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Preemptive Strikes of the (Pseudo) Progressive Kind
For reasons related mostly to geography and the positive experiences of an uncle and a number of family friends, I attended an undergraduate college run by the Society of Jesus, a Catholic religious order known more colloquially as “the Jesuits”.
In making the choice to attend this place, neither my parents nor I were particularly driven by the desire to insure that I be inculcated with the “right values” during my first extended sojourn outside the nest. Rather, we all just hoped that I would get the type of solid education needed for me to be relatively happy and productive in the adult world.
Looking back I can say, with some gratitude, that the Jesuits delivered handsomely on their part of this bargain.
When, later on, Spanish friends would get to the point (always much later in a friendship with a Spaniard than in a relationship with an American) of asking me where I had gone to college, I was surprised at their sharp reactions to the news that I had studied at a Jesuit institution.
In so doing, they provided me with one of my first great lessons about the deeply contextual nature of meaning. What was for me mostly an organization that ran, as we used to say, “a good school” relatively close to my home, was for them something quite different and much more freighted with meaning.
In the Spanish context, “studying with the Jesuits” carries with it strong suggestions of family wealth, a belief in a militant and often martial Catholicism, and above all, a devotion (albeit with occasional bouts of insouciance and rebellion) to maintaining and strengthening the existing social order.
The Jesuits were founded more or less simultaneously with the Counterreformation, a movement designed to insure that Spain, whose governmental system in the mid- sixteenth century was inextricably entwined with the hierarchy of the Catholic church, retain its role as the sole super-power of the world. This effort obviously involved a great deal of military strategy.
But the Spanish elites also knew that all the military force in the world was useless if they were to lose the “hearts and minds” of the people (mostly from the Germanic principalities) whom they hoped to keep within their sphere of control. They also knew that that this “long war” against religiously fueled insurgents would require ideological discipline in the “homeland”. It would not do, they reasoned, to have the nation’s future leaders perceive the world-view of the insurgents as having even the slightest shred of legitimacy.
Enter the Jesuits.
One of the great attractions of the beliefs of the insurgents, a family of faiths we now refer to as Protestantism, was their accent on the legitimacy of the individual’s personal search for God. No truly thoughtful person ever wishes to have their search for meaning circumscribed by a priori barriers or considerations. Insofar as these new faiths promised to strip away at least some of these strictures, they tended to appeal to the more intellectual sectors of society.
In this context, one of the Jesuits’ prime functions was to provide those who found themselves attracted to the relative intellectual freedom of Protestantism with a competing intellectual option from within the mother Church.
In other words, their job was to demonstrate that the organization that would, in short order persecute Galileo and burn Giordano Bruno at the stake and that was backing huge and very brutal military campaigns designed to make people stop thinking in the way they were thinking about the church and the Spanish state, was really a great precinct of intellectual life.
Faced with this evidently very hard if not impossible sell, the Jesuits became the masters of the rhetorical misdirection play.
Realizing that they could not win most of the arguments about the church’s and Spain’s long records of perfidy “on the facts”, they got very good at tying their intellectual opponents up in knots with the discussion of small and relatively insignificant shades of rhetorical meaning, a practice of intellectual pre-emption often referred to as casuistry.
Over the past several years I have tried to dialogue with certain friends and acquaintances--almost all of them self-professed liberals and/or progressives--my sense of deep alarm at the destruction of the most basic elements of democratic behavior in this country.
I have shared with them a lot of information about things like extra-judicial killing, the destruction of the most basic constitutional rights, Obama’s real as opposed to imagined comportment, the terrifying cost in both life and material destruction to the millions of people living in the countries we have invaded and occupied during this period.
Aware that the use of carefully tested, innocuous sounding euphemisms is the cornerstone of the corporate and military “perception management” campaigns, I have made a great effort to be stark and simple in my descriptions. When people anywhere get killed by others, I call it murder. When countries that have done nothing to us get invaded I call it wanton aggression and compare it to other times in recent history when countries suffered the unprovoked losses of sovereignty. I refer to people as “war criminals” who have gone on TV and admitted planning and carrying out, well, war crimes.
The hope, of course, is to encourage people to transcend the normalizing rhetoric craftily employed by the powers that be and begin use their empathetic imaginations, to ask what it would be like to be the person sent away forever with no charges, to watch your country destroyed for having done absolutely nothing to the country of the invaders, to be beaten by cops for no reason other than you wish to exercise the most basic of democratic rights, to live in a place where the wealthy own not only the corporations you work in, but most of the venues where you might want to express yourself freely as an individual. In other words, the goal is to have people contemplate and in some sense feel the reality and magnitude of what being done in their name.
But rather than this, I most often get what I can only call casuistic responses in return, statements designed to make the conversation among us about anything but the process of empathizing with the people suffering from our own government’s acts of brutality and lawlessness.
Here are two of the more frequent ways of doing this.
The pose of the savvy and condescending public relations advisor. “I hear what you’re saying but if you want to get anywhere, you’ll need to stop calling people who murder ‘murderers’ and people who destroy the constitution ‘destroyers of the constitution’. People can’t handle that”. They then go on to call such rhetoric “angry” when it is, in fact, merely a description of reality shorn of familiar euphemisms
What they are of course really saying, is that they can’t handle looking at the society without euphemisms, contemplating the fact that the society that hey have been told constantly since birth is the moral beacon of the world, might, in fact, be something very different. So, rather than contemplate the facts in regard to our own comportment, they change the channel to talk about the messenger’s “tone” and “delivery”.
The pose of the hard-edged pragmatic “doer”. “All you say might be true, but what are you proposing we do about? If you had a plan, I’d listen. But all this just seems like complaining to me. Get back to me when you are ready to propose a real solution to the problems you speak about.”
Did Rosa Parks have a plan when she decided not to move to the back of the bus? Did Lech Walesa have a fully developed plan when he jumped over the shipyard wall in Gdansk? Did Mohamed Bouazizi have a plan when he set himself on fire in Tunisia late last year?
Of course not. What they had was a deep and visceral sense of the immorality of the systems they were living under.
Movements of change very seldom begin with blueprints. Rather they begin with a sense that what is seen presently as “normal” is, in fact deeply wrong and unsustainable. The blueprint for the future can only emerge when, and if, people gain a clear understanding of how the system they are living under actually works.
One of the reasons our Constitution has been so durable (at least until the last decade) is that the men who wrote and ratified it had a very detailed knowledge of how previous systems had oppressed mankind, and therefore, how they wanted the one they were building to be different.
What makes it worse, is the fact that many of these same people wouldn’t think of buying a coffee maker or a bike without having done obsessive research about how these products work and which particular brand would be the best for their particular personal needs.
But when it comes to the social and the political they don’t want to know anything, or at least not much, unless is a pre-baked plan dreamed up by someone else.
Somehow I think this probably has a lot more to do with “not wanting to go there”, that is, not wanting to discover how we all might, in fact, be implicated in supporting practices and institutions they we know to be at variance with our own largely positive images of self and nation.
We have seen this last technique on stark display in the media’s coverage of the protest events in and around Wall Street. They have done everything in their power to put the focus not on the reasons that have driven these mostly young people to take such dramatic action, but rather whether or not they “have a real plan” for making things better.
Why do they do this? Because like the close-to-the-establishment Jesuits of the 16th century, the New York Times and all the mainstream media are deeply implicated in the task of making the morally unsustainable and the morally indefensible sound preternatural and reasonable.
They know they cannot win on the facts and they are beginning to realize, moreover, that a lot more people than they ever imagined, are coming to know this. And in their panic, they do what well-connected casuists have always done: they attempt to direct the gaze of the people elsewhere.
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Show AllWatching some the news commentators, it is obvious that many are clueless. They are young, handsome, employed, in positions of power, and with all the interviews, close to those in power, and make very good salaries, They have followed a path of success through individual merit, achievement, doing the right thing, etc and actually have no idea what it's like to be on the other side of the fence...for whatever reason. And who would want to lose such a position--especially in this economy? They're happy and comfortable, and don't want to mess with their happiness!
It usually takes personal experience to see from another perspective.
And what is it that occupiers want? At least some of the same--like a job, a home, food on the table, and a fair chance at even a regular life--not gerrymandered or otherwise ruled out by policies designed to keep them out or throw them under the train so to speak!
Excellent piece. Except i do not think that setting oneself on fire benefits the whole. That is a throwback to the belief in human sacrifice as a good and holy act and is quite the opposite. This is a deep religious myth that needs to change - along with original sin mythology. And the Jesus died for your sins story. It always amazes me that this stuff is still the underpinnings of our collective realities. But that is another topic.....
Anyway, this is a refreshing and deeply intelligent piece. Although i think things pre 2000 were not exactly terrific. In fact, it just got more, in your face and out front. That is the main difference.
This movement will ultimately prove not to be about changing the system but about transcending the existing system that is too corrupt to change. The values of the young will supplant the values of the old. A new system will develop that forges new pathways for living in the 21st Century. The blackshirts and the brownshirts will disrespect the new outcomes and attempt to replace them with traditional Fascist values. Their efforts will fail because the decentralized architecture of the internet will enable the people to develop and implement systems to overwhelm them. Mother Nature wired our minds differently to enable a BALANCE to be struck. When the extremes prevail, as in Communism or Fascism, great numbers of people die as the system struggles to re-balance. Only by respecting the values of others can a Democracy function and the BALANCE be secured. The current protests transcend the status quo and rests in the deeper canyons of our souls.
I appreciate your post, stone. And perhaps democracy itself, at least as we think of it is ready for a transformation.
"Did Rosa Parks have a plan when she decided not to move to the back of the bus? Did Lech Walesa have a fully developed plan when he jumped over the shipyard wall in Gdansk? Did Mohamed Bouazizi have a plan when he set himself on fire in Tunisia late last year?" Evolution does not happen when planned. It is impossible.
One of the greatest books ever written "the deschooling of society was written by a Jesuit priest.
The article makes great points. Movements don't have to start out with any plans. They need a sense that things aren't right and people to put their bodies on the line. This has happened, and the Genie can't be put back in the bottle. Let us simply add some nereded ingrediants such as ideas as we go along and keep moving toward an egalitarian world.
Fennec
Thanks for the info on the book you mentioned. Sounds like it could be interesting. I'm going to look for it.
Also, I agree with you on evolution. It is driven by forces outside of our control.
I believe that The Deschooling of Society, by Ivan Illich, was written after he left the priesthood. He was too radical for the established order, especially the Jesuit Order. The Jesuits take a vow of obedience, which Ilich eventually rejected.
"One of the greatest books ever written "the deschooling of society was written by a Jesuit priest."
Of course, Ivan Illich, a great thinker whose ideas were beginning to take root during the mid to late 20th century, was considered by the mainstream a radical thinker, too outside the box to take seriously. It's worth taking a look at Illich's work as we contemplate and evolve into a new world order.
It is somewhat surprising that Prof. Harrington did not mention two of the greatest and progressive Jesuits that this country has ever seen and that would be Daniel and Philip Berrigan who had the courage and moral rectitude to speak out against the militant policies of the U.S. government during the Vietnam conflict.
This then raises the question why one sees very few religious leaders and religious people today speaking out against what the United States is doing to the people of the Middle East. And yet whenever I ask the Mormons and the Jehovah's Witnesses who knock on my door about this and ask them why they are not out on the street protesting what Obama is doing and emulating what the Berrigan Brothers did those mnay years ago, all they can say is they are doing their bit by spreading the word of the Bible whenever they harass people in the neighborhood.
Where is the voice of Pope Benedict XVI on the subject of Occupy Wall Street? From what he has written about the global economy in his recent encyclical, Caritas in Veritate (Charity in Truth), he would seem to share many of the concerns of the protesters. Is he perhaps still too spooked by the protests of 1968 to voice his support for what is happening now?
You do know the Vatican is part of the 1%, do you?
And when they talk of charity it's always the charity of other people , not themselves.
When preachers say outright on television that the plan is for a worldwide, one religion, that's gotta make a lot of religious leaders sit up and take notice. The Mormon Church is getting the message loud and clear now exactly where they stand with this new religious extremist teabagger party going after Romney because of his religion (calling it "a cult"). From my short time in one of those extremist churches in Texas, I know they see the Catholic Church as a cult as well. So Pope Benedict XVI probably has more on his mind at the moment than the Occupy Wall Street crowd.
And I doubt that, as a member of a totally different culture, the pope immediately understands the economic and social reasons behind the Occupy movement.
In defense of casuistry, philosopher Mortimer J. Adler:
"Casuistry
as the word itself suggest, we are here concerned with particular cases. When the moral law or the principles of ethics are applied, they are applied to particular cases, each one unique in the circumstances and factors that are operative in the here and now.
Aristotle in Book V of his Ethics, on justice, points out that general rules do not apply perfectly to particular cases; and so an equitable dispensation from the general rule is required to do justice in the particular case.
In the tradition of the Anglo-American common law, the separation of courts of law from courts of equity, which were the province of the Chancellor, provided an institution that enabled justice to be done in the particular case, justice that departed from the general rule.
One way of saying what is sheer dogmatism in the ethics of Immanuel Kant is to point out that his moral law -- his so-called categorical imperative -- completely ignores the circumstance of particular cases. According to Kant, there are no exceptions whatsoever to the general rule that lying violates one's moral duty to tell the truth.
We are to imagine the following case. A man is standing at his fence on the roadside. He sees an individual breathless and haggard with fear running down the road, as if pursued. A little beyond his house, the road branches into two forks, one to the left and one to the right. The individual running away pauses for a moment and then decides to take the fork to the left.
A moment later, two villainous-looking individuals brandishing big clubs appear and ask the man who is still standing at his fence whether the man they are pursuing with deadly intent came by and, if so, which fork in the road beyond the house he took.
Should the onlooker tell them the truth though he can be almost certain that if the pursuers catch the man who is fleeing, they will do him in with their clubs and fists?
Without knowing whether the individual who is fleeing from his pursuers is guilty or innocent of some crime, and without knowing anything about the motivation of the pursuers. Kant answers the question of whether the onlooker should tell the truth flatly in the affirmative. Kant does not allow for any casuistry whatsoever. No moral philosophy that does not provide casuistry for finding exceptions to general rules can be sound.
There are many other reasons for finding fault with the moral philosophy of Immanuel Kant, but the dismissal of casuistry is sufficient in itself to challenge the validity of Kantian ethics.
Fundamental Errors in Moral Philosophy
Desires, Right & Wrong (1991), Chapter 5
Critique of Immanuel Kant's Moral Philosophy
Desires, Right & Wrong (1991), Appendix 1, Note 9
John Stuart Mill's Utilitarianism and Immanuel Kant's Rationalism
Desires, Right & Wrong (1991), Appendix 1, Note 10"
"According to Kant, there are no exceptions whatsoever to the general rule that lying violates one's moral duty to tell the truth. "
I'm sorry, but I must have missed your point. Not being an expert in Kantian philosophy, I may have misunderstood yours or his intention but where in your scenario does it say the witness has to respond? Did Kant have an affirmative duty to speak at all times even when the news would result in certain death? Did Kant not allow for someone's conscience to let them keep silent? If Kant didn't have this affirmative requirement, then something's been added in your scenario that could be in some circumstances unreasonable and dishonorable. If he did have this requirement, then your point seems valid.
I'm not the expert, Adler is. According to Adler the Kantian Imperative is absolute, to lie is to always be wrong, yes, even in the case he cites. He uses Kant to make the point that cauistry is necessary in order not to get caught in the trap Kant sets for himself. Moral principles, when applied to particular cases, must account for unique circumstances, i.e., in some cases lying is not wrong. Not to speak, in this case, is a kind of lie.
It is not true, as so many believe, that the USA has lost its way in the last decades, no the USA was founded on Genocide,Slavery and then Imperialism.
And that is exactly why a total restructuring is 200 years overdue.
Amen! I absolutely love it when I see the bobble heads on the left telling us that we've lost our way, our democracy and that we blah blah blah while forgetting that this country was founded on the genocide of its native population and the complete theft of their land. I dunno about any of you but, where I come from, nothing built on those grounds can't be what it purports to be. And to confirm that, they moved on to slavery when they run out of 'red devils' - The reality is that this has been an oppressive, delusional, imperialist, neocolonialist, Fundamentalist, racist (continue adding adjectives) regime since its inception and calling it anything else is mere denial and mental masturbation.
What would you have done? Do you think simply that Europeans should have simply stayed in Europe?
The euphemisms used to dilute murder, torture, bribery, and national aggression allow most Americans to ignore our national behavior. Theft by banks, oil companies, and politicians are constantly hidden from view. Civility and morality prevent us from demanding that a certain segment of our body politic stand in court for breaking laws, not that the courts are above turning a bind eye toward murder, or any other crime that is considered necessary to maintain power. It requires hard work to maintain a pretense that it will soon be better when lies demand more lies, and selective reasoning is used to uphold the crumbling facade. I wonder how many arrests, how many assaults by police, how many billions of dollars in the transfer of wealth, and how many people left jobless until those leaning a bit to the "left of center" will begin to understand and embrace a "change we can believe".
Jesuit casuistry? Huck; Chapter 16:
Is your man white or black?"
I didn't answer up prompt. I tried to, but the words wouldn't come. I tried for a second or two to brace up and out with it, but I warn't man enough -- hadn't the spunk of a rabbit. I see I was weakening; so I just give up trying, and up and says:
"He's white."
The last few years have seen emerge influential people who publicly assume the posture of embracing the ethics historically associated with the Left, yet cheer-lead for the current incarnation of The Democratic party and President- whose actions are demonstrably antithetical to these ethics -a truly disheartening thing for me to observe.
Case in point: a man of my acquaintance, trained in the law, who's life's work has been as a staffer for Democrats in Washington and our state capital, who recently defended Obama's right to kill anyone, including American citizens. (This was just days before Aulaqi's murder.)
I thank Professor Harrington for shedding light on this phenomenon.
It looks as if Prof Harrington and I had similar educational backgrounds. I went to a Jesuit university too, and became quite familiar with casuistry. One of their most successful techniques was to make distinctions. Rather than respond to a question, they would distinguish between two possibilities. Then, following one of them, they would make another distinction. After a while, you forgot what the original question was. One of my friends once said that getting an answer from one of our professors was like walking through a swamp on stilts.
Regarding the Berrigan brothers, they certainly were exceptions to the general rule. I believe that both of them left the order, rather than submit to being silenced. Phillip married a former nun who also left her order. I don't remember what happened to Daniel, but all of them continued in their anti-Vietnam activities.
I thought this article gave me the closest thing to syncronicity as I've encountered in some years. Nicely written.
What you have accurately noted, the prevalence of pseudo-progressive casuists hijacking so many discussions here, goes on frequently, especially relating to the Israeli-Palestinian mess and to 9/11. An article about Obama's failure to adequately address unemployment can easily degenerate into food fights over what "really" happened on 9/11, or how the writer is just a shill for the Democrats. Casuistry is alive and well on CD. It often plays the starring role on many comment threads.
It drives me fucking nuts.
I love "The Lone Virtuous One" and will use it myself (even though it is trademarked - please don't sue me :-). Thanks. I suspect that the "Lone Virtuous One" phenomenon is one of the reasons that the left have trouble working together. The LVO would rather be right than win. It is a "virgin Mary purity fantasy" (since we are talking about the Jesuits) at work. We on the right, on the other hand, know that true virtue is very rare, that men are not angels, that man is not perfectable, that the doctrine of original sin reflects a fundamental psychological truth, and that compromise is almost always inevitable.
Good post. Cheers
Well written articles like this is why I support CD financially. Good comments below.
" And in their panic they do what well connected- causuists have always done: they attempt to direct the gaze of the people elsewhere ". That is exactly what I called Obama in the last election: " the master of casuistry ". Casuistry: specious or excessively subtle reasoning designed to rationalize or mislead. Or to make it simple, BO was the epitome of this statement and fits the definition of casuistry to a " T ".
"One of the reasons our Constitution has been so durable (at least until the last decade) is that the men who wrote and ratified it had a very detailed knowledge of how previous systems had oppressed mankind, and therefore, how they wanted the one they were building to be different."
Particularly, because they themselves were either slave owners or condoned and benefited from slavery. But that's the way to do it and that is what has become "The American Way(tm)" - criticize something or pretend to fight it while wantonly and openly engaging in it. Ha ha!
Ah, the rhetorical misdirection play!
I've been fishing for people who understand this kind of concept and have become aware that carefully tested, innocuous sounding euphemisms are not only the cornerstone of the corporate and military “perception management” campaigns but slides into the way the opposition thinks. At this very moment there's another post on CommonDreams that confuses "victory in a battle" with "victory in a war." In a similar fashion, in many #Occupy posts and comments, there's confusion between "revolution," "protest," "demand," "demonstration," and "insurgency" all of which have a connection to having a fundamental on-the-ground change come about, but are not the same thing.
This is not a new subject for inquiry. When I graduated from the University of California with a B.A. in Experimental Psychology in 1968, I was deflected from going on to a Ph.D. by Noam Chomsky's critique of B.F. Skinner which led me spend time understanding the Chomsky's Revolution in Linguistics which led me to understand the importance between "experimental" projects and "exemplary" projects which led me to take a break when my USOE Title III project was defunded as it was exemplary and there were no guidelines for such projects.
The result was I never went back to any kind of job or paid position but instead attended what some of my friends call The School of Hard Knocks which took me across north America, Europe, and Asia. I came to the United States just after the start of the new millenium and have continued research in this area.
At the moment I'm working up a report on the current situation but it would be too long for posting here and I hesitate to make it public as the number of people who are interested in moving beyond rhetorical misdirection are few and far between. Thus I would rather have a mailing list, or perhaps I could publish it on my website, www.actual-life.com (anybody can send me e-mail via Actual Life, otherwise they'll hit my spam blocker).
Here's a short list of references I'm currently using in support of my contention that what is happening isn't a "recession" or "depression," but a Third Industrial Revolution:
Jeremy Riffkind's "The Third Industrial Revolution: How Lateral Power Will Transform Society" (see http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jeremy-rifkin/the-third-industrial-revo_b_981168.html?utm_source=DailyBrief&utm_campaign=092811&utm_medium=email&utm_content=BlogEntry&utm_term=Daily%20Brief
Joseph Needham's "Science and Civilization in China" is the place to go, starting with Volume 7 where Needham reflects on the reasons the (first) scientific and industrial revolution didn't happen in China as the same time it happened in Europe.
Kirpatrick Sale's "Rebels Against the Future," which documents how the Luddites in Britain tried to stop the change of fundamental processes and failed miserably.
"Machine-breaking in England and France during the Age of Revolution" which documents how France and England differed: http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/llt/55/horn.html
Wikipedia's history of Chinese Industrialization: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_industrialization
David Andrew's "The IRG Solution, Hierarchical Incompetence and how to Overcome It" which introduces the concept of Requisite Variety.
Pepe Escobar's "Why the US won't leave Afghanistan" which documents what Osama bin Laden said in contrast to what then President Bush said: http://english.aljazeera.net/indepth/opinion/2011/07/2011711121720939655.html
"The Art of War" and "Seven Pillars of Wisdom: This and only this is the Incredible Story of Lawrence of Arabia."
I'm a big fan of plain speaking and I probably agree with most of your characterizations of acts you call murder, war crimes, and unconstitutional.
But if you are going to make strong statements and justify them as plain speaking, you need to be careful.
In particular, it can't be that "When people anywhere get killed by others," it's murder. This would imply that if someone is shooting at you, and you shoot back and kill him, it's murder. Or that if your country is invaded, unprovoked, ("wanton aggression"), or soldiers of your government murder your family, and you take up arms against the soldiers, that's murder. Is that what you meant?
Not all killing is murder, or if murder is just killing, why don't you just call it "killing"? In fact, the word "murder" implies that the killing is willful and unjust.
So, when you call some act of killing "murder," you are not just speaking plainly, you are loading in moral judgment about the circumstances and any ostensible justification of the killing. You have to justify those meanings; I'm not saying you can't, but that is the real work.
Likewise, when you call certain acts "war crimes" or "destroying the constitution" you will run into people with arguments that the same acts are not war crimes or are not unconstitutional. If you answer them by saying you are just speaking plainly, you will get nowhere.
I'm not sure I know how to get somewhere against such arguments, but I have found that just throwing around words whose meanings are not neutral is not enough. People will either agree with you or not.
Perhaps one approach is to really, really speak plainly. So, we do not have to argue whether killing in war is murder or not. We can just talk about all the killing that is going on and all the lives being destroyed. We can show pictures.
We don't have to argue about whether using drones to bomb villages in Pakistan is a war crime or not. We can just talk about the children and innocent adults maimed and killed by such attacks, the anger and hatred they engender, the unreliability of "intelligence" on which they are based, and the inability of such attacks to lead to any kind of victory. We can show pictures.
We don't have to argue about whether torture or spying on citizens is unconstitutional. We can talk about who has been tortured and how, show their pictures and let them tell their stories. We can talk about how the government is reading our email and listening to our phones, and what has happened to some people already as a result.
Speak plainly, and let cold facts and photographs speak for themselves.
Good example. If you Google "define murder" you get this "The unlawful premeditated killing of one human being by another." If you Google "define manslaughter" you get "The crime of killing a human being without malice aforethought, or otherwise in circumstances not amounting to murder." Plus "murder" can be used metaphorically, just to mix things up ...
"Murder" is statutorily defined differently across the various jurisdictions, although the words "premeditated" and "malice aforethought" and the like often pop up.
I always described the difference between "murder" and "manslaughter" in this way; "murder" is the wife and her lover plotting the death of her husband by slowly poisoning him, and "manslaughter" is the husband catching them in bed together first and doing them in.
Of course, there is another subset of manslaughter that involves death caused in the commission of another offense (such as reckless driving).
A law school professor teaching criminal law once opened up his lecture on murder by saying that there were four types of homocide;
1) Justifiable,
2) Premeditated,
3) Self Defense, and
4) Praiseworthy.
I would humbly suggest that the "murder" or "manslaughter" of Bush, Cheney and a whole host of others would fall under #4.
Bush told a lie so he could invade Iraq to save us from terrorists,(or steal their oil so we could maintain The American Way Of Life) in his tiny little mind telling a lie for what he claimed was a good end was justified. Why does Adlers argument seem just another justification of The Lesser Of Two Evils. Hanna Arendt quotes the Talmud on this subject " If they ask you to give up one man to be murdered to save all the men in the village from being murdered, Do not give him up, If they ask you to surrender one woman to be ravished to save all the women in the village from being ravished, do not give her up"
As many others have already stated, this is a superb article.
I like some of the larger arguments here, but there's at least one clunker of an historical example. Rosa Parks and other black Montgomery residents DID have a plan. Parks had been an NAACP activist for over a decade and had studied at a school for grassroots activists just months before her arrest. She had made up her mind long before Dec. 1955 not to forfeit a bus seat for a white if asked. She intended to spark some kind of mass action. Meanwhile a black women's group in Montgomery had in fact _planned_ that mass action ahead of time -- figuring out how to run the alternative carpool system during a bus boycott -- and was just waiting for the right test case to come along. Two black teenagers were arrested for the same offense earlier in 1955, but community leaders decided Parks was the best standard-bearer, so they put their pre-fab plan into action after her arrest.
Exactly.
And why must Lech Walesa have had a "fully developed" plan even before he was thrust into the media-demanded role of "leader"?
Harrington: "The pose of the hard-edged pragmatic “doer”. “All you say might be true, but what are you proposing we do about? If you had a plan, I’d listen" "
I'm beginning to see this argument coming from climate change deniers. They have argued for 30 years that Earth wasn't warming and, possibly, was actually cooling. But just in the last year or two, they've seen that you can't say that and be taken seriously. So, along with the eternal argument 'its natural', I'm beginning to also hear 'well, what's your plan'? On one website, a denier say he disliked Al Gore because all Gore did was complain about climate change, but he had no plan to do anything about it. I directed him to an ad for Gore's book, ON THAT SAME Webpage, subtitled "A plan to solve the Climate Crisis", and sarcastically indicated that I thought he might find a plan in there.
Yes, its useless misdirection. Spend 30 years denying there's a problem, and then wonder aloud why us 'greenies' haven't solved it yet. As for the Wall Street Occupiers, why should they have a plan if Congress doesn't have one? If, for one second, Congress could do its job, the Occupiers wouldn't have to attempt to do it for them.
I think it's reasonable to state a problem without a plan if you indicate you don't have a plan and are looking for one. All too often problems are stated without any plan and called "revolutions" or some such.
Did you catch the idiot, David Brooks, on the PBS News Hour on Friday. He kept repeating a new mantra: You can't fix all of society's problems by taxing the top 1%. I lost track of the times he made the same point, as though the Occupy Wall Street had said such a thing. When you can't win an argument, fight against a straw man.
Thomas, your Jesuit training is showing.
Nicely done, Mr. Harrington. Thanks.