enormous revulsion at American incursions of the recent
past. But if the bomber boys of NATO man their consoles, and keep
their cups of ketchup off their keyboards, watch out. </span></span></span></span></em>
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<em><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">Without
being able to eliminate Iran, the US will prove itself useless and
unthreatening to Saudi Arabia, and Saudi Arabia, with turmoil
growing, will look for help elsewhere. They might think of
liberalizing their regime and launching a program of public works,
especially in the realm of water desalination. For that they would
turn to China, and so will be inclined to sell oil in, who knows,
yuan, but anyway in something other than American dollars. For
everyone knows dollars are about to blow in the wind and certainly
will if Saudi Arabia refuses dollars for oil. Now they selling oil
for what is soon certain to be dry leaves they can use only to buy
war toys the US makes them buy to protect them from </span></span></span></span></em><em><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">Iran
and palace coups. Since the US can't eliminate Iran, and no longer
can afford a palace coup, why should Saudi Arabia keep taking
dollars? Arms are the last thing they need. Why buy them if the US is
no longer a threat to them or Iran, and the only hope is an expensive
liberalization? No arms, no need for dollars. The US is a friend to
Saudi Arabia the way a mafia Don is a friend to a restauranteur
paying him protection. When the Don loses power, the friendship ends.
</span></span></span></span></em>
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<em><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">Without
the US hold on Saudi Arabia, “dollar hegemony” is gone. With
“dollar hegemony” goes the dollar and with the dollar goes the
United States. With the exception of its atomic weapons, the US is
now impotent in the Middle East, as it is elsewhere. It's hold on
Saudi Arabia is relaxing fast. The Saudis, were they rational, would
do very well to stop buying arms and instead use the oil wealth to
improve the lives of their people. </span></span></span></span></em>
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<em><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">The
US threat to Iran is no more than the ability to sneak a drone or two
(without missiles) into Iran, or to sponsor a saboteur here, an
assassin there, or a terrorist group crawling under the wire. They
will not overthrow the Ayatollahs like that and Shi'ite strength will
grow. The American Sixth Fleet, based in Bahrain, is not really a
threat but rather a chip set out on the Imperial shoulder. Knock one
of these ships off and prepare for atomic incineration. But why wear
such a chip and demand that your enemy knock it off? It is a way to
threaten but not go to war, or, again, a provocation to spark a nutty
war you want to fight but not to choose. Madness. </span></span></span></span></em>
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<em><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">In
threatening atomic war the US in employing Nixon's “madman policy,”
known elsewhere as a temper tantrum. “If you don't give me my way I
will destroy everything.” The US government is a two year old. But
the threat of atomic war does not compel people to do what you want
them to do. It is simply not credible, and even if it were, why
acquiesce?The US is no longer able to threaten anyone into obedience.
Saddam Hussein acquiesced to everything, but the US invaded him
anyway. So why would anyone now give in to US threats? Iran, clearly,
has learned this lesson well. We threaten them with atomic war and
they go right on doing what they are doing. They only refrain from
any overt act of war, that is, knocking off the chip. But why should
they go to war? Time is on their side. The threat of atomic war will
not influence the Shi'ites and disgruntled Sunnis in Saudi Arabia not
to organize politically, and it will not stop Iran and Iraq from
aiding them. If Iran stands, Saudi Arabia will fall —to its own
people.</span></span></span></span></em></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<em><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">In
short, to maintain the US relationship with Saudi Arabia, the US must
remove Iran, which will offer aid and a refuge for Saudi Arabia's own
disgruntled Shi'ites. The US is incapable of removing Iran without
initiating world atomic war. So the US hold on Saudi Arabia is
broken. Saudi Arabia will turn from the US, and, if they act
rationally, from the US dollar, which until now they poured into US
arms. Sovereign states, now using dollars to buy oil, will want to
unload them. Hyperinflation would then destroy the United States.</span></span></span></span></em></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<em><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">What
about Israel? Israel really does believe Hezbollah is a threat to it,
and Hezbollah has fired missiles into Israel during the most recent
Lebanon war. Hezbollah is an Iranian client. So Israel could want to
get at Hezbollah through Iran, or at Iran through Hezbollah. But
Hezbollah is not capable of invading Israel other than with a secret
incursion and immediate retreat, has always acted defensively, and,
anyway, Israel has atomic weapons. They could incinerate Lebanon,
wiping out Hezbollah and much else. So Israel could, if it had no
designs on Lebanon, live with Hezbollah on its northern border in
peace with a treaty entered in good faith by both sides. For neither
could gain from invading the other. Faced with Israel's nuclear
weapons, Iran would not think of invading Israel either. Israel does
</span></span></span></span></em><em><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">not
border Iran. Iran could gain nothing from a war with Israel. In
reality, Iran is not a serious military threat to Israel and
Hezbollah, though it is an annoyance and certainly could kill some
people, is not a reason to threaten to blow up the whole world. So
you don't get along with your neighbor. That's life.</span></span></span></span></em></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<em><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">But
the Israeli government, with its holocaust thinking, sees any threat,
even the smallest, as “existential.” I have no doubt that in
Netanyahu's mind Iran truly is a military existential threat. But
Israel knows that any attack from it will be considered an American
attack and will unleash Shi'ite hell on the Sunnis who control Saudi
Arabia and Kuwait. They would be looking at a Shi'ite giant. So he
knows Israel, like the US, must attack Iran with nuclear weapons or
not at all. That makes human life on earth hang on Netanyahu's sanity
or Obama's strength in restraining him. Good luck to us. </span></span></span></span></em>
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<em><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">However,
it is in its questioning of the holocaust that Iran offers Israel the
real existential threat. They sponsored a conference about the
holocaust and now represent, in their existence, the legitimacy of
holocaust questioning. And if holocaust denial, or holocaust
revisionism, or even holocaust scholarship were to catch hold,
Israel, the Jewish baby that the horrible birth pangs of the
holocaust produced, might look illegitimate. The raison d'etre of
the Jewish state would be brought into question. What will the
Germans feel after having apologized and paid reparations all those
years? They had to sit in school to learn how bad they were? What
kind of trust will they have in a government that would make them do
that if the premise becomes questionable? Holocaust revisionism is a
political earthquake just waiting to happen in Germany. Such an
earthquake would likely delegitimize a government that had tried to
prevent studying it. How far behind would antisemitism be? Denial
thrown off would erupt into an orgy of holocaust scholarship that
will reveal what it reveals, and nobody can know ahead of time what
that will be. The shock would shake Israel all the way back to the
patriarchs. Israel might do well to take a step toward making peace
with this rather than continuing to war with it. </span></span></span></span></em>
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<em><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">Iran
is an existential threat to Israel and the United States, but not a
military existential threat. Iran, unlike Iraq, is a spiritual
threat. Iran can make war against neither Israel or the US, has no
motive for doing so, and would be a fool to try. Conversely,
militarily, the US and Israel can do nothing against Iran but use
atomic weapons. But to use military force against a spiritual threat
is to declare ones own defeat. </span></span></span></span></em>
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<em><span style="color: black;"> </span></em><em><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">The
US and Israel cannot eliminate this threat without WWIII. China and
Russia both hope the US will keep its internal disintegration to
itself, instead of blowing the world up in an hysterical panic. For
the American encirclement of both of them is surly an hysterical
panic at a rapid loss of all moral, economic, cultural, indeed all
sources of power other than military. What is the point of this
encirclement? Are we intending to threaten or actually attack Russia
and/or China? Is the US creating of itself the 'doomsday machine”
straight from Dr. Strangelove? Is this not hysterical panic?</span></span></span></span></em></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<em><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">Both
Russia and China, it seems, have decided against further appeasement.
Probably the Libya War persuaded them. The UN resolution 273 that
the US twisted so violently as to disprove once and for all the
possibility of written law, probably made it unmistakable, even to
the very last wheeler-dealer wannabe in Russia, that the US intended
to retain its world ruler-ship with force. American warships are also
strutting up and down China's coasts, and the US is tweaking the
Taiwan question. China has a raft of dollars it can float to swamp
the US into deep recession any time it chooses. So far it has had no
reason to unload them, and continues trade with the US, especially
for scrap metal it seems better able to use than we can. But China
cannot afford to be cut off from Middle East oil. Were the US to
seriously threaten Iran, China could send the US economy down simply
by outbidding us for oil with all those dollars. </span></span></span></span></em>
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<em><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">The
US military is right now riding on borrowed money, and we can't
really borrow any more. Threatening to make the dollar worthless
would be a very effective strategy for China. Since the US keeps
threatening and pulling back from war with Iran, Chinas restraint
must come not from confidence that they can read the tea leaves of
overt US intentions, but some back door assurances. Even so the Libya
double cross must make them leary of back or front door US
assurances. The desire to hold things together for a little longer,
and perhaps fear of an itchy American finger on the nuclear trigger,
has kept the Chinese playing their inscrutable game. But the US is
going down so fast both Russia and China might fear it will attempt
an outright rule by force, and that would mean destroying Iran with
atomic weapons. </span></span></span></span></em>
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<em><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">Russia
has put an aircraft carrier at Tartous, Syria that is, like all
aircraft carriers, indeed all warships, a chip on a shoulder. An
aircraft carrier, easy prey for missiles, is a message that says,
“touch this and it's atomic war.” So the threat now goes both
ways. China is supplying Iran with surface to air missiles that make
any “conventional” attack even more problematic, for they really
work but are also a similar chip. Make no mistake. An attack on
Iran, and even Syria, will not be contained. </span></span></span></span></em>
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<em><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">Hope
seems to rest upon the United States finding someone intelligent and
brave. He won't come out of next year's elections, that is for sure.
Since Iran's threat is, neither for the US nor Israel, military, and
any military action against Iran is suicide, the US and Israel,
rather than ending the world in atomic war, might best consider Iran
a reality, and turn their attention to the earthquake this sets off.</span></span></span></span></em></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<em><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">The
US will lose control in the Middle East and the rest of the “empire
of bases.” They will have to abandon them. Dollar hegemony will
vanish, and the dollar will hyper-inflate, making it impossible to
continue our military adventures all over the place. That's the good
news. The bad news is that the American economy is over. We won't be
able to afford the gas. With all this clearly in view perhaps we can
eliminate the superfluous military-industrial complex and Department
of Defense to leave some resources for preparing for the austere
future. If we follow the usual American methods we will just let the
chips fall where they may, excuse me, I mean, let the markets handle
the problem. It cannot work, and will exhaust the resources
desperately needed elsewhere. As the economy doggedly fails to
reinflate through yet one more debt bubble, a society of desperate
street children will challenge every cop in the country. Many of
them will have guns, and guns take the manhood out of fighting. But
the hope of finding someone with half a brain and two balls who sees
this is slim. </span></span></span></span></em>
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<em><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">As
the US withdraws from Europe, Germany's government, throwing off US
domination, will find it impossible to suppress holocaust
scholarship. Holocaust denial will percolate, and percolate more
openly the more Israel tries to suppress it. German children are now
taught to be ashamed of the past in school. How could they resist
re-examining this humiliating episode if they have some hope it
wasn't so? You can be sure this process is already well advanced. I
have no idea what the real opinion of the German people is about the
holocaust, but repression of all thought and expression can only have
inflamed a curiosity hope already fed. There must be an enormous
underground distribution of holocaust denial literature. Israel must
allow holocaust scholarship to emerge into the open. Whatever the
truth here is, let it be revealed. If the holocaust deniers are
crackpots, prove it, not with repression and violence, but with
scholarship. Any lie about history or suppression of the truth is a
blasphemy against or repudiation of the creative God. For what is the
creation but what is and was? Anyone who would, with lies, reshape
the past into what he thinks ought to be is tinkering with the
creation, thinking he knows better than God, and putting himself in
God's place. Reshaping history has no place in Judaism, and
suppression of discourse flies in the face of the principle of free
thought that governs civilized life. Holocaust thinking has turned
Israel into a non-Jewish state. </span></span></span></span></em>
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</div>Michael http://www.blogger.com/profile/17596457110530754431noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4415577562084074022.post-9375679361061165422011-12-02T07:36:00.001-08:002012-04-12T09:00:27.067-07:00Rules on Rails<title></title>
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Constitutions are laws about the set-up
of a community. Like all laws they are supposed to be rules for human
conduct. We read the law, and if we are law-abiding, we do what it
says. Wittgenstein, in another context, points to a problem:</div>
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<span style="color: #333333;">“<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">But
am I not compelled, then, to go the way I do in a chain of
inferences?” --Compelled? After all I can presumably go as I
choose!-- “ But if you want to remain in accord with the rules
you </span></span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">must </span></i></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">go
this way.” – Not at all, I call </span></span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">this
'</span></i></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">accord'.
– “Then you have changed the meaning of the word “accord”, or
the meaning of the rule.” --No; – who says what 'change' and
'remaining the same' mean here? However many rules you give me-- I
give a rule which justifies </span></span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">my </span></i></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">employment
of your rules.</span></span></span></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">You
may think my interpretation outlandish, absurd, ridiculous, but
nothing in the written rule allows you to do so. The little marks on
the page do not force me to do this or that. How could they? I can
insist that virtually any action is in accord with the rules. What
prevents me from doing so is convention. “Certainly you can't
possibly think that doing THAT is in accord with the law.” The
general scorn of others forces me to acquiesce. We have always taken
the rule to mean thus and so! But who has always taken it thus and
so? How we “always took it” is lost in the mists of time. Writing
about that time is just more words on a page, subject to the same
mutability as the written laws. What allows the rule to have any
affect is a general agreement as to what actions accord with the rule
and what do not. But it is not the rule nor any argument about how we
have always taken it in the past that forces this agreement. It comes
only from a general willingness to agree in the course of life as it
is lived <i>now</i>. The rules do not allow us to escape from
conventional usage, and our agreement about conventional usage
depends upon good will. Someone who doesn't want to agree will find a
way not to. Usage is conventional because we agree on it or, in any
case acquiesce. Neither the law, nor convention, can force
agreement. </span>
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">People
held power without law. How did they do it? Let us take a little
excursion. Aristotle, in <i>The Constitution of Athens</i> writes,
“The ancient political order that existed before Draco was as
follows: The magistrates were selected from the noble and the
wealthy.” We might ponder that “selected.” How selected? We
tend to think of something like our own elections, but this was a
very small group of people who had no media, no airplanes, in short
no way of distancing themselves from one another. They were all out
in the <i>agora</i> every day. No noble or wealthy citizen of Athens
ever moved to another city, so these people all knew one another
since childhood. For one reason or another, alliances formed. For one
reason or another someone became a leader without actually being
chosen in any way. That is the way when kids grow up together. They
spoke to one another day after day not in whitewashing telepromptese,
but extemporaneously. Everybody knew what shit a guy stepped into
five years ago. Everybody knew who was a fool, a hothead, a coward.
Everybody also knew who was wise, worth listening to, brave, clever.
Everybody knew who would obey whom. And most important, everybody
knew who was likely to further the interests of whom. In short a
man's human qualities emerged. Everybody already knew who was whom
just from having hung out with them for their whole lives. There
were no surprise candidates like Barak “Who-the-hell-is” Obama or
Mitt “Who-the-hell-is” Romney. Those who held the offices gained
the acquiescence of others through their personal qualities that
emerged in the course of daily public life over a lifetime. The
Greeks called these qualities of excellence <i>virtu.</i></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">The
noble and wealthy ruled because they could afford a soldier's
equipment. The leaders emerged naturally from life lived together,
and they ruled the poor by force. The rich owned the land and the
serfs paid steep rent or had themselves and their children sold into
slavery. To the poor this quality of <i>virtu </i>was no virtue. But
they couldn't do anything about it. The poor obeyed out of fear, not
because of any law. Those who ruled did so because of their monopoly
of military equipment. They were rich because they were tough. They
didn't have to explain why they did what they did. </span>
</div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">The
poor had “no share in anything,” Aristotle says. What kept them
down was military force that easily overwhelmed them. It seems like a
stable situation, but apparently it wasn't. The problem arose between
the very-rich and the barely-rich. The very-rich were the officers in
this military city, the barely-rich merely foot soldiers. The very
rich exploited the barely-rich too. Sometimes the barely-rich
interfered with the plans of the very-rich at which point the very
rich might treat them not that much differently from the way they
treated the serfs. The loyalty of the barely-rich to the very-rich
was shaky. The “Draconian” laws Draco made created a treaty of
peace between the very-rich and the barely-rich to assure that the
barely-rich would remain foot soldiers in the threatening class war
with the poor. For the very-rich needed the loyalty of the foot
soldiers if they were to maintain their military superiority. Draco
made the ability to supply oneself with a soldier's equipment the
criterion for citizenship. But you needed quite a bit more to be
appointed to office. He created a council of four hundred chosen by
lot from among the citizens. This Areopagus could judge complaints
one citizen might have with another. Thus the poorer of the rich
could bring complains against the richer. There were other rules that
favored the barely-rich-but-rich -enough-for-armor. It gave them a
way to protect themselves somewhat against the more powerful. </span>
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<div style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">The
very-rich obviously agreed to this set-up only reluctantly, for it
deprived them of opportunities to exploit the barely-rich. That was
what it was supposed to do. They agreed to it only because they knew
they needed the barely-rich against the poor. In other words they
agreed to it because the threat of civil war weighed more heavily
than their “interests.” If the poor later offered no threat the
rich would again use force to take whatever they wanted. The laws
would not stop them if they thought they didn't any longer need the
less rich. They would reinterpret the laws as they wished. The laws
themselves, like all laws, are open to any interpretation, and can
only serve as a reminder that civil war looms and compels good will
and fairness in interpretation to insure the loyalty of the
barely-rich. So the whole enterprise hinges upon incipient civil war
and the rather artificial good will this inspires between different
naturally hostile classes. The law depends upon the good will of
parties who by nature mistrust one another and so harbor ill will.
They agree to read the law with a good will they don't really have
because of the threat of civil war. </span>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">Draco's
laws solidified the rule of the rich. By buying the loyalty of the
foot soldier it strengthened a repressive force. Aristotle concludes
his account of Draco's laws with, “but loans were secured on the
person of the debtor and the land was in the hands of the few.”
But repressing the poor with force apparently didn't work. Aristotle
continues with a report that the common people rose up against the
upper class and “the civil discord became violent.” </span>
</div>
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<br /></div>
<div style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">When
that happened they called in Solon. Solon's laws were a second
attempt at law, this time to take from the rich and give to the poor
to bring the civil war to an end. Repression had failed, so they
thought to compromise. The parties agreed to Solon as lawgiver
because he was from an ancient family but not that rich. His
interests seemed not to lie clearly with either party. From his
poetry one gets the idea that his interest is with the community as a
whole. Aristotle quotes him: </span>
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“<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">I observe, and my heart is
filled with grief when I look upon the oldest land of the Ionian
world as it totters.”</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">The
existence of a citizen, someone who's interest is with the good of
the whole, is hereby tacitly acknowledged. By agreeing to Solon they
have agreed that it is possible to be a citizen, someone whose “heart
fills with grief” when he sees the <i>polis</i> in danger. But all
they have agreed to, when they agreed to accept Solon as lawgiver,
was the <i>possibility</i> of a citizen. Either side might, at any
time, withdraw this sobriquet from Solon himself. Indeed Aristotle
mentions this happening, or nearly happening. Solon canceled debts,
but some said some of his friends went into debt just before he did
so, reaping big rewards. Making a move he said was to help the poor,
he actually aided his own interests proving that he put his interests
above those of the community as a whole. Apparently Solon weathered
this storm whereas some well-known selfish man in his place probably
wouldn't have. His reputation pulled him through. But he saw that if
he remained he would lose his status as citizen, and the laws would
become suspect. For to people, that is to the whole city, who see
<i>all</i> human action as self-interested, Solon's actions would
seem self-interested too. So he left the city thus preserving his
claim to be its one true citizen. </span>
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<br /></div>
<div style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">Being
a citizen, one whose interest is with the good of the whole, and
appearing to be one after having made the laws, are two different
things. Was Solon out for himself or trying to do what was best for
the city as a whole when he canceled debts? The interests of the
rich as a whole are made up of the individual interests of the rich.
Although they regularly screw the poor they are not above screwing
one another. The rich can use laws that redress the sufferings of the
exploited poor, which always take something from the rich, to screw
others of the rich by putting themselves temporarily in the position
of the poor to take advantage of these laws. Those who knew Solon was
going to cancel debts borrowed to the hilt and made a bundle. </span>
</div>
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<div style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">Neither
the rich nor the poor have any ability to assess Solon's integrity.
For both, integrity is a purely theoretical concept beyond their
experience. They both acknowledge their self-interest. They choose
Solon because he looked like a citizen and the denizens of Athens
recognized that the law needed good will to serve its purpose. The
words on the page had to have a meaning everyone thought “fair,”
and wouldn't have that meaning if written by a self-interested man.
Solon wrote laws that definitely benefited the poor. The rich
accepted these laws as part of a peace treaty. They had to believe
that their sacrifices were for the good of the whole, that is, the
peace treaty. They had to believe that Solon was wise and had the
good of the whole at heart, even though they had no feeling for the
good of the whole. They were making a trade that depended upon mutual
good faith, and this good faith would exist because everyone had
faith in Solon. For the rest of the city good faith was as unreal as
the tooth fairy. Acceptance of and trust in Solon was essential even
though what was essential in Solon, his integrity, was beyond
everyone else's experience. </span>
</div>
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<br /></div>
<div style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">So laws
are either alliances between rich people with different interests to
continue the civil war against the poor, or a peace treaty between
rich and poor to end the civil war. One might argue that all laws
are alliances of rich and less rich, for there are always people even
poorer than the poor. In Athens there were slaves and foreigners,
both unprotected by Solon's laws. A citizen lawgiver is important
whenever the poor or less rich see that their interests are different
from those of the rich, that is when the poor are class conscious.
This is often not the case, for it is usually not too difficult to
convince the barely-rich that their interests and those of the
very-rich are the same. No one seems to have worried about Draco's
bonafides. During the last quarter of the twentieth century most
Americans thought their interests were the same as those of the very
rich. Even the poor thought themselves “entrepreneurs.” Where
being barely-rich ends and being poor begins is a matter of opinion.
In any case the citizen lawgiver, where mistrust exists, must make
the laws and vanish, forcing the inhabitants of the city to think as
the citizen thinks in any dispute. The citizen lawgiver is essential
when the sides openly have different interests.</span></div>
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<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span style="font-style: normal;">So
where does that leave our own Constitution? Americans generally
imagine the “founding fathers” bubbling over with good will,
sitting around a large solid table, and trying with their formidable
intelligences to craft or better, “hammer out,” our marvelous
system of checks and balances to protect our liberties. But at that
time the debate was all about whether or not the Constitution would
</span></span><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"><i>take away</i></span><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span style="font-style: normal;">
American liberties. For example, here is <a href="http://www.constitution.org/rc/rat_va_04.htm#henry-01">Patrick
Henry</a>, one of the most prominent anti-federalists speaking
against ratification. </span></span>
</div>
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<span style="color: black;"> “</span><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">The
rights of conscience, trial by jury, liberty of the press, all your
immunities and franchises, all pretensions to human rights and
privileges, are rendered insecure, if not lost, by this change, so
loudly talked of by some, and inconsiderately by others.”</span></span></span></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">Those
who supported the Constitution tried to calm this fear. The complex
and ingenious structure of “checks and balances” would guarantee
our freedoms, they said. The Articles of Confederation under which
the United States actually came into being was a loose affiliation of
truly independent states. There was no standing army and the
Confederate government had no power to tax citizens and no real way
to force the states to contribute. It protected freedoms quite
admirably, was nearly broke, and opened the opportunity for foreign
powers to play one state against another. The Constitution was a
proposal to “form a more perfect union,” that is, cede
sovereignty to the federal government. No one, for or against,
thought of it as protecting freedoms. Those for the Constitution
could argue, at best, that it would not take them away.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">During
the Constitutional Convention Jefferson was in France. We must
remember that communication between France and the US was, in those
days, arduous. Jefferson wasn't getting daily reports. Hamilton and
Madison were the most important proponents of the Constitution. What
were their concerns? The English had remained in the Northwest
Territory (Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin and Michigan) longer
than they were supposed to, and Spain controlled a large part of the
Mississippi. John Jay had been sent to negotiate navigation on the
Mississippi and had been humiliated. In fact American diplomats in
general had been treated with contempt in Europe. Our founding
fathers, who look so dignified and gentlemanly to us, were bumpkins
to the incredibly refined European aristocracy. They were made to
squirm in the role of the <i>bourgeois </i><span style="color: #333333;"><span style="font-size: small;"><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">gentilhomme</span></i></span></span>.
They were looked upon as the representatives of some rag-tag mockery
of a country--or so Hamilton and Madison said. In addition in revenge
for the revolution the English were restricting American shipping and
it seemed war was about to break out with France. With pressure from
all these sources some of the states had made private deals with
other countries, and the union seemed likely to break up. </span>
</div>
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<br /></div>
<div style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">Hamilton
argued that not only England, France and Spain, but also Holland was
a potential enemy of the Confederation. Others thought these threats
exaggerated. Jefferson, in France, tried to calm everyone on that
score. Here is <a href="http://www.constitution.org/rc/rat_va_07.htm#henry-03">Patrick
Henry</a> again:</span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: 1in; margin-right: 1in;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">We are threatened
with danger for the non-payment of our debt due to France. We have
information come from an illustrious citizen of Virginia, who is now
in Paris, which disproves the suggestions of such danger. This
citizen has not been in the airy regions of theoretic speculation:
our ambassador is this worthy citizen. The ambassador of the United
States of America is not so despised as the honorable gentleman would
make us believe. A servant of a republic is as much respected as that
of a monarch. The honorable gentleman tells us that hostile fleets
are to be sent to make reprisals upon us: our ambassador tells you
that the king of France has taken into consideration to enter into
commercial regulations, on reciprocal terms, with us, which will be
of peculiar advantage to us. Does this look like hostility?....</span></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: 1in; margin-right: 1in;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">Do you suppose the
Spanish monarch will risk a contest with the United States, when his
feeble colonies are exposed to them? Every advance the people make to
the westward, makes him tremble for Mexico and Peru. Despised as we
are among ourselves, under our present government, we are terrible to
that monarchy. If this be not a fact, it is generally said so.</span></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: 1in; margin-right: 1in;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">We are, in the
next place, frightened by dangers from Holland. We must change our
government to escape the wrath of that republic. Holland groans under
a government like this new one. A stadtholder, sir, a Dutch
president, has brought on that country miseries which will not permit
them to collect debts with fleets or armies. </span></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">Patrick
Henry tried to minimize every threat Hamilton saw; Hamilton seems not
to have believed him. In any case Hamilton had one obvious motive —to
shift sovereignty from the states to the federal government-- that
would have made him ready to profess fear of whatever the Union would
protect against. Hamilton's interest was entirely in creating an
unbreakable union with the power to tax and raise an army. Jefferson
recounts a <a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=4vrD1WKLicwC&pg=PA95&lpg=PA95&dq=Thomas+jefferson+%22isaac+Newton%22+hamilton&source=bl&ots=eJXLmAmcAe&sig=zGd3CQNf7VTM9Tr2VDl2Agb0-D0&hl=en&ei=QWDWToO8B8rL0QH-uKX9AQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=3&ved=0CCwQ6AEwAg#v=onepage&q=hamilton&f=false">meeting</a>
(page 96) with Hamilton in which Hamilton expressed his preference
for Julius Caesar over Enlightenment luminaries Jefferson admired. He
called Caesar the greatest man who ever lived. Jefferson told
Washington that Hamilton had asserted that only force and interest
could rule men. Unless Jefferson was lying, Hamilton had no faith in
the Constitutional Government's complex structure, but went along
with it to centralize the government. It is hard not to see Hamilton
having used Madison to argue to the other Enlightenment influenced
men for the checks and balances where he could not. Henry and
Hamilton both fixed their eyes firmly upon who was to control
military force. They differed in that each saw the other's preferred
result as a disaster.</span></div>
<div style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">Hamilton
may or may not have believed in the threats he warned of, but he was
definitely a patriot, or at any rate thought of himself as one. For
he was surely correct about the states going their own way and making
independent arrangements with foreign, or simply other, states.
Independent states make their own treaties. Hamilton wanted a
constitutional monarchy, and his <a href="http://www.usconstitution.net/consttop_ccon.html#hamilton">British
Plan</a>, introduced at the Constitutional Convention included a
“Governor” and Senators elected for life, and state governors
appointed by the national legislature. Hamilton was a visionary, a
genius, and probably a paranoid who saw a United States mortally
threatened during its infancy, but, if protected, growing into a
colossus ruled by a Caesar. That was what he wanted to have happen,
that is what he believed was best, and that is what has happened. </span>
</div>
<div style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">Hamilton's
greatest fear was the nightmare of a continent full of petty states,
like Europe. After the introduction his first three entries in <i>The
Federalist Papers</i> are all on this subject. Here is a <a href="http://thomas.loc.gov/home/histdox/fed_06.html">sample</a>
of his language:</span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: 1in; margin-right: 1in;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">A
man must be far gone in Utopian speculations who can seriously doubt
that, if these States should either be wholly disunited, or only
united in partial confederacies, the subdivisions into which they
might be thrown would have frequent and violent contests with each
other. </span></span></span>
</div>
<div style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">Madison's
primary concern seems to have been Shay's Rebellion that had shaken
the Massachusetts establishment. Shay had been in the continental
army, had loaned money to the Continental Congress to pursue the war,
then had found the Federal Government, without the power of taxation,
could not redeem the bonds and they were almost worthless. On top of
that when he had returned home he found he had lost his land for
debt. He was not the only one thinking he had gotten a raw deal, and
many others were also outraged. A rag-tag army of, some said, 30,000
seemed to grow overnight. To Madison Shay's rebellion was the
ultimate nightmare. Patrick Henry, on the other hand criticized Shay
only for lack of capacity, and Jefferson actually <a href="http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/jefferson/105.html">welcomed</a>
the rebellion. </span>
</div>
<div style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">Both
Hamilton and Madison reflexively thought it was necessary to suppress
Shay and his ilk with force. Here is <a href="http://thomas.loc.gov/home/histdox/fed_09.html">Hamilton</a>:</span></div>
<div style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: 1in; margin-right: 1in;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">"Should
a popular insurrection happen in one of the confederate states the
others are able to quell it. Should abuses creep into one part, they
are reformed by those that remain sound.</span></span></span></div>
<div style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: 1in; margin-right: 1in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
“Quell” and “remain sound” are
for curing diseases. The Union is the cure.</div>
<div style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">Here
<a href="http://www.constitution.org/dfc/dfc_0619.htm">Madison</a>:</span></div>
<div style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: 1in; margin-right: 1in;">
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><span style="font-weight: normal;">The
insurrections in Massts. admonished all the States of the danger to
which they were exposed. Yet the plan of Mr. P. contained no
provisions for supplying the defect of the Confederation on this
point. According to the Republican theory indeed, Right & power
being both vested in the majority, are held to be synonymous.
According to fact & experience, a minority may in an appeal to
force be an overmatch for the majority. 1. </span></span></span><a href="http://www.constitution.org/dfc/dfc_0619.htm#15"><span style="color: black;"><sup><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><b>15</b></span></sup></span></a><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><span style="font-weight: normal;"> If
the minority happen to include all such as possess the skill &
habits of military life, with such as possess the great pecuniary
resources, one third may conquer the remaining two thirds. 2. </span></span></span><a href="http://www.constitution.org/dfc/dfc_0619.htm#16"><span style="color: black;"><sup><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><b>16</b></span></sup></span></a><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><span style="font-weight: normal;"> one
third of those who participate in the choice of rulers may be
rendered a majority by the accession of those whose poverty
disqualifies them from a suffrage, & who for obvious reasons
may </span></span></span><a href="http://www.constitution.org/dfc/dfc_0619.htm#17"><span style="color: black;"><sup><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><b>17</b></span></sup></span></a><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><span style="font-weight: normal;">be
more ready to join the standard of sedition than that of
the </span></span></span><a href="http://www.constitution.org/dfc/dfc_0619.htm#18"><span style="color: black;"><sup><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><b>18</b></span></sup></span></a><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><span style="font-weight: normal;"> established
Government. 3. </span></span></span><a href="http://www.constitution.org/dfc/dfc_0619.htm#19"><span style="color: black;"><sup><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><b>19</b></span></sup></span></a><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><span style="font-weight: normal;"> where
slavery exists, the Republican Theory becomes still more fallacious.</span></span></span></span></div>
<div style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: 1in; margin-right: 1in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">The
appeal to force and repression is direct. So it is clear that the
American Constitution is a Draconian alliance of the rich for the
repression of the poor. Neither Shay, who would have been the proper
representative of the poor, nor anyone sympathetic to him, ever
ratified the Constitution. That was done entirely within the state
legislatures. However, what the Constitution created was something
almost new, a Republic, and this threw a monkey wrench into the
workings of the rich. For we must remember that it is Patrick Henry
and other rich men who opposed the Constitution on the grounds that
it restricted their freedom. Henry would never have been in Shay's
shoes, but here he was in apparent alliance with him. </span></span>
</div>
<div style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><span style="font-weight: normal;">The
Constitution of the United States created a new body politic where
there never had been one. Henry feared that the federal government,
once created, would have interests of its own. He conjured up a
constitutional tyrant repressing the states. In this he was on the
money. Henry, Madison, Monroe, Jefferson and similar others ruled
Virginia very comfortably. Their freedom consisted in being able to
shape the world around them with others who talked it out with them
and acted from a sense of justice. Having to talk to others, equals,
face to face, was what kept them honest. That, what they called
“freedom,” was what they would lose. Oh they would still be able
to talk, but they would not be able to manage the life around them.
The federal government, with its ability to tax the citizens directly
and raise an army, would be a power all its own which, of necessity,
would repress the states and so take away this freedom. The Civil War
decided the issue once and for all. Henry was right and he lost. </span></span></span>
</div>
<div style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><span style="font-weight: normal;">It
is hard to believe that Hamilton, who thought only force and interest
could rule men, ever believed in the checks and balances of the
constitution. Henry certainly never did. But such constructs of
government were all the rage in those days, and it seems almost
certain that Madison had real faith in them. The Enlightenment had
changed the idea of law to correspond to its new idea of natural law.
Natural law, like Newton's law of gravitation, had come to consist
of a set of procedures. Each of these procedures when done carefully,
produced a predictable result. But Enlightenment men did not think of
them as a set of procedures, but as revelations about the laws of
nature. Newton's Law of Gravitation gave people license to think we
knew how all things worked in the cosmos, for it applied both on
earth and in the heavens. We still live with this epistemological
commitment. No one noticed that Newton's gravitational formula can
describe </span></span></span><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">any</span></i></span></span><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><span style="font-weight: normal;">
eliptical or hyperbolic planetary path depending upon the masses and
initial velocities involved. But these numbers were just plugged in
to make the orbits what we already knew to be right. The game was
circular, but no one was good enough at math to see it. The idea that
science examines nature (which is somehow always found in the
laboratory) obscures science's real nature as a collection of recipes
for operations that, done carefully, produce predictable results.
Everybody thought of the Enlightenment as having discovered the real
truth about everything. The universe was merely a succession of
repeatable procedures. It ran, as it were, on rails. Since such
procedures were ideal for producing commodities, the rapid creation
of wealth cemented the belief. Mass production here we come, but the
idea of life as made up of a complex of rigid procedures, </span></span></span><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">the</span></i></span></span><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><span style="font-weight: normal;">
Enlightenment idea, infected the Constitutional Convention. Belief in
rigid procedures —the checks and balances and election rituals--
substituted for belief in the one true citizen, Solon and in his good
will, as essential for law's success. The checks and balances, rules
for human behavior, could, it was thought, be specified. These
procedures would cancel out private interests automatically so that
only the interest of the whole would result. Madison specifically
renounces and hope for good will in </span></span></span><a href="http://thomas.loc.gov/home/histdox/fed_10.html">Federalist
10</a><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><span style="font-weight: normal;">.</span></span></span></div>
<div style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: 1in; margin-right: 1in;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><span style="font-size: small;">It is
in vain to say that enlightened statesmen will be able to adjust
these clashing interests, and render them all subservient to the
public good. Enlightened statesmen will not always be at the helm.
Nor, in many cases, can such an adjustment be made at all without
taking into view indirect and remote considerations, which will
rarely prevail over the immediate interest which one party may find
in disregarding the rights of another or the good of the whole.</span></span></span></div>
<div style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">The
Constitution was, so to speak, Draconian rather than Solonic, that is
an alliance of the rich against the Shay and the poor rather than a
peace treaty between rich and poor. But it was also Solonic as a
peace treaty between the rich and the Federal government. The
anti-federalists feared the new body politic itself wold be a
constitutional tyrant. Whereas in Greece the poor sought protection
from the rich, here the rich seek protection from the government. It
is for this that an American Solon was needed. For that Solon we
have the checks and balances.</span></span></div>
<div style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">The
new Solon was “due process.” The founding fathers counted on the
governmental processes to preserve their freedom. Men are
self-interested and the best we can do is try to balance these
interests so that, in the tug of war, the general interest will
emerge. “We are a nation of laws, not of men,” is a description
of just this reliance on process rather than good will. </span></span>
</div>
<div style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">It
is interesting to compare the Bill of Rights to other earlier laws.
Earlier laws are about who owes what to whom, who had the right to
hunt where, who has the right to tax whom, and the like. There is
nothing like the right to free assembly or the right to free speech
or freedom of the press, all of which seem not to be a question of
one person's interests over another's. These are rights one needs to
oppose a government structured upon ideas, a government that,
supposedly, can be opposed or persuaded through argument. The
separation of powers, election of officials, and shortly after
ratification, the Bill of Rights were supposed to protect against
constitutional tyranny. Many believed it would work. Henry and
Jefferson did not. Henry was one of the few who saw no problem with
the Articles of Confederation. He believed that free men in the
states could protect themselves without such a repressive structure
as he saw the new Federal State to be. </span></span>
</div>
<div style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';"> </span></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">This
Enlightenment faith in procedure was not only American, but took hold
wherever the Enlightenment spread. In France, The Declaration of the
Rights of Man is full of principles that are to be secured by law.
The </span></span></span></span><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">Code
Napoleon </span></i></span></span><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">supposedly</span></span></span></span><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">
</span></i></span></span><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">created
the system of procedures for France. This all came crashing down
with the Dreyfus affair that I treat with more detail </span></span></span></span><a href="http://deeperdarkness.blogspot.com/2011_08_01_archive.html">here</a><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">.</span></span></span></span></div>
<div style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">The
Dreyfus Affair revealed that the system of procedures could not
insure justice and in fact mitigated against it. At the time it was
quite clear to everybody. Zola's </span></span></span></span><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">J'accuse
</span></i></span></span><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">is
about how, with the Dreyfus Case, France betrays it's foundation in
</span></span></span></span><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">The
Declaration of the Rights of Man. </span></i></span></span><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">He
mentions antisemitism only once. Even Theodor Hertzl, for whom The
Dreyfus case was a revelation of eternal antisemitism, saw the case
as a repudiation of France's deepest principles. What was so
appalling was that to implicate Dreyfus court officials introduced
flagrantly false evidence. They went through the motions, the
procedures and produced a mockery. Their shameless falsehoods flew in
the face of reason itself, but when they refused to withdraw what to
any reasonable man were outrageous forgeries, there was nothing
within the law to stop them. </span></span></span></span>
</div>
<div style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">Franz
Kafka's story </span></span></span></span><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">In
the Penal Colony</span></i></span></span><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">
illustrates perfectly what had happened. In it, the penal colony has
inherited a machine for administering justice from an earlier
“Commandant.” The machine is the centerpiece for the whole penal
colony which is itself a machine meant to run by itself.</span></span></span></span></div>
<div style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: 1in; margin-right: 1in;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">We who were
his friends knew even before he died that the organization of the
colony was so perfect that his successor, even with a thousand new
schemes in his head, would find it impossible to alter anything, at
least for many years to come. </span></span>
</div>
<div style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">The
colony was a process resistant to human intervention. The machine is
designed to operate a set of needles to write the criminals crime on
his back in wounds. A tattoo of words kills him. The officer, who
runs the show, explains it in French, which the soldier and the
condemned man don't understand. Even though the officer tasked with
administering the punishment was there at the machine's construction,
he does not know how to fix it. Anyway, he can't get parts. The
machine is falling apart. No one any longer knows how it was supposed
to work. When the officer finally subjects the prisoner to it, it
mangles him horribly and writes nothing on his back. </span>
</div>
<div style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">The
justice system of the West, set up as a machine for justice meant to
run rigidly according to strict procedures, has substituted
procedure-following for justice. Supreme Court Justice Scalia's
infamous <a href="http://www.presstv.ir/usdetail/200380.html">comment</a>
reveals this:</span></div>
<div style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: 1in; margin-right: 1in;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">"This
Court has never held that the Constitution forbids the execution of a
convicted defendant who has had a full and fair trial but is later
able to convince a habeas court that he is "actually"
innocent. Quite to the contrary, we have repeatedly left that
question unresolved, while expressing considerable doubt that any
claim based on alleged "actual innocence" is
constitutionally cognizable."</span></span></span></div>
<div style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">The
quotes around “actual innocence” sets it off against innocence
found through the procedures of the law. That he didn't do the crime
is irrelevant if the procedures produced a “guilty” verdict.
Scalia is not being a monster here unless being a good judge is being
a monster. For he is just following what every lawyer learns in law
school. The result of the procedures is what matters. All else is
juvenile folderol. How the machine was supposed to work no one can
tell. It is outside our ken. </span>
</div>
<div style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">The
hope that rigid procedure, law, as it were, on rails, could
substitute for good will, was vain. Wittgenstein has shown decisively
that nothing written can dictate rule-following, even in the most
basic case, that of counting. If someone insists he is obeying the
rules in following 1000 with 1002 we might banish him from further
math study, or even send him to the insane asylum, but what we cannot
do is show him where he is wrong by pointing to a rule. For he will
insist he is following it. Mathematics works because of a rigid
training. It is a tyranny, a tyranny of teachers, not marks on a
page. Those who won't or can't obey are thrown out. </span>
</div>
<div style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">Since
law is a peace treaty between two classes who have no good will but
see ending their hostilities as more important than some of their
private interests, both sides <i>want </i>to reinterpret the law in
their own favor. If the guarantee for the laws fair interpretation is
not good will but some rigid procedure, both sides are free to
exercise themselves fully to have things go their way within the
letter of the law. The reliance on procedure is a license to pursue
self-interest. Since laws do not actually prescribe anything unless
there is good will, it is quite easy to manipulate them. For <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enemy_combatant">example</a>:</span></div>
<div style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: 1in; margin-right: 1in;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">In
the United States the use of the phrase "enemy
combatant" was used after 9/11 by the Bush administration to
include an alleged member of al Qaeda or the Taliban being
held in detention by the U.S. government as part of the war on
terror. In this sense, "enemy combatant" actually refers to
persons the United States regards as unlawful combatants, a
category of persons who do not qualify for prisoner-of-war status
under the Geneva Conventions.</span></span></span></div>
<div style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: 1in; margin-right: 1in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="color: black;">To
circumvent the law one need merely rename someone so that they fall
outside the category. Want to circumvent labor laws, rename the
workers “independent contractors.” Can't have an office slave?
Call her an “intern.” “War?” no, “kinetic military
action.” Conversely, if you want to include some entity under the
protection of the law, use the same trick in reverse. A corporation
is a “person;” money is “speech.” But these are only the
most obvious techniques. Techniques are limited only by human
ingenuity itself. Perhaps the law has a spirit as well as a letter,
but rigid procedures refer only to the letter, and it can be twisted
to mean anything. The faith in procedure is misplaced and relieves
the parties, especially the rich, of the obligation of good will,
essential to the success of any system of law. And thus we see the
ever more Kafkaesque government going ever further along the rails as
law is piled upon law in the vain attempt to turn human action into
procedures done on rails of written language. We imagine <span style="font-size: small;">these
procedures forged of steel but they are woven of cobwebs.</span></span></div>
<div style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>Michael http://www.blogger.com/profile/17596457110530754431noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4415577562084074022.post-2657325856839337182011-11-03T12:40:00.000-07:002011-11-03T12:46:20.526-07:00Conservative intellectuals and the invisible hand<title></title>
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<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">Conservative
Intellectuals</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-size: medium;"> <i>The invisible hand just gave you the finger, son.</i></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-size: medium;"><i> </i>Clyde "the possum" Ridenour</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-size: medium;"><i> </i></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
The expression “conservative
intellectual” was, at least until the nineteen-fifties, an
oxymoron. Conservatives, with their founder, Edmund Burke, insisted
that not reason but custom was the true foundation of freedom. The
rights of Englishmen, founded in long tradition and customary
practice, were real. “The rights of man,” the brainchild of
Enlightenment thinking, was but a chimera, a brainstorm without
substance. The “reason” of the Enlightenment produced only a
wind-egg and worse, the Terror. Conservatism attacked reason itself,
so how could it then turn around and spawn conservative “think
tanks” such as the Heritage Foundation, peopled with conservative
intellectuals?</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
The change seems to have come with
books like <span style="font-style: normal;"> </span><i>The Origins of
Totalitarianism</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> by Hannah
Arendt. Totalitarianism was what linked the regimes of Nazi Germany
and Soviet Russia together. Before that everyone thought one was
extreme left and the other extreme right. No two regimes could have
been more different. But no, they shared a new kind of political
structure never imagined by the ancients who otherwise identified all
known political structures.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-style: normal;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-style: normal;">Totalitarianism, it seemed, needed an ideology, a set of ideas that
cling together to inspire citizens to embrace the totalitarian
movement, set out for its illusory Shangri-la, and perish in confusion. The
ideas within the ideology were unimportant because the ideology
served the same purpose in any totalitarian structure regardless of
the ideology's content. That the Soviet Union was to the far left and
Nazi Germany to the far right didn't matter. The actual ideas in the
ideology factored out, so to speak, leaving just the path, the
unreachable Shangri-la, and the pit. </span>
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-style: normal;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
The totalitarian
structure was not really a structure at all, but, perhaps an
anti-structure, a whirlwind where everything changed from day to day.
Its kaleidoscopic chaos hypnotized the population then led them into
the maw. In its grip people turned away from lifelong friends. In
politics they fervently embraced policies and motives only to abandon
them a day later. Such is the instability of ideas. Under
totalitarianism, in the spell of ideology, people abandoned all
morality. They shoved others into gas chambers in Poland, or,
bizarrely, confessed to crimes they did not commit, after which they
trundling off proudly to their own executions in Moscow. Nothing held
fast; everything was in flux. Oh ideas, evil ideas. Spiraling into
hell, those in their grip hallucinated that they marched all
together towards paradise.
</div>
<div style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-style: normal;"> The
conservative intellectual's task was to raise the alarm against
ideas--to persuade people that state planning, reason, ideas used to
achieve some state purpose, led to disaster. Their objection was to
practical reason, planning and carrying out that plan, not rhetoric.
Unlike Burke, they did not object to the use of the art of
persuasion. Talk away. Just don't do any non-market thing if you are
in the government. State programs launched for the common good were
the enemy. All plans were the germs of ideologies that pointed to
some hair-brained utopia whose vision hypnotized governments and
turned leaders into zombies. Indeed anything a government might do to
achieve any goal was the germ of horrible ruin. </span><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span style="font-style: normal;">The
conservative intellectual wanted to point out that our own liberal
democracy was itself in mortal danger to the extent that the
government had ideas that led them to do things. To make policy in
the hope of achieving some social program was to invite
totalitarianism. Thinking to help, you create disaster. “The
tyranny of good intentions” discredited all good intentions. Since
ideology, ideas used to plan action, always leads to totalitarianism,
government regulation was only a step away from the gas chamber. </span></span>
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span style="font-style: normal;"> Burke's
attack on reason was incoherent. He argued against the firebrands of
the French Revolution in a rhetorical war to see who could persuade
the English to either embrace the ideas of the French Revolution or
repudiate them. Burke argued rhetorically that the rhetorical appeal
of his enemies should be repudiated because </span></span><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"><i>all
rhetorical appeals</i></span><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span style="font-style: normal;">
</span></span><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"><i>are bad</i></span><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span style="font-style: normal;">.
Ideas, no matter how good, tear up custom and make the ship of state
rudderless. Custom is the steady guide. But custom does not need
Burke to exhort you to follow it, for then you would be following
Burke and not custom. He reasoned that one should not trust reason. </span></span>
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span style="font-style: normal;"> His
modern disciples have solved that problem. Because their quarry is
not a gaggle of soap box firebrands, but the government itself, they
have withdrawn their objection to rhetoric and have thrust their
lance at practical reason. That is where the totalitarian danger
comes from. What they object to is “government regulation” to
achieve a social program. Regulations deprive us of “free choice.”
The government sets up rules and enforces them -- with violence if
necessary. This is coercion. The conservative intellectual includes
all government regulation and all commands in the category of
“coercion.” The government is identified with the highwayman. Both coerce. Thus all government regulation is bad, and will lead
to catastrophe-- depressions, gulags, holocausts, totalitarianism.
Government should act only as a referee to prevent force and fraud and so be
a shelter for the free market, but otherwise do nothing. Individual
free choice, allowing the “invisible hand” to shape the world,
replaced custom as the guide through the wilderness.</span></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"> The
conservative intellectual does not object to the use of commands
within a commercial enterprise, that is, within the free market. The
workers have chosen to work in the factory. They have chosen to obey
the commands of the boss. Even though their entire lives are spent
obeying commands, they are free. For they freely chose to go to work.
If they don't like it they can leave. Such a situation remains within
the realm of “choice.” </span>
</div>
<div style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"> In
the Introduction to <i>Free to Choose</i>, Milton and Rose Friedman,
make up a little bit of American history. It goes something like
this. Our founding fathers created the United States of America to
protect men from the encroachment of government. For quite some time
Americans were largely free, and the country blossomed. But in spite
of this there were still many evils. Intellectuals forgot that it was
free choice that produced all the good and thought they could use
government to correct all the evils. When these intellectuals were
able to influence the government, the Great Depression resulted.
Here, in the Friedmans' own words, is how the story ends:</span></div>
<div style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: 1in; margin-right: 1in;">
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">However, government's
responsibility for the depression was not recognized —either then
or now. Instead, the depression was widely interpreted as a failure
of free market capitalism. That myth led the public to join the
intellectuals in a changed view of the relative responsibilities of
individuals and government. Emphasis on the responsibility of the
individual for his own fate was replaced by emphasis on the
individual as a pawn buffeted by forces beyond his control. The view
that government's role is to serve as an umpire to prevent
individuals from coercing one another was replaced by a view that
government's role is to serve as a parent charged with the duty of
coercing some to aid others.<a class="sdfootnoteanc" href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=4415577562084074022#sdfootnote1sym" name="sdfootnote1anc"><sup>1</sup></a>
</span>
</div>
<div style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">The
Friedmans offers us no example of an intellectual who embraced their
bizarre idea of the duties of a parent. But what Friedman objects to
here is coercive social programs. Such governmental interference
coerces the rich to aid the poor. The Friedmans, as usual, assimilate such
“coercion” to that of the highwayman. But given these two
very dissimilar cases, just where does the boundary lie? The
Friedmans do not want to say that natural limitations coerce us. “I
would prefer to fly but my lack of wings coerces me into walking.”
No. What is, is. Coercion is something people do and has nothing to
do with our natural limitations, which are neither good nor bad but
simply something an adult must live with. The starvation of a
worker's children, for example, does not coerce him into taking a
job that he otherwise would have spat upon. He still makes a free
choice. To complain about this is to complain about not having wings.
What is, is; one makes choices within the context of reality. If
your children are starving that is what is. You try to fix it, but
within the market place. “What is” in this case as well, is not
coercion, according to Friedman. What distinguishes “what is”
from minimum wage laws? Why is it not coercion when they are? No
doubt it is that only people, or social institutions can coerce. No one made the children starve.</span></div>
<div style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"> Now
the worker with starving children might say that the rich man who
owns all the food is <i>coercing him</i> when he comes to get some
food. Instead of letting him take it he had guards, the police, who
use coercion, even violence, to keep him from the food. The worker
did not use force; He would have been happy to take the food
peacefully. Force was used against him. And this coercion arose with
people, namely, the police. So it is not like “just the way things
are.” This is a simple case of government coercion. “But a man has a right to protect his own property,” the
conservative intellectual will say indignantly. “Protection of
property is what the United States is all about. It is essential for
the free market. ” Very well, but then the Conservative
intellectual must admit that coercion is good in the protection of
property. Since “protection of property” is an idea and the
police an agency for carrying out government regulation to realize
that idea, when the conservative intellectual accepts police
coercion he violates his own principles.</span></div>
<div style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"> Coercion to protect property rights is governmental regulation to realize a social good. Why is this regulation good but not
one guaranteeing enough food for your children? The answer, whatever
it may be, comes from ideas, <i>verboten ideas,</i> and an attempt to
realize them. So there is no possible justification for choosing one
right, “ protection of property,” over the other, “the right to not be hungry,” without contradiction of the
principle forbidding social programs to realize ideas of the good.
The conservative intellectual is left with a conceptual train wreck. </span>
</div>
<div style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"> Friedman
wants to say that good things happen when the umpire favors property
and not starving children. But this good thing is a social good the
Government uses regulation to realize. The free market is a
cornucopia! Maybe so, but the poor man with no share in it might not
call it a good thing. What is it to him? He would not allow that <i>any
good thing</i> can happen while his children starve. Since we are all
individuals any opinion is as good as any other. For we must not try
to realize any social good through means outside the market place.
What is good and what bad coercion depends upon one's point of view.
The intellectual argument objecting to coercion has vanished and the
conservative intellectual is revealed as simply having taken sides.
Once there can be good and bad coercion “coercion” loses its
place as a criterion for what is good or bad. And the conservative
intellectual can offer no other criterion without violating his own
principles.</span></div>
<div style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"> The
distinction between “free” and “coerced” also disappears,
since freedom, The Friedmans agree, requires a coercive umpire to
keep people from coercing one another. In other words freedom
requires coercion to remain free. So how can “freedom” and
“coercion” inhabit mutually exclusive realms? What is freedom now
that coercion must be inevitably mixed in with it? For governmental use of coercion to achieve
social ends is, in his setup, identical to highway robbery. If one
tries to argue that the police do not really influence anyones actual
choices and thus to distinguish between good coercion that does not
influence market choice and bad coercion that does, the highwayman
will object. For, he will argue, his coercion does not influence
market choices either. His pistol is like a deed of trust that
proves that he already holds his victims life in his hand. He does
not threaten his victim's life; he already possesses it and can do
with in what he will. The victim can choose to buy back his life with
his money or not. Whichever he chooses, he is not coerced. The highwayman offers him a deal: his money for his life. He is
free to choose. The highwayman does not
influence him either way. That his life is at stake is irrelevant.
For lives are often at stake in the market. In the quote above the
Friedmans want us to think of the citizen as [responsible] “for his
own fate” rather than as a “pawn buffeted by forces.” Very
well, then why shouldn't he be responsible for the protection of his
own life and goods? The market is a translation of a Darwinian jungle
into a paper city. It is a duel to the death fought with documents
rather than with tooth and claw. But why exclude tooth and claw? The
exclusion of these weapons is unjustified. Why deprive the con man or
thug of his skills? No argument without an appeal to the general good
is possible. Any rules restricting a jungle where the fittest survive
will keep the fittest from surviving unless one assimilates the rules
to “what is.” </span>
</div>
<div style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"> The
discourse of the conservative intellectual is really an ideology, a
set of ideas that don't hold together, but set us off towards a
utopia and to our doom. This utopia is perhaps different in that the
conservative intellectual refuses to offer any picture of it. The
“invisible hand of the market” will take our hands and lead us
there, but we will not know where we are going. Just the human
penchant for boredom will guarantee that if we ever think we know
where we are going the enormous urge to not continue in the same
direction for yet another day will set us off in a different
direction. Knowing where you are going is a sure sign of not knowing
where you are going. This utopia has no fixed shape. Its citizen is a
man who constantly tries to peer into the future and then get there
first. He tries to glimpse the next “what comes next” and point
his own market activity towards it. Superior human beings, capable of
guessing the desires of tomorrow, will emerge. The Conservative
Utopia, the best of all possible worlds, sometimes called “whatever
comes next” is just whatever emerges from the rough and tumble of
the marketplace (but it will be good!). In our blind march towards
the utopia of market success some find the way, but most fall by the
wayside. If you do it is your own fault; you lack character or
energy, stability or imagination, in short either one thing or its
opposite. That is the Darwinian way of the world, and it is good.
This Utopia's indistinctness, far beyond the formidable
indistinctness of previous utopias, gives it plausibility in our
present habitual mistrust of planning and clear goals (except within
a market context). But since all such utopias are unreachable, the
unrecognizablity of this one hardly matters. If an hallucination
without any qualities can be called an hallucination, this utopia is
as hallucinatory as any other, or even more so, since whatever
happens is a step in the right direction. Recent events have revealed
that this utopia is a fatal snare , but its web of ideas continues to
entangle us. </span>
</div>
<div style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
What you would normally think</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Has more to it than that.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Behind the surface truth</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Something else appears.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
When you focus there</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
You find a silver path</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Whose forks, seeming choices,</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Are outposts, points of view,</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
From which the beauty of the whole plan</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Shows up.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
But someone else is there.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
A spider in that web</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Views you as you flail</div>
<div style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">In
the trap he set for you.</span></div>
<div style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div id="sdfootnote1">
<div class="sdfootnote">
<a class="sdfootnotesym" href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=4415577562084074022#sdfootnote1anc" name="sdfootnote1sym">1</a>Milton
and Rose Friedman, <i>Free to Choose</i><span style="font-style: normal;">:(Harcourt
Brace Jovanovich, 1980) 5</span></div>
</div>Michael http://www.blogger.com/profile/17596457110530754431noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4415577562084074022.post-78149631964114960772011-10-22T08:26:00.001-07:002011-10-22T11:36:14.408-07:00The Catastrophe of Class Warfare<title></title>
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Karl Marx wrote <i>The Eighteenth
Brumaire of Louis Napoleon </i><span style="font-style: normal;">as a
history of the French Revolution of 1848 in terms of class warfare. Its oft quoted first two
sentences read, “</span><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">Hegel
remarks somewhere</span></span></span></span></span><span style="color: #000099;"><span style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="font-family: arial, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-color: transparent; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial;">
</span></span></span></span></span></span></span><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">that
all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak,
twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time
as farce.” He refers here to the French Revolutions of 1789 and
1848. The first is a tragedy because, according to Marx, power
changed hands from the old aristocracy to the rising bourgeoisie. The
second is a farce because power fell into the hands of the buffoon,
Louis Napoleon but means of production did not change hands from one
class to another. For although the Paris proletariat did hold power
for a brief time in February, 1848, a counterrevolution involving
almost all classes against the proletariat, allowed Louis Napoleon,
the representative of the </span></span></span></span></span><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">lumpen
proletariat</span></i></span></span></span><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">,
to take power and rule for many years. Though different in kind both
revolutions are stage plays, but, Marx hopes, the real revolution,
the “social revolution of the nineteenth century, won't be. </span></span></span></span></span>
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"> Marx
chuckles at the bourgeoisie for being so afraid of the proletariat
that it allows itself to fall into barbarism, demolishing what Marx
thinks of as the bourgeois goal, the bourgeois republic. “The
French bourgeoisie had long ago found the solution to Napoleon’s
dilemma: 'In fifty years Europe will be republican or Cossack.' It
solved it in the “Cossack republic.” No Circe using black magic
has distorted that work of art, the bourgeois republic, into a
monstrous shape. That republic has lost nothing but the semblance of
respectability.” Marx expects this monstrous specter to inspire the
“social revolution of the nineteenth century.” He explains that
the proletariat didn't revolt after Dec 2 when Louis Napoleon
overthrew the vestiges of the bourgeois republic because the whole
remainder of the nation ganged up against it— including the
peasantry. But also, he asserts, the proletariat will not be able to
replay a past stage play, but must invent itself as it goes along. In
spite of this hiccup, the history fits neatly into Hegelian terms.
Contradictions within the bourgeois republic lead it to throw itself
into the arms of Louis Napoleon, described as what most of us would
see as a proto-Nazi. With the Bourgeois Republic now revealed as a
monstrosity, the social revolution of the nineteenth century cannot
be far off. </span></span></span>
</div>
<div style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"> Marx
adopted the word “proletariat” to identify the working class and
with it he describes history as, not a story about political actors,
but class warfare. Aristocracy, bourgeoisie, proletariat, and lumpen
proletariat—these are the actors on the world historical stage.
Since then, this description has been persuasive both to the “left”
and to the “right.” It is class war that allows Marx to describe
the revolution of 1789 as tragedy and that of 1848 as farce. The
idea that the first French Revolution, that of 1789, was the
“Bourgeois Revolution,” as Marx described it, has taken root.
Most on the left now think of that revolution as something of a
preliminary revolution, with the final revolution, the proletarian
revolution, still to be accomplished. To be sure, with Marx's
demonization, the word “proletariat” can no longer be used, but
the idea remains. “The people” or “the 99%” now substitute
for it. The distinction is one of class. </span></span></span>
</div>
<div style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"> But
those who actually participated in the French Revolution did not
think of it in class terms. The Marquis de Lafayette wrote the
Declaration of the Rights of Man with the help of Thomas Jefferson.
Neither could be accused of membership in the bourgeoisie. The
Declaration of the Rights of Man spoke of universal human equality.
Marx comments that classes, such as the landed peasantry, who
supported the first revolution, turned against the Paris proletariat
in the second because they had benefited from the “bourgeois
republic.” “While the Paris proletariat still reveled in the
vision of the wide prospects that had opened before it and indulged
in seriously meant discussions of social problems, the old powers of
society had grouped themselves, assembled, reflected, and found
unexpected support in the mass of the nation, the peasants and petty
bourgeois, who all at once stormed onto the political stage after the
barriers of the July Monarchy had fallen.” Is this an alliance
between classes or a counter revolution that is classless?</span></span></span></div>
<div style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"> What
is perhaps forgotten now is the considerable sympathy the original
French Revolution had within the European aristocracy, supposedly its
enemy. Lafayette was of the aristocracy. </span></span></span></span></span><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">
Lord Stanhope, chairman of “The Revolution Society” founded in
honor of the English Revolution of 1688 expressed support for the
French Revolution, as did the other members of the society in 1790.
To be sure he was later ostracized for his sympathies, but their
early acceptance reflects some aristocratic sympathy with the
original idealism of the Revolution. </span></span></span></span></span>
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"> The
French Revolution of 1789 did abolish privileges of the aristocracy
and thus opened the way for freer commercial flow. In that sense it
was a bourgeois revolution. But it also deprived the nobles of
property, one of Burke's major objections, and thus was a peasant
revolution. The sentiments expressed in the Declaration of the Rights
of Man were of universal human equality, not class war. Even Burke
admitted sympathy for these sentiments.”Those who cultivate the
memory of our Revolution [the English Revolution of 1688] and those
who are attached to the constitution of this kingdom will take good
care how they are involved with persons who, under the pretext of
zeal toward the Revolution and constitution, too frequently wander
from their true principles and are ready on every occasion to depart
from the firm but cautious and deliberate spirit which produced the
one, and which presides in the other.” </span></span></span>
</div>
<div style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"> But
the word “equality” meant different things to different people.
Burke's equality was what he called moral equality. He was convinced
that the French Revolution betrayed the sentiments it professed to
uphold. Burke understood, as anyone who thinks about it must, that an
idea of universal equality in everything is a chimera. Nature bestows
gifts unequally, including the gift for amassing property. Burke
believed in another interpretation of these sentiments. With his
“moral equality” “<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">you would have
had a protected, satisfied, laborious, and obedient people, taught to
seek and to recognize the happiness that is to be found by virtue in
all conditions; in which consists the true moral equality of mankind,
and not in that monstrous fiction which, by inspiring false ideas and
vain expectations into men destined to travel in the obscure walk of
laborious life, serves only to aggravate and embitter that real
inequality which it never can remove, and which the order of civil
life establishes as much for the benefit of those whom it must leave
in a humble state as those whom it is able to exalt to a condition
more splendid, but not more happy.</span>” Burke, it seems, hoped
to convince the people that they were happy in their humble position,
a sentiment that surely must have been impossible to inculcate in the
bustling new-born entrepreneurial capitalism of the nineteenth
century. Burke feared popular dissatisfaction and seems not to have
anticipated the overweening ambition free enterprise inspired and
through which the rising bourgeoisie must inevitably have destroyed
the privileges of the nobility. Neither he nor Marx thought equality
might mean equality of opportunity to develop one's talents. </span></span></span>
</div>
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<br /></div>
<div style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Marx,
of course, thought of these sentiments as costume.</span></span></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"> The
classic description of universal human equality is that in the
American Declaration of Independence. “We hold these truths to be
self-evident, that all men are created equal.” Were equality
identified with equality of financial means, social position, or
natural endowments the statement would be absurd, not “self
evident.” The statement, couched as it is in the logical language
of “self-evident truths” is clearly an expression of the
Enlightenment. What it objects to is privileges bestowed upon the
scions of certain families that give them unfair advantages. Those
informed by the Enlightenment, as all of us now are, saw human beings
as a collection of talents, the primary being that of reason.
Self-evident equality at creation could only mean equality at naked
birth, an equality of opportunity for “life, liberty, and the
pursuit of happiness,” that is, the development of these talents
for one's own benefit. Given an image of man naked in the state of
nature, these truths do, indeed, seem self-evident.</span></span></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"> Marx
saw the bourgeoisie's curious political incompetence that contrasted
sharply with their rise in wealth. In spite of the nobility's
apparent recovery of power after the Congress of Vienna and other
similar congresses following Napoleon's defeat, the bourgeoisie
retained their freedom of activity under the restored monarchy. Louis
Philippe was known as the bourgeois monarch. Their riches continued
to grow, but curiously, they remained politically clownish, as Marx
saw so clearly in the Revolution of 1848. </span></span></span></span></span>
</div>
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<br /></div>
<div style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">
The boredom and corruption Marx identifies with the bourgeois
republic was something of a commonplace. Moliere's <i>Bourgeois
Gentilhomme</i>, presented more than 100 years earlier, had satirized
the bourgeois mercilessly. The well-known bourgeois passion for
social climbing revealed the barren nature of bourgeois life and its
bad conscience. The first thing the successful bourgeois wanted to do
was escape being bourgeois. He aspired to imitate the decadent
nobility unless he could, through his wealth, actually join them. His
excursions into the demimonde to give life spice were also well
known. Marx mocked the bourgeoisie for having virtually thrown power
to Louis Napoleon in fear after the brief appearance the the Paris
proletariat on the stage of history. But this also shows the enormous
bourgeois political inferiority complex. Statesmen were subtle,
unlike the fumbling bourgeois gentilhomme. The whole Romantic
movement was an attempt to find an escape through imagination to a
life more alive than what bourgeois society had to offer. The
“bourgeois gentleman,” an oxymoron, hardly had the courage, let
alone the imagination, to take political power in spite of his
burgeoning wealth. </span></span></span>
</div>
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<br /></div>
<div style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"> Hannah
Arendt notes the bourgeoisie's political backwardness. She writes in
Origins of Totalitarianism, “The central inner-European event of
the imperialist period [1884-1914] was the political emancipation of
the bourgeoisie, which up to then had been the first class in history
to achieve economic pre-eminence without aspiring to political rule.”
She attributes this sudden arrival on the political stage to the
bourgeoisie's need to use the army to rule foreign countries, a
project in direct contradiction to the <i>raison d'</i><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"><i>ê</i></span><i>tre
</i>of the nation state. For the nation justifies its existence as
protection for the particular way of life of a “volk” or nation,
as Burke would have it. The English nation-state protects the rights
and customs of Englishmen, not the universal rights of men. It has no
business ruling others with other customs. She recounts the state's
resistance to the “megalomania of imperialist aspirations.” But
capitalism set free must expand and will soon reach the borders of
the nation-state and need to go beyond them. Hence imperialism. Of
course the true irony was that the nation state's imperial venture
infected the subject countries with the passion for their own nation,
inspiring inevitable revolution. </span></span></span>
</div>
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<br /></div>
<div style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"> But
where did this bourgeois megalomania come from? Arendt traces it to
Hobbes, and she is undoubtedly right. But there is nothing further
from Hobbes than the Declaration of the Rights of Man. Nothing
could contrast more with Hobbes's “nasty, brutish, short” human
life than that of a man in the state of nature developing his talents
to achieve “happiness.” How did Europe get from the “new dawn”
of the French Revolution to absolute nihilism of the imperial
bourgeois period? Well, there is not much difference between nihilism
and materialism. Arendt writes, “ For power left to itself can
achieve nothing but more power, and violence administered for power's
(and not for law's ) sake turns into a destructive principle that
will not stop until there is nothing left to violate.” And so
imperialism has proved in fact. But after Marx what else was there
but power and more power, wealth and more wealth.</span></span></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"> The
French revolutions of 1830 and 1848 were again in the name of the
principles of 1789. But Marx's characterization of the revolution of
1848 as a farce because it failed to transfer power to the Paris
proletariat changed all that. For it is through this history that
Marx changed the idea of revolution from a fight for universal human
equality to class warfare. Behind this is Marx's materialist
philosophy, the idea that all culture and value were but disguise for
the real truth, namely, the identity of who controlled the means of
production. High ideals were the costume of tragedy or farce
depending upon which class ended up with the means of production at
the end. </span></span></span>
</div>
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<br /></div>
<div style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"> Such
interpretation appealed to leftist historians who could push aside
all that refinement of manners they were not heir to and look only at
the cold hard material facts: who controls what. But what no one
seems to have realized is just what a boon such interpretation was to
the bourgeoisie. They too stumbled over their clumsy manners. This
interpretation set them free from the self-doubt of the uncultured
and the moral qualms that might arise from their possession of “dark
satanic mills” while professing a belief in universal human
equality. They were now warriors in a class war and all that could be
pushed aside. All that was real was money and power, and that was
what they had in spades. The bourgeois's clumsiness, his lack of
style, the emptiness of his life, was irrelevant. Manners, honor,
morals were but window dressing. They saw through it to the truth.
Boredom evaporated in the frisson of unvarnished savagery that was
class warfare. Their inferiority complex had kept them away from
politics, but in the late nineteenth century they commandeered the
machinery of the nation state for imperialist purposes with ruthless
glee. For there was nothing to hold them back. </span></span></span>
</div>
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<br /></div>
<div style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"> Since
revolution was class war, not a fight for universal human dignity,
all was fair. Since power and wealth was everything, why should the
bourgeoisie relinquish it to another class? In a war for wealth and
power neither side has the moral high ground. Marx's labor theory of
value does not succeed in persuading anyone of the justice of the
proletariat's cause. The Congresses that followed Napoleon's defeat,
through which Metternich set up the nation state system that
continues in a hollowed out way today, countered the revolutionary
sentiments of the French Revolution by embracing, not rejecting them.
Friedrich von Gentz, Metternich's secretary, was a Burkean, and had
published a pamphlet, <i>Die Historisches Journal </i>which was
nothing but a translation of Burke's works. The Burkean nation-state
system countered the inflammatory Enlightenment sentiment for
universal equality by claiming it could only be achieved through the
nation state. Freedoms became “our” freedoms. The nation state,
the bourgeois republic, proclaimed itself the protector of human (now
English) rights. At the same time the parliamentary system exhausted
the revolutionary energy in procedural wrangling. The courts, too,
exhausted petitioners for justice as Dickens describes in <i>Bleak
House. </i>Nationalists<i> </i>did not pretend that the
revolutionary sentiment was nothing but a costume concealing the
reality of class warfare, but fed hopes for realizing these ideals
into a system that choked them with red tape. In such a system
demands for equality, when they grew too hot, could not be so easily
ignored. The American civil rights movement could succeed, if only
in a limited way, because it's demand for equality of treatment
repeated the noble hopes of the American and first French Revolutions
that the United States still clung too, however precariously.</span></span></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"> Once
revolution became class war, and the bourgeoisie became political,
it's embarrassment over the “monstrous nature” of the bourgeois
republic vanished. Marx thought the exposure of this monstrous
character would doom the republic. What he failed to note was that
his own materialism made this monstrosity as much of a costume as
were the high flown sentiments of the first French Revolution.
Everything was but cover for power and wealth hunger. The bourgeoisie
proved quite indifferent to the horrors they perpetrated. War was,
after all, war. They pursued the ever more ghastly wars with aplomb,
focusing entirely on the prize, their own power and wealth. The
revolutionary cry, once “liberté, égalité, fraternité<span style="font-family: sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: medium;">,</span></span>,”
had become “show me the money.”</span></span></span></div>
<div style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"> One
can only wonder what might have been had the revolutions that
continued through the nineteenth century remained revolutions for
universal human equality. Had equality been understood not as a
requirement for dispossessing the bourgeoisie, but as rather assuring
fairness of opportunity, the outcome might have been different. Marx
was certainly not wrong in seeing class war in the social
relationships mushrooming in the nineteenth century, but class war
need not have become the central theme of revolution. Dickens, who
saw all the horrors of capitalism better than almost anyone, to the
surprise of many, was horrified by class warfare. In his report, “On
Strike,” of the Preston strike in 1854 he wrote, “Masters right
or men right masters wrong or men wrong both right or both wrong
there is certain ruin to both in the continuance or frequent revival
of this breach. And from the ever widening circle of their decay what
drop in the social ocean shall be free?” </span></span></span>
</div>
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<br /></div>
<div style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"> If
equality of opportunity had remained the theme of revolution, it
still would have required some redistribution of property, for no one
can expect children growing up in poverty to “realize their
potential.” Arendt attributes the bourgeois adaptation of their
rapacious ethic to their political isolation, and this does seem
plausible. But in the Canut revolts in Lyon, surely events that can
be seen as class warfare, the mill owners claimed the workers were
violating the principles of the French Revolution. That the
bourgeoisie would have acquiesced to this lesser level of property
redistribution seems doubtful from our perspective. But we are
looking from the well armed turrets of post Marxist capitalist
society and are primed to launch our own attacks in the war of all
against all. Had the bourgeoisie retained their sense of the
emptiness of bourgeois existence and the rightness of the principles
of the first French Revolution they might have seen the state as more
than just a police force and been more inclined to use some of their
wealth for the furtherance of universal human equality, seen as
equality of opportunity. After all it was because of the uprising in
the name of this equality that they realized their power in the first
place, and the talents thus fostered would have been in their
service. </span></span></span>
</div>
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<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"> </span></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"> </span></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"> </span></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"> </span></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"> </span></span></span></div>Michael http://www.blogger.com/profile/17596457110530754431noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4415577562084074022.post-66703530209624872862011-08-26T12:15:00.000-07:002012-04-12T09:10:16.742-07:00The end of law<title></title> <style type="text/css">
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<span style="font-size: small;">The Dreyfus Affair</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">The Dreyfus Affair that started in 1894 when Alfred Dreyfus was convicted of spying for Germany in a blatantly unfair trial is misunderstood today. It is true that the Dreyfus case inspired Theodor Hertzl to launch the Zionist project that ended with the creation of the state of Israel, but antisemitism is only a small part of this trial's historical importance, and Hertzl knew it:</span></div>
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“<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;">The Dreyfus case embodies more than just a judicial error; it embodies the desire of a vast majority of the French to condemn a Jew and to condemn all Jews in this one Jew… In republican, modern, civilized France, a hundred years after the Declaration of the Rights of Man, the French people, or rather the greater part of the French people, does not want to extend the rights of man to Jews. The edict of the great revolution has been revoked.”</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">The Dreyfus case proved to Hertzl and many others, including Emile Zola, that the Declaration of the Rights of Man, that is the declaration of universal human equality, was a dead letter, not only for Jews, but for everyone. Hertzl drew the conclusion from this one trial that the Jews could never expect the law to protect them. Although Hertzl was primarily interested in the Jews he saw clearly that the entire project of “rule by law” was over. </span> </div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;">People believed that the </span><span style="font-size: small;"><i>Code Napoleon </i></span><span style="font-size: small;">secured the project of universal human equality. Universal human equality required legal proceedings that produced objective proof of guilt or innocence. What the law was and what the defendant did should be all that mattered in a legal proceeding. Social position was to have no bearing. It is precisely here, in the reliance on objectivity in the courts, that the Enlightenment's scientific thinking met its idealism. Hertzl recognized that the railroading of Dreyfus in a trial that was scandalously unfair, negated not just Jewish safety in civilized Europe, but the whole project of judicial procedure to determine objective facts. That one could erect a legal procedure that might insure that criminal convictions be based upon fact had been proved false. </span></span> </div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;">Emile Zola, who wrote </span><span style="font-size: small;"><i>J’accuse</i></span><span style="font-size: small;"> about the Dreyfus case, also saw it this way. To be sure, he does condemn antisemitism in his letter, but it is the larger issue that troubles him far more. In the Wikisource translation Zola writes:</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">But what a spot of mud on your name—I was going to say on your reign—is this abominable Dreyfus affair! A council of war, under order, has just dared to acquit Esterhazy, a great blow to all truth, all justice. And it is finished, France has this stain on her cheek, History will write that it was under your presidency that such a social crime could be committed.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">Zola goes on. “I declare simply that commander Du Paty de Clam, charged to investigate the Dreyfus business as a legal officer, is, in date and in responsibility, the first culprit in the appalling miscarriage of justice committed…. If I insist, it is that the kernel is here, from whence the true crime will later emerge, the terrible denial of justice from which France is sick.” Antisemitism allowed Dreyfus to be used as a fall guy for Esterhazy (the real culprit), but it is the open blatant miscarriage of justice that troubles Zola most. For if the court cannot recognize obvious lying, fabrication of evidence, and attempts to frame the defendant, what good is it? </span> </div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">We think of the law as setting down rails upon which the court procedure will run to provide, in the end, a just verdict. But what of fabricated evidence, false testimony and the like? Are there </span><span style="font-size: small;"><i>procedures</i></span><span style="font-size: small;"> for discovering such things or does such discovery depend upon human judgment? Who decides when such procedures are needed? Couldn’t deceptive practices circumvent procedures mechanically followed? But the opposite of following a procedure mechanically is following it thoughtfully, that is with judgment. That is: not on strict rails. Furthermore, who decides whether or not the procedures are actually being followed? Do the instructions on paper guarantee that they are, or do we still need custom and judgment and in the end someone to decide?</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">Wittgenstein, in an entirely different context, gives a classic expression to the problem:</span></div>
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“<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;">But am I not compelled, then, to go the way I do in a chain of inferences?” --Compelled? After all I can presumably go as I choose!-- “ But if you want to remain in accord with the rules you </span><span style="font-size: small;"><i>must </i></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-style: normal;">go this way.” – Not at all, I call </span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><i>this '</i></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-style: normal;">accord'. – “Then you have changed the meaning of the word “accord”, or the meaning of the rule.” --No; – who says what 'change' and 'remaining the same' mean here?</span></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-style: normal;"> However many rules you give me-- I give a rule which justifies </span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><i>my </i></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-style: normal;">employment of your rules.</span></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">Wittgenstein exposes the problem in mathematics, whose rules are presumably the most rigid of all. Legal terms are surely even more open to interpretation. In any case, all rules are open to endless interpretation. Those who would argue against this have nothing with which to argue, but gain their point through contempt of the dissenter and the power teachers have over students. </span> </div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">The deepest question is this: what happens when everyone agrees that the procedures have been followed properly and the result is injustice measured not legally but in human terms. To illustrate, consider this quote from Supreme Court JusticeAntonin Scalia: "This Court has never held that the Constitution forbids the execution of a convicted defendant who has had a full and fair trial but is later able to convince a habeas court that he is “actually” innocent." And what if the man is actually innocent? He did not commit the crime. Clearly, Scalia is saying that that would be irrelevant. The law is the law. The quotation marks around “actually” indicate that, for Scalia, innocence is a matter of judicial procedure, and is completely independent of the actual facts if they emerge outside that procedure. </span> </div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">The laws themselves, even when properly enforced, produce frequent injustices. But these injustices, if one restricts oneself to looking only at the laws, are invisible. According to the law they are not injustices. It is only when the appeal goes beyond the law, and rests on what we can only call our sense of justice, that we can see it. He didn't do it! Too bad, he was convicted and the law is the law. Of course these injustices are not always so extreme. A man caught smoking a joint is convicted and required to endure six months of drug therapy. The man might be quite functional, indeed a pillar of the society. He might have a family that is destroyed because of his infamy. The therapy is stupid and in his case pointless. It's cruel and inhuman punishment, but does not appear so. And the law is the law. Or two people commit the same crime, but one is rich the other poor. The rich man gets a good lawyer, finds a loophole, and escapes conviction. The poor one doesn't. That wealth can affect judicial outcome shows that the notion that the procedure determines whether or not a law was broken and that punishment depends upon that is a sham. But if our “law is the law” blinders restrict our vision only to whether or not we followed the procedures, such injustice is invisible. </span> </div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">The Dreyfus case surprised Zola because it revealed not only the problem with written law, but the affect this law had upon human judgment. “The law is the Law” thinking that written law forces, suppresses, if it doesn't kill, the human sense of justice. The quote from Scalia shows just how this happens. Scalia's statement, outrageous to anyone with an intact sense of justice, seems quite fine to anyone habituated to “the law is the law” thinking. If he retains this sense of justice at all it is so repressed as to have no real bearing on his opinion of what is right and wrong. And his attitude is not anomalous, but quite correct in a Supreme Court justice. Law school trains people to repress this sense of right and wrong and refer only to the legal procedures. If “due process” is followed, the verdict is the right one regardless of what crime was actually committed. Since lawyers suppress the sense of what is right and wrong, and it has no bearing on a case at law, it is irrelevant and atrophies. </span> </div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">This causes further damage when legislators, the preponderance of whom are lawyers, enact further laws. For whereas laws were originally supposed to codify our sense of right and wrong, those without this sense enact laws without reference to it. Drug laws enact harsh penalties upon people who have done nothing to harm anyone else. But because those who rule are so thoroughly schooled in “a law is a law” thinking, they do not even notice. Nor does anyone else who has embraced “the law is the law” thinking.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">As the Dreyfus case wore on interminably into the Dreyfus affair the enormous uproar at the miscarriage of justice died away. People seemed unable to see what happened and just how decisive it was. The clear demonstration that written law could not guarantee objective criteria for judicial proceedings faded away in fuzzy thinking. And everyone continued to operate as if the law could work. </span> </div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;">About the fall of the third Republic in 1940 Hannah Arendt comments:</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">What made France fall was the fact that she had no more true Dreyfusards, no one who believed that democracy and freedom, equality and justice could could any longer be defended or realized under the republic.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">The anti-Dreyfusards well knew that they attacked not only the Dreyfusards, but also the principles of the French Revolution, that is democracy, freedom, and universal human equality. That Dreyfusard sentiment should have petered out is not surprising. For, as we have seen, justice under the law still depends upon judgment and the human sense of right and wrong. All one can say is, “don't you see how wrong this is!” If others disagree, if they refuse to listen to reason, if they have no judgment, what more can reason do? The sense of justice might rest, for example, on Kant's categorical imperative, but what do you do when your interlocutor simply rejects that and any other principle derived from the universalist ideas. All you can do is shrug.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;">The anti-Drefusards were mostly Fascists, that is, ultra-nationalists. Nationalism has always opposed the enlightenment ideal of universal human equality. Edmund Burke, founding father of conservatism, appealed to the “rights of Englishmen” in his argument against the French Revolution, and Metternich (or his secretary, Friedrich von Gentz) hoped to use Burkean nationalism as a bulwark against the enlightenment revolutions springing up all over Europe in the first half of the nineteenth century. Nationalism insists that not reason but custom is the basis for human freedom. The English, Germans, French all have a way of life and their freedom depends upon their living that way. Herder coined the term nationalism and was openly anti-enlightenment. He well knew that the </span><span style="color: navy;"><span lang="zxx"><u><a href="http://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&q=cache:houbHVVSx_4J:www.nhinet.org/white18-1&2.pdf+herder+nationalism&hl=en&gl=us&pid=bl&srcid=ADGEESjymTtX6ynqSJMrO0jXeAUj8bUTtcMNGsIZPv5EcYeXvmmz98zebCW3JTlRDHAhmnW4NlhvxBaSqAYLlNuUHLF5BqyJQCL3H9NQBq6XzuTSGy11uupeBAoLKHm21oUjtDqPi9CE&sig=AHIEtbTPAdrn_LyGVc2gphZ_tL2OLNl3_w&pli=1"><span style="font-size: small;">opposition</span></a></u></span></span><span style="font-size: small;"> between reason and nationalism is ineradicable:</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">One of the received ideas of traditional philosophy is the</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;">claim that human beings possess reason and that this faculty allows them to determine how they should live their lives. But from this it follows that whatever conclusions philosophers reach must be valid for all rational beings in the same circumstances, regardless of from where they come. Thus at a certain point, nationalism and national differences should be considered irrelevant. But this</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">is precisely what the nationalist refuses to accept.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">The enlightenment seems to have two parts that its early thinkers thought were one: profession of universal human equality and reliance on the scientific method. Nationalism opposes the first, though no nation could afford to do without the rewards of the second. But are they separable? Equality before the law requires objectivity in its judgments of guilt or innocence, and thus joins the two. The nation state, which rejects the first but must embrace the second, needs them to be separable. Might we not incorporate national identity into the court's fact finding mission? The first fact in any case is national identity. A French citizen in a French court will be treated differently from a foreigner. Upon that will depend the remainder of the courts procedures. The defendant is first of all found “guilty” or “innocent” of being a citizen, that is a national. Afterwards the court procedures would continue as before. </span> </div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;">However, the problem remains, for scientific thinking is not merely a discipline of restricting oneself to objective facts, but discernment of which facts are relevant in a situation or experiment. Post hoc is not propter hoc. National identity is clearly not </span><span style="font-size: small;"><i>relevant </i></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-style: normal;">to whether the defendant did or did not commit a crime. Indeed it is not relevant to whether he did or did not do anything. So his “nationalist” crime, so to speak, is simple existence. Genocide lurks in the corner of any nation, whether it emerges or not. But to let nationality be a criteria that determines the legal case is to violate reason, for the legal procedures are to determine whether someone did or did not do something. One can only maintain both scientific discipline and nationalist fervor by compartmentalizing one's mind. The careful physicist becomes the rabid irrational fascist when he leaves his laboratory and goes out into the street. But nationalism can just as easily influence acceptance of scientific conclusions. Before we accept any scientific conclusion we judge its value for the nation. If it's bad we simply deny its truth. Global warming is bad for business, so it isn't happening. The compartment that includes national interest as a criteria will expand to include the whole mind. Why not? Nationalists falsify scientific findings all the time. </span></span></span> </div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"> Western people buried what the Dreyfus affair revealed, namely that written law cannot secure, indeed makes completely insecure, justice based on the principle of universal human equality, and thus the rule of reason itself. Writing cannot secure justice with or without nationalism, but within Metternich's nation state system, which enshrines nationalism, people acquire a motive for thwarting the court's rendering of impartial justice. The deflation of the Dreyfusards was actually a waning of the fervor for the idea of universal human equality and, perhaps unwittingly, that of scientific objectivity as well. Antirational nationalism is quite consistent in subjecting the objectivity of scientific fact to the interests of the nation, race, or clique. </span> </div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-style: normal;"> Although nationalism opposes universal human equality, it still needs to profess it. The way of life it is supposed to protect is just a collection of customs, by definition unreasonable, that is, arbitrary. But nationalism threatens these customs, for it threatens to break the state down into ever smaller factions, each with its own way of life. The United States fought a bitter civil war. People are obviously loyal to their class, their ethnicity, their color rather than their country. Are you French of Basque, Spanish of Catalonian. Patriotism struggles with </span></span><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-style: normal;"> </span></span></span><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><i>fraternité, </i></span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-style: normal;">its emotional opposite,</span></span><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><i> </i></span></span><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-style: normal;">but also, to control its own tendency towards disintegration, embraces</span></span></span><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><i> </i></span></span><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-style: normal;"> </span></span></span><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><i>fraternité </i></span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">as a cohesive emotion-generating idea, though certainly not as a serious ambition.</span></span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><i> </i></span><span style="font-size: small;"><i> </i></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-style: normal;">The sentiment of </span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><i>fraternit</i></span><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><i>é </i></span></span><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-style: normal;">leads to stable community, patriotism to war and civil war.</span></span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-style: normal;"> </span></span></span> </div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"> Metternich devised the nation state system to counter Napoleonism, that is the aggressive sentiment of universal human equality that threatened the European Aristocracy. Since Europe was already drenched in the revolutionary sentiment and revolutions were cropping up all over the place, he saw, as Burke did, that this sentiment could not be suppressed completely. The system of Parliamentary democracy and the court system, it was hoped, would hold down the pressure for universal human equality by sending it into the complex piping of the parliaments, congresses, and courts, where its steam would be cooled. If the pressure for freedom became too strong, the rulers would yield grudgingly, letting off steam in liberalizing legislation until things cooled down, then tighten up the escape valves again. </span> </div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"> In this way it was hoped that nationalism could tame and use its opposite sentiment, that of universal human equality as a tool of nationalism. Freedom became not universal and human, but American or English. Democracies sprang up. The nation states, those who called themselves democracies, proclaimed that they were protectors of human freedom, now freedom in one country. They insisted that the legal systems, restrictively national, would protect liberties. Hence nationalism was necessary for liberty. The Dreyfus case exposed this claim, but because nationalists are essentially anti-rational, they easily ignored the obvious conclusions. Since their commitment to universal human equality, like Burke's, was nothing but commitment to its use as a safety valve to keep revolutionary fervor from building up, they had no objection to obscuring the conclusion the Dreyfus case should have forced. They had no problem with a sham court system, since they had no real commitment to universal human equality. </span> </div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"> Since then nationalism has been on a blind journey to nowhere. When exhaustion buried the Dreyfus case's revelation that the complex system of written laws actually harm rather than help the realization of justice, the nation state left its orbit. It is not surprising that reason wore out in the face of unreason, but without the Enlightenment project what is left? It is, indeed, dark times. National leaders can never stop using the words “democracy” and “freedom,” for nationalism bare would destroy the nation state in internal squabbling or civil war. These words, used to once again stimulate these sentiments, have become nothing more than an appeal to a kind of magic for the creation of somnolence. For their continued force depends upon a continued suppression of the revelation that within the nation state system they are meaningless. </span> </div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-style: normal;"> Imperialism in which capitalist enterprises hijacked the nation state to exploit areas outside its borders, violated the principles that found the nation state. For the nations state is supposed to protect a nation justified by preservation of indigenous custom. To extend its rule outside its borders is to directly contradict its </span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><i>raison d'</i></span><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><i>ê</i></span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><i>tre</i></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-style: normal;">. But the nation state had already embarked upon a project of mental incoherence in its attempt to graft enlightenment values onto nationalism, and found it quite easy to swallow one more contradiction. The monstrous wars of the twentieth century were the result. </span></span></span> </div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"> </span></div>Michael http://www.blogger.com/profile/17596457110530754431noreply@blogger.com1