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Note To Progressives Who Back a No Fly Zone on Libya
Iraq alone should have made any progressive support for Western military intervention in Libya negligible. It is very sad to see that didn't happen. The corporate media has, again, succeeded in getting many well intentioned progressives to think within its box.
A dictator falls out of favor with the West and, after quietly supporting him for years, we are suddenly told that "we" must not tolerate him (and only him) a second longer. The other tyrants we support, however, are just fine. In fact, those tyrants can even boost their standing in "our" eyes provided they cooperate with bringing down the "bad" dictator. See the way the Arab League's support for a "no fly zone" (i.e. war) on Libya is routinely offered to justify it.
A similar argument can be made tomorrow against any one of the West's allies - Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Pakistan, Uzbekistan, among numerous others - should they "go bad" in the West's eyes. All the crimes "we" ignored, never heard about, and were complicit with will suddenly be thrown in our faces. If "we" aren't willing to support our blood drenched governments as they "liberate" people then clearly we are putting our political views ahead of our humanity
No surprise that BBC presenters have repeatedly said "Saddam" recently when they meant to say "Gadaffi". They’ve come to instinctively know the drill, even if they mess up the names.
Should we want to stop Gadaffi from killing people? Of course, but why only Gadaffi? Why not our own governments and their allies who have done so on a much larger scale and not only through war?
We - who want civilized polices - should never forget the incredible destructive power and criminality of the West. Again, look at Iraq - with about 2 million dead since the West "liberated" Kuwait from Saddam in 1990 then all of Iraq in 2003. One progressive writer, in support of the "no fly zone" (i.e. war) on Libya argued that the Western dominated UN Security Council is analogous to the police within a typical capitalist country - guilty of grave double standards in its behavior, no doubt, but still necessary to protect innocent people. The analogy fails completely because it grossly understates the criminality of Western governments internationally. That goes far beyond what anyone can accuse police of in a country like the USA. Again, see Iraq, the most obvious example from recent history but there are many others.
We - who want civilized polices - do not control our governments. With considerable effort, we can influence what our governments do internationally; limit some of their destructiveness (like prevent Vietnam from being nuked or Iraq from being bombed even more heavily). That kind of influence is not to be dismissed but must not be exaggerated either. Influence is not control. In fact, we don’t even have control of our governments at home, much less abroad.
When we support Western bombing we are helping to bolster the most criminal and destructive governments in the world - and solidifying their alliances with other tyrants. The US and its allies would likely have invaded Iran by now if they had not run into unexpected trouble (an undeniable disaster) in Iraq. A bogus military "success" (Kosovo, Grenada, the 1990 Gulf War, the bombing of Libya in 1986) where the carnage can be successfully covered up and downplayed softens the public up to get behind "disasters" in the future.
So what should we do? Rather than helping (however minor the help may be) to unleash destructive forces we do not control, we should be trying to hold our own leaders accountable for their crimes - in other words, get control over them. Among many other things, we need to put the arms manufacturers (overwhelmingly located in the self-proclaimed “civilized” countries where we live) out of business. That is hardly a short term project. It’s a daunting task and there is an understandable appeal in getting behind polices (like a no-fly zone) that our governments are willing to do now. However, expanding the range of what our governments do to include civilized policies means we must not let the corporate media control what we think. Even when the corporate media fails to impose its worldview, it often succeeds in controlling what we think about, and in severely limiting our focus.
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Show AllWell said, Tom.
"In the old tradition of anarchism, Proudhon, Bakunin, Kropotkin, to its later advocates, Bookchin and Chomsky, anarchism has always been anti-capitalist."
-- I would only add that it goes a bit deeper than being just anti-captialist. Anarchist thinkers (past and present) have defined the movement as an opposition to all forms of authoritarian organization and hierarchy - capitalism is linked directly to these two things, along with the State and church to name a few more.
Sure. The state and church are just instruments of ruling class domination, and the ruling class is a capitalist class.
Response to "A Liberal in La".
-- The only thing I see you doing here is making a mockery of the concept of the English language by twisting words and labels to suit your personal ideology - an ideology that originated in the head of Murray Rothbard who spit in the face of the hundred plus years of a rich history to do exactly as you are doing. Your right-wing 'anarchist' ideas are distinctly at odds with a hundred plus years of anarchist thinking. That is all I really have to say to you because I have always found that arguing with fools is seldom rewarded...
What is bigoted about my post, hmm? Go ahead, show my bigotry?
And yes you are an anarchist. So what? There are lots of types of anarchists. Right wing libertarianism is one of them.
"Rights don't come from governments. Further, on your misguided view, if there were no governments, there'd be no justification for establishing one to protect private property; no one would yet have the right to protect what he possesses and claims to own. It may also be that no other rights exist. For instance, if you don't own your body, you have no right to use its vocal cords, or the fingers, or other parts. In fact, you wouldn't have the right to use it, as you'd need to do, to do the work of establishing a government.
"
Nowhere do I assert that rights come from government. My point is that rights are meaningless, unless they can be enforced. Otherwise, to paraphrase Bush the younger, they are just a piece of paper. Your beloved property rights are meaningless unless you can enforce them. That is the real, material world we live in. We don't live in some thought experiment.
This is the problem with you right wing anarchists. You are obsessed with "thought experiments", with theories, not with material reality. Material reality is that someone is needed to enforce rights, to enforce equal rights.
"Ah, the old trick of adolescent innuendo. Also, even the rightwing libertarians, properly so called, despise crony capitalism. Here's one: http://www.economicpolicyjournal.com/.
"
What innuendo is there? Just because people CLAIM to despise crony capitalism doesn't mean that they actually do so. Capitalism cannot exist without government, BTW.
"But you're too comfortable with your prejudices to do the work needed to discover that fact.
.."
Says the poster whose entire posts are nothing more than regurgitations of right wing libertarian mantras. You might thing that what you post is revelatory. It really isn't . I've read posts, and articles, such as yours uncountable number of times, from right wing libertarians. Everything in your posts, from your thought experiment about the body, to your adoration of von Mises, is in the standard thought process of a right wing libertarian.
I see the term "progressive" as having two functions today: 1) "Progressive" is a replacement term for "liberal" - a term that has been successfully tainted by the Right Wing Echo Chamber. 2) In the last so many decades, Liberal leaders have steadily moved to the Right in practice, if not rhetoric. Use of the term "progressive" then is a way to reclaim the liberalism of the past (a history viewed through heavily rose-tinted glasses).
I see Liberalism and Conservatism as two sides of the same capitalist coin. Any "ism" that doesn't reject capitalism is just a variation of the former two (e.g. US style Libertarianism and progressivism). Capitalism is not possible without the aid of the state. The state makes laws that favor capitalist accumulation (not democracy).
The New Deal era Glass-Steagal Act (and the rest of FDR's "progressive" legislation) was a product of a massive, militant working class (which we have not seen since), not a product of Liberals (even though they take credit for it). The ruling class was working hard to repeal or weaken New Deal legislation from the moment is was enacted. It was Liberal Clinton (the state) that signed its repeal. This eliminated the fire wall between speculative and commercial banking allowing the mortgage-backed bubble to wildly enrich Wall Street. Then, when the inevitable bust happened, "our" government (the state) gave trillions in working class money to the banks. This was done under both Conservative (Bush) and Liberal (Obama) administrations. The highly unequal society that we have (that the capitalist system naturally produces) is not possible without massive state involvement on the side of the capitalist class. This is axiomatic as the state is, of course, made up of members (or apologists) of the capitalist class itself. They serve their own class interests. "A capitalist democracy is nothing more than democracy for the capitalists."
Interesting discussion. What do you think about Communitarianism? Haven't read about it yet but plan to.
Well, at least we can thank Joe Biden for making the case for the impeachment of Barack Obama:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Adpa5kYUhCA
"We - who want civilized polices..."
So progressives should not petition government to coerce strangers to support progressives' own favorite charities? Who then would support those charities? It won't be progressives; they expect other people to do their work for them.
Isn't it more likely true than not true that you do NOT want civilized policies, just as the warmongering progressives do not want civilized policies?
So right wing libertarians should not petition government to enforce their beloved property rights? Who would then enforce those property rights? It won't be right wing libertarians, they expect other people to do their work for them.
Many liberals, like the author of the essay, do a rather shallow, single-valued analysis. A multi-valued one would be better.
A multi-valued analysis on anarchic grounds would start from the premise that we are all in this together, and that everyone has the natural right to personal political and economic autonomy within pro-social limits. Which implies that we must secure each other's rights if we want our own to be secure (I would hope that's not a news flash to anyone).
So our reactions should be very different depending on what's going on. At a minimum, if the innocent are being oppressed, we have an obligation to level the field so that they can effectively fight back.
If the field cannot be leveled, we have an obligation to physically get involved on their side until the oppression is stopped.
The fact that we've allowed our government to become a nest of psychopaths who never do anything that doesn't further the interests of the wealthy has nothing to do with *our* ethical obligations as people who want to live in a peaceful democracy free of oppression.
If we can't personally go help people free themselves (and most of us can't, for a myriad of reasons), then we have to do what we can to see that the oppressed people get as much out of the rich-serving intervention as possible.
It's putrid to claim that there is no reason to intervene where there is a vast power gradient in favor of the oppressor. That's not neutrality, that's tacit collusion with oppression. Failure to act is also action.
From the article: "The corporate media has, again, succeeded in getting many... progressives to think within its box."
See exhibit A above.
On the contrary. And it's quite insulting of you to pretend that I didn't motivate my own conclusions. I don't give a damn what the corpomedia says, and haven't wasted any time on it in years. As that British press baron said, ages ago: "news is what someone doesn't want you to know; everything else is advertising". I ignore advertising.
When Kitty Genovese was screaming and crying for help as she was being slowly murdered, everyone turned up the tv or did something else to ignore her. And I imagine many of them never lost any sleep even after her body was discovered.
Just as "Pasquale Gino" in Milgram's famous experiment lost no sleep. He said he was happy to find out that he hadn't killed the "student" after all, but he felt no responsibility. If he had killed him, it'd still have been okay because he was just doing his job.
Those are not the kind of people any of us should be willing to be.
The two cases you list are just examples of capitalist alienation's (look it up) dominance over solidarity. Both raise the issue of "human nature" to explain the phenomena. There are structural reasons for why those people did what they did. You don't have any structural analysis. So whether you know it or not, you are still susceptible to mainstream (aka ruling class, aka MSM) formulations.
If you are interested in learning something look into Philosophical Materialism. It says that human consciousness (and human nature) is determined by our material existence (how we produce our lives). So, a Kalahari bushman will think and have different values (and a different "human nature") than the Wall Street banker. So Materialism says that our material world determines our "nature" not that our nature determines our material world ( the position of Philosophical Idealism which says that our "nature" is determined - a priori - by God). In short Materialism (no connection at all to the contemporary greedy "materialistic") is the view of science and Idealism is the view of Religion (and capitalism - as it cannot rationally or empirically justify the unequal world it creates). Idealism is the philosophical justification for unjust societies, it says some people are better than others (or closer to God) and deserve their privileged status (the wealth of the capitalist) and should rule the masses. Why? Idealism says that it is just the way that it is; it's "human nature." Materialism says - prove it. Innumerable debates we have in our society fall into a debate that is fundamentally about a conception of human nature. Philosophical Materialism (from which comes Dialectical Materialism and Historical Materialism) can give you the tools to sort it out. Materialism is based in the material world, in empirical reality - not some self-serving Idea from someone's head (or class) that seeks to control you. "The ruling ideas are nothing more that the ideas of the ruling class."
I'm not subject, except socially through the actions of others, to anything to which I don't attend, and I would really appreciate it if you'd stop trying to sell me Marxism 101. I don't attend to Marx, either, since the durable things he had to say, like the durable things Freud said, have already been incorporated into current understandings.
Nor am I in need of being introduced to materialist thought: I'm a student of the writings of the late, much-lamented cultural anthro Marvin Harris, who persuasively accounted for culture in materialist (I prefer the term "practical") terms.
I have the structural tools of my training (psychology). They provide a proven framework for analysis that's sufficient to explain Genovese and Gino without invoking political theory.
You claim to be materialist, yet you try to explain the behavior of individuals in non-materialist, political-theory terms. One can sometimes explain the aggregated and smoothed behavior of *whole populations* in such terms, but not the behavior of individuals, the reason being that *other* individuals, subject to the same political conditions, behave differently.
There were people who *refused* to continue the shocks.
There have been many people who have come to the aid of victims at the risk, and sometimes cost, of their own lives.
Your invocation of political theory ignores such individuals and the antecedents of their behavior, and as such is useless for anything material, like organising. It's fine for academic discussions empty of purpose other than, maybe, publication, but that's a very narrow definition of value indeed and one for which I personally have no use.
RE: I don't attend to Marx, either, since the durable things he had to say, ... have already been incorporated into current understandings.
Really! That's great! Um, just what "current understandings" are you talking about? If what you are saying was only half true, we would have 150 million revolutionaries in the US alone trying to overthrow capitalism. Obviously, that's not the case.
RE: I have the structural tools of my training (psychology)
Psychology attempts to help people cope with all sorts of individual psychological problems that have have roots in material reality, a reality that is a product of the capitalist system. For example, capitalism thru advertising, pop culture etc, creates certain (family or individual) expectations that many (most?) people cannot meet. This causes a collapse in many peoples' self-worth, so they seek out ways to anesthetize the pain of their perceived failure. Another, is not living up to your parents' expectations, expectations that are based on a measure of "success" determined within the capitalist system. Psychology seeks to help here, but it doesn't seek to find the societal causes (sociology might). Psychology is like those looking for a cure for cancer, when they should be looking for its cause, in other words, psychology attempts to treat symptoms. Psychology is ultimately a bourgeois band-aid (for people with the money to pay a therapist) - not that band-aids don't help, it's just that they don't help much. I know from experience.
Psychology is NOT a structural analytical framework, it focuses on the individual not the systemic or "structural" foundations of society. (You could make an argument for sociology here but not psychology.)
RE: Your invocation of political theory ignores such individuals and the antecedents of their behavior, and as such is useless for anything material, like organizing.
Yeah, lots of people are messed up - most probably. Capitalism alienates people from themselves, from other people and from nature. That's more than enough to mess with people's heads for generations. Organizing is a great cure for a lot of problems your field seeks to address: because 1) it places blame where it belongs, with a system not the individual. 2) solidarity: being treated with respect and equality just because you are a human being does a lot for people (under capitalism one is always being judged).
I never mentioned "political theory", I was talking about a philosophical theory (Materialism) that because it is based in empirical reality, provides us tools to overcome all sorts of psychological mind-f**ks, intended to keep us docile and in servitude to a highly exploitative and unequal political system. That's not academic.
Your understanding of psychology is very limited, apparently involving only some talk-psychotherapy.
To broaden your knowledge, look up social psychology, cognitive psychology, and eco-psychology for openers. Social deals with the individual's relationship to other individuals in groups (it's closely related to cultural anthropology), and eco with the individual's relationship to the world as a system. Cognitive deals with how we acquire, store, and process information. None of them, you'll notice, have much to do with psychotherapy (although there are therapy methods that do try to hook into them).
We are all individuals, and are responsive in varying degrees to those around us. Our behavioral repertoire is the least fixed of any known organism. Far moreso than any other creature, we learn from experience, even pseudo-experience that we create in our heads, and we can change our behavior in response. Anyone who tries to win bar bets (a very good measure of practical understanding) by predicting individual behavior on the basis of political theory is going to go home much poorer. (Alinsky actually demonstrated that in an amusing way; he reported it in Rules.)
The still-dominant politico-economic theory in the US is that we are "homo economicus" -- creatures who put money above everything.
But this is taking a really embarrassing beating by researchers who started out wondering whether it was really true, and who by field experiment (social psychology in action) have demonstrated that, no, we're not even close to being "homo economicus". A far more accurate term would be whatever the Latin is for "fairness-seeking human".
But, although they can now predict *in general* that most people will choose fairness over even quite a lot of money, the details of just what that means varies from person to person, and from context to context, and is not fully predictable.
It's foolish to treat people as cardboard cutouts, or avatars of a class, or as anything but the individuals they are.
(1) "we are all in this together"
Argument by slogan and obvious generalization with no analytic value. You may as well write, "we are all alive on the same planet."
(2) "everyone has the natural right to personal political and economic autonomy within pro-social limits"
In other words, "nation first, individuals second". You seem a little like a maverick Republican who once ran for President against a neo-Fascist. (The neo-Fascist won.) But since your welfare statist predilections are obvious, your ethical code requires yo to practice an old error: "from each according to his means, and to each according to his need."
It should not be a news for you to learn, though apparently it is, that the right to associate with others is wedded to the right not to associate with those whose company you disdain. Your collectivism tramples the latter right, thus it tramples a right you affirm. Of course, I'm assuming that you affirm the right of voluntary association. If not, pls say so. I'd be happy to interfere with and to ruin all your relations.
So, you advocate a secular religion of enslavement of all to all, but esp. of producers to consumers. This is an ancient doctrine, and a fatally flawed one which has led to astounding evils, esp. when empowered with technology that gives statist evil wings.
Now what happens when producers learn that production is to be punished by your noble ideal? Production goes down, and poverty beckons.
(3) "If we can't personally go help people free themselves (and most of us can't, for a myriad of reasons), "
In other words, "I want something but don't have the means to obtain it...or don't want to commit my own wealth...or to risk my own neck. Nevertheless, I'm entitled to what I want, so I'm going to conspire with others of my ilk to petition government to coerce neighbors and strangers alike until I get what I want."
(4) "'The fact that we've allowed our government to become a nest of psychopaths"
Given what you expect government to do, how could it turn out otherwise? In fact, what person but a psychopath supports government at all? It can't be established without fraud, it cannot be preserved without force, and it leads to destruction and chaos everywhere. Government is most homicidal activity known to humans, as the past 150 years alone have shown. Common murderers, of the type with which your local TV reporters are preoccupied, are just pikers in comparison to politicians, bureaucrats, lawyers, cops, etc. And then there are governments' many other crimes, like crony capitalism.
It's repugnant to any progressive to dignify the "democrats" who support wars (whether in Iraq, Afpak, or now Libya) with the label of "progressives." These people are just faithful democratic party supporters, and since it's "their" guy going to war, they support him and they war. Of course adopt the rationales fed to them from their party chiefs. This must be a good war (innocents killed aside) since they are told this is a humanitarian war to save the Libyan people. No wonder peoples of the world cringe when they hear the "U.S." (or corporate power behind it) proclaim they are going to "save" someone or "bring democracy" some place.
Probably, this matter will only become clear in hindsight if at all. Kind of like Rwanda. I was too young to know anything of what happened at the time. Would readers against this intervention have applied the same reasoning to Rwanda? If not, feel free to share your thoughts from a vantage point of before the massacre.
*sigh*
Western countries, ie France and Belgium, were already interfering in Rwanda, and Burundi, before all those massacres started. France was a supporter, providing arms and training for those who conducted those massacres. Those ethnic divisions were stoked up by France and Belgium over many decades (the usual colonialist divide and conquer tactics). This is why even today, Rwanda and France have very frosty relations: Rwanda holds France responsible in part for those massacres.
For a good summary of France's despicable acts in post-colonial Africa, there was a very good expose in Le Monde Diplomatique. And France, the French foreign policy establishment reacted to that expose, the same way that the American foreign policy establishment reacted to the wikileaks cables. Lots of screaming about how LMD was betraying France, jeopardising French security.
You need to lose your naivete about the "goodness" of western countries.
People who live in a glass nation should not drop bombs on other nations. I speak of the U.S. aggression of economic sanctions against the children of Iraq. That was genocide. And the entire United Nations was behind it supporting it and some were breaking sanctions to get oil while the children died slow painful deaths from polluted water, starvation, malnutrition, cancer and horrible birth defects from U.S. depleted uranium bombs and other toxins. How dare America and the U.N. act like humanitarians? Wars and economic sanctions only hurt the civilians. Unless the leader is assassinated oops that is against international law the alternative is military aggression or sanctions where untold numbers of civilians are collateral damage.Who knows who will take control of Libya next, he may be worse.
Impeach Neocon war criminal Barack Obama!
In addition, any so-called "progressive" promoting this criminal war has the blood of all Libyans murdered by the Western air-strikes on their hands.
So-called deluded progressives backing the Libyan revolutionaries include Juan Cole and Robert Fisk.
See: "It’s the Popular Sovereignty, Stupid" and "Top Ten Accomplishments of the UN No-Fly Zone"
http://www.juancole.com/
and,
"Right across the Arab world, freedom is now a prospect"
http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/fisk/
On February 18 the US vetoed a proposed measure of condemnation of the
State of Israel for its actions. 14 out of 15 members agreed to the
condemnation.(no abstentions) The US VETOED it. Israel has been
given free reign to provoke Palestinians, to murder,slaughter,steal
lands, blockade and occupy as a fiefdom. With US weapons and tech-
nology. Shame, shame on Israel. Shame on the US (Congressional,
Executive!!
MSNBC pundits would have opposed pro-torture-of Bradley-Manning President Obama's bombing of Libya if W was carrying it out instead of Obama. The overwhelming, wholly dishonest and cherry-picked pundit support of this cowardly, barbaric bombing of Libya by the US demonstrates that the "liberal lineup" on MSNBC -- Matthews, O'Donnell, Maddow and Schultz -- are as partisan as the neo-Cons were when the neo-Cons lied us into Iraq. The lies all 4 of them have come up with -- right out of the Democratic Party talking points playbook -- shows that if a Democrat starts an unaffordable, depression-deepening, deficit-ballooning war, the "liberal" part of the media will support it and actively and knowingly dishonestly cheerlead for the war, but would actively oppose the same war if it were started by the other side. The same is true about the neo-Cons. They'll support all wars, but attack Dems who carry out wars.
Schultz, O'Donnell, Matthews and Maddow are simply trying to work up the "Good German" wing of the Democratic Party into opposing the middle class by supporting another depression-deepening, deficit-ballooning, cowardly 21st Century high-tech, firepower and body armor terroristic war against civilians who have 19th Century weaponry. Their lies are so shrill and apparent, they have effectively removed any hint of real journalism in their purchased desire to support their hero, pro-torture-of-Bradley Manning, Barack Obama. The MSNBC "liberal lineup" is no better than Fox. Progressives know this and ignore them.
A friend who also posts on the Medialens site said I had evaded some key questions in my article. Here are his questions and my answers.
1. Do you deny that Benghazi was on the brink of being overrun by Gaddafi's forces, and subjected to the consequences of Gaddafi's threat of bloody reprisals?
No.
2. Do you deny that western military intervention has averted that, at least in the short term?
No, but the costs of doing so, even in the short term are likely to be high ("collateral damage", influence gained by the West over the uprising, payoffs to neighbouring tyrants to go along with the intervention, etc...) In the long term, the costs are likely to be horrendous. Whenever the West is able to sell a "good war" (an ongoing pursuit for many reasons) the long term consequence is inevitably a "bad war". The 1990 "liberation" of Kuwait, Kosovo, Grenada, bombing of Panama in 1989, the bombing of Libya in 1986, arming jihadis in Afghanistan throughout the 1980s - all of these were quite successfully sold as "good wars" and were part of a long term project to cure the "Vietnam syndrome" which inevitably led to the "Iraq syndrome".
3. Do you deny that as a result the Libyan Uprising therefore still has a chance of overthrowing Gaddafi and creating a non-dictatorial governance for themselves?
Gaddafi is more likely to be overthrown now that the West has started bombing. The nature of the regime that overthrows him is much more likely to be beholden to the West. A cursory look at the regimes the West props up should tell you what that means for the prospects of democracy. The way the West has relentlessly demonized and sought to undermine very successful democratic movements in Latin America (Venezuela and Haiti in particular) should also alarm anyone who wants to see democracy advance in the Middle East..
The West overthrew two very brutal dictatorships in Iraq and Afghanistan. Why didn;'t that end violence and bring about democratic governments whose example made the likes of the Saudi Royals and Gadaffi tremble? The answer is quite simply that contempt for democracy runs very deep among the western powers. It is the exact opposite of what their interventions are about.
4. Would you have preferred no intervention, with the inevitable consequence that the Uprising be crushed?
I oppose western bombing of Libya.
Removing western support for dictatorship should be what we push for in the region, and the world, not just Libya. Bombing works against that goal as discussed above.
Democratic movements in Latin America have flourished despite suffering incredibly bloody defeats. In the absence of ample US (and Canadian ) backing for those defeats, it is undeniable that the movements would have rebounded sooner and be even stronger today. I see no reason to doubt that radically different priorities among the Western governments (which we must fight for) would make any victory by Gaddafi, or any other dictator, very transitory.