Absurdity

ThinkProgress.org had an article detailing the concerns of some generals that Iraq could be “worse than Vietnam” for the United States.

One of the reasons I have been so long in posting is because my desperation and dumbfoundedness have been growing exponentially in correlation to the amount I learn about this country’s leadership. Perhaps I will awaken from my stupor long enough to vote in 2008, and perhaps on the next morning I will awaken to a Democratic President-elect and hope for the future. The Neoconservative school of foreign policy will lead this nation down a calamitous path, to say the least. “Of Biblical proportions,” is right. I can confidently say without hyperbole that we are in a worse state, on the world stage, than we were when this Little Gentleman took office, and many times over at that.

The absurdity, the hypocrisy, and the outright lies propagated by this “leadership” in its death throes are enough to drive one man insane. If my readers long for a replacement, I highly recommend ThinkProgress.org , which is adept at aggregating the evidence of and exposing the administration’s penchant for doublespeak. I despair as well that the idea of Impeachment, the only solution – the only solution – to this crisis, remains in the margins of the political discourse, as if the instrument invented by the Forefathers for just this purpose is best left alone. Our Republic is dying, I have no doubt of that.

In the mean time, I am taking a leave of hiatus of undecided length.

Why Support the President?

The question arises, “Should one support the President?” Let me venture, with transparent methodology, my answer.

If one were to always support the President, this would be a simple conversation indeed. But that cannot be the case. It is generally accepted that a President can legitimately and deservingly lose the support of his constituency, but to say this alone would be assuming the conclusion.

Adolf Hitler was democratically elected and, though he seized power undemocratically, it offends our intuitions to say that the German citizens under him were obligated to support him throughout his tenure. Likewise, rulers much less offensive are undeserving of the support of their electorate, whether they have committed crimes or abused their power in other ways. It makes sense that one should support a President, but when in the absence of offensive circumstances.

The response that a “solid front” ought to be presented holds a small amount of water. In the case of warfare or national crises, certainly it is valuable to appear united to each other and to a nation’s collective enemies. Yet we find that, in these situations, a President usually generates his own support. For example: the days immediately following September 11th, the Great Depression, etc. It is after either time or an action of the leader (or a combination of both) that the populace’s fervor begins to wane: it is either when a President does nothing to keep the support of his people, or when he does something actively to lose that support.

Reiterating: it is valuable to appear united against a common cause. But that value, as we saw by allusion to Hitler, cannot be overriding, otherwise we would always be compelled to support the President. Certainly, as we have seen, there must be other considerations, the sum of which can override the benefit of a ‘united front.’ For a short list of such offenses, I offer: gross abuses of human rights, warrantless domestic wiretapping, wars of aggression, etc. These offenses in concert, and arguably, if sufficiently radical, alone, can trump the necessity for a united front.

In these cases, when the actions of a leader may gain the overwhelming and passionate censure of the world, it may be in the national interest to disagree vocally with a President. If it were possible that one’s enemies could understand that, e.g. America’s President doesn’t speak for the people, it may be in the interest of the citizens to mitigate the hatred of their enemies by communicating just such a message. Certainly it would appear better to the world for a majority of the citizens of a country to visually disagree with the policies of their leadership than to acquiesce, especially when such acquiescence is a very real material threat.

We have seen that it is not always the case that a populace should stand behind their President, and that certain gross abuses warrant a vocalized dissatisfaction. But perhaps there is a distinction to be drawn between a President’s actions and his office. Perhaps we should, as it were, ‘love the sinner but hate the sin.’ How quaint!

However, I know of no way to judge a man but by his character, informed in turn directly by his actions and words. I choose then to proportion my support for a person based on their character. Indeed, we often hear of a President having ‘disgraced the office.’ In this case, we see the President [qua a person] and his actions judged at once, and yet disconnected from the Office of the President itself and the honor that it is due. In this sense we tend to think that the Office, as it were, deserved better than such and such a person.

There is no doubting that a healthy patriotism demands a respect for the ideals of this country, the virtue and prescient wisdom of the Constitution included. Therein lies the demanded respect for the Office of the President, but blind support placed behind a potentially destructive and sinister — and ultimately, undeniably fallible — human being is no patriotism. It is wrong and it is dangerous, and it has no place in serious political discourse as an overarching principle.

Democratic Peace Theory

Even those American citizens who are firm in their dislike of the U.S. must admit that they live in a particularly privileged society.

For example, just south of the border, in Mexico, 40% of the population lives below the poverty line. Even the poorest Americans are richer by leaps and bounds than the world’s poorest. Fully one billion people worldwide live on less than one dollar a day. Another two billion live on twice that. That’s one half of the world’s entire population, one out of every two people on this planet, living on two dollars per day or less. Thirty thousand children die every day from preventable diseases like dehydration and diarrhea.

We should be thankful. Though I was once an ardent socialist, more extreme than I am now, I have come to realize that capitalism is responsible for the astronomical standard of living that the “comfortable” in America enjoy. Those who would smile upon our free market, however, must understand that they have not it alone to thank, but its inherent exploitation and waged enslavement of the worldwide masses. We should not be so quick to lovingly endorse our own institutions.

Which leads me, in an admittedly roundabout way, to my real point. Some of our neighbors and fellows, ever blind in their patriotism, chalk up American success and prosperity to its myriad domestic institutions. This is a terrible mistake. It’s not easy to say that, because we have institutions X, Y, and Z, and because we have attitudes and practices A, B, and C, that America is successful.

The particular target of my article is the notion that democracy as a form of government has as a necessary consequence sustained peacefulness. Though I haven’t taken an hour of social science or international affairs classes, I can tell you intuitively that a single institution (such as democracy) cannot account entirely for the behaviors and attitudes of millions of people. This should be readily apparent.

So, I take aim at “democratic peace theory,” a hypothesis in international affairs and politics that says that democratic countries are less likely to – or never do – go to war with one another. Simply: “no democracy has ever declared war on another democracy,” or “democracies never go to war.” The idea proves popular from our university Ivory Towers all the way down to the common man, whose faith in democracy is unerring, and even further down to President Bush, who counts this theory as a reason for his obsession with ’spreading democracy.’

Immanuel Kant was an early proponent of a similar idea. In his book, Perpetual Peace, he argued that, if all nations of the world were democracies, the result would be, you guessed it, perpetual peace. His reasoning was that no country would vote to send its children off to die. Give Kant some credit, for he was alive before the Weimar Republic, one of the most liberal democracies the world has seen, gave rise to Hitler’s Germany. Liberalism and democracy are, in my mind, no surefire guarantee for peace and prosperity.

Yet the idea of democratic peace remains oft-cited. Such a popular theory, with such implications as justifying regime change over nearly half of the world, demands serious critical consideration.

Let us consider the strong claim that a democratic government always leads to peace. At least, that there is always peace between democracies. It should take only one counterexample to refute this. Do we have any? Yes, we have several.

Consider the War of 1812, in which the United States declared war on England, which was ruled by a king as well as Parliament. Consider the Civil War, in which the United States declared war on the Confederate States, both of which were democratic. Consider lastly the recent Israel-Lebanon conflict, in which the two democratic governments fired multiple salvos over their border over the course of about a month.

Democratic peace theorists are not daunted, and have come up with numerous qualifications to refute these examples. One skeptic, Peter Singer, dismissed democratic peace theory by saying that it depends on how one defines “democracy” and “war.” Indeed, he is exactly right.

Defenders of the theory require that democracies are ‘established’ (at least three years old), and that the population is enfranchised (that is, at least 2/3 of adult males can vote). Assumably, their election processes must as well be legitimate, they must have a competitive multiparty system, and the atmosphere is free from persecution and coercion. Defenders of the theory qualify war by requiring 1000 combat deaths between both sides.

The War of 1812 is no longer a valid exception because England had poor electoral representation. The Civil War is no good because the C.S.A. was a young democracy. And the recent Israel-Lebanon conflict fails because Israel was fighting Hezbollah, and was not technically at war with the army of Lebanon. (Each of these examples is arguably invalid for additional reasons, but the ones I have listed are good enough to discredit them.)

Is this theory still intuitively acceptable? I, for one, have grown only more skeptical after the qualifications are introduced to discredit my examples. Why must a democracy be three years old? Is there not a better way of determining if it is legitimate and functioning? Why must 2/3 of males have voting rights? Why not all males, and why not females as well? Wouldn’t that be more fair, and a better model for true democracy? Why must there be 1000 battle deaths between both sides? It is conceivable that a single person could die in a legitimate armed conflict. Perhaps qualifying “war” in such a way is mincing words, or just really making sure it’s a large scale conflict.

Defenders could mitigate their claim by saying that ‘most of the time’ democracies don’t go to war with one another, or that being democratic significantly lessens your chance of going to war with another democracy. I will not consider such claims here, save to say the more extreme claim remains dubious.

So, what is the cause of peace and prosperity? In America’s case, it was likely our immense natural resources, our significant remoteness from the Old World, the Protestant work ethic, and a knack for exploiting other peoples. It cannot be said that democracy alone guarantees peace for a country: more likely it correlates with other features that, in tandem, are promising for peace.

Thomas Jefferson believed that a well-funded series of public libraries was necessary for a free and informed electorate. We should be weary of attempts to stifle the free flow of information in this country. I recall when Hamas won a significant portion of Lebanon’s parliament. There is no stopping, no stopping, a populous from democratically endorsing terrorism, or massive acts of violence against their ’sworn enemies.’ (In this case, the culprit was widespread religious fundamentalism.) Proponents of democratic peace theory, and those who laud democracy alone for creating stability, are forgetting a number of other important factors: for example, the education of the masses, a high standard of living, a free press, the right to assembly, to associate and to movement are all valuable and necessary for an informed and war-fearing mass.

Indeed, we have a number of things to be thankful for here in the States. Democracy, however, is not some panacea we should wantonly prescribe for the rest of the world because of a much qualified and viciously contentious theory.

Saddam’s Hanging

What a debacle! Having seen the footage on YouTube of Saddam’s hanging, I have mixed feelings.

One feeling is anger, anger for a number of reasons. I am angry at the guard(s) who taunted Saddam. Those who defend the taunts, or are unwilling to condemn them outright, the present American administration included, could argue something like this: “The man was a monster, it doesn’t matter if we taunt him when he’s hanged.” Or, “Let’s make his last moments as uncomfortable as possible,” or “It’s no equivalent to what he did to those people he gassed,” etc. ad nauseum.

“Have you no dignity, sir?” We might as well admit that we are sinking to Saddam’s level: granted, our execution is focused and, supposedly, the product of due process of law. (Make no mistake: any real trial of Saddam would have incriminated half of the Western world.) Is it okay to be mean to somebody because they have been mean to others? Should we fight fire with fire, take an eye for an eye, or should we turn the other cheek, and do unto others as we would have them do unto us? Which cliché should we embrace in this case?

Why would childish taunts and hecklers be tolerated at a dictator’s hanging any more than they would at an American murderer’s execution? George Bush, as governor of Texas, executed a retarded individual with the mental capacity of a seven-year old. Would it have been okay to taunt him?

The taunting called to my mind, for which I am ashamed, the archetypical image of Palestinians hurling rocks at tanks, or Arabs in the streets hoisting their AK’s high and wailing in a bloodthirsty foreign tongue. Americans need see no more of such images, they would only justify their malformed beliefs about the Middle East. I feel dirty whenever one of those images reaches my television screen.

The point is that taunting is altogether uncivilized and indecent, sullying an otherwise solemn occasion. It is entirely uncalled for, vicious by nature, disruptive, unbecoming, grotesque and infantile. I would like to think that I would not have taunted Hitler, had he been hanged in front of me (or hanged at all), for that is certainly a greater show of dignity and remorse for all deaths. If I had been alive then, and had believed in the death penalty, my hypothetical relief would have been silent and dignified, thank you. I would imagine that seeing a man die is vindication enough. Why, why is taunting necessary? Silent indignation, relief or vindication would have shown a degree of superiority astronomically greater than any childlike taunt hurled at a defenseless and doomed soul whose only hope is likely to have a dignified last moment on earth. Why are we justified in frustrating his desires? Because he did it to someone else? A naked fallacy that needs no elaboration.

I am also angry at the Iraqi judiciary for sentencing Saddam to hang in the first place. Granted, it may have provided a shred of vindication for the small number of Westerners who still embrace the death penalty — the United States stands out starkly as a developed nation that endorses capital punishment, executing more prisoners than everyone except China and Iran. I am not the first, nor, certainly, will I be the last to add that Saddam’s execution will do little but make a martyr out of him for the minority Sunnis of Iraq. If there’s one thing Iraq needs less of, it is sectarian anger. Whether one admits to the existence of a Civil War, no one should deny that passions are enflamed, and this execution, no matter how noble, just, or destined it may seem as we gaze from our distant and insulated shores, will plunge the country further into chaos and clashes.

Another feeling is embarrassment. I am embarrassed such a mess could be made of an otherwise solemn occasion. The United States was quick to absolve themselves from any responsibility for the execution itself, as if it would have been pulled off without us. Perhaps, then, we should have been involved, to ensure that something, some semblance of decency, order and ceremony was present at the hanging. The event reflects poorly on the Iraqi government, which cannot easily be disentangled from the United States. The execution is yet another cruel, inhuman, degrading and embarrassing scar on the United States’ already poorly-informed and much-maligned conduct overseas.

One feeling I don’t have, come to think of it, is relief. This will not be the end, certainly. It gives me personally no feeling of closure. I remain awestruck by the absurd and counterproductive actions taken by all sides of the conflict, excepting no one.

O’Reilly on Jefferson

O’Reilly, in a recent syndicated column, said that Thomas Jefferson would ‘mock the secular fools’ [who are assumably waging the war on Christmas]. He also reiterated the fallacious claim that the separation of church and state was a myth, etc., etc.

O’Reilly is, at least, grossly mistaken and, at most, a blatant liar preaching to the converted choir that has no purpose for reason or evidence anyway. If O’Reilly had found it incumbent upon himself to back up his assertions with actual words from Jefferson, he would have surely been distressed at the mountain of quotes to the contrary.

I find it ironic that O’Reilly would be so careless as to invoke both subjects in the same column, that is, Jefferson and the Wall. It was Jefferson, for God’s sake, who coined the term “Wall of Separation” between Church and State. Do you really think, do you really believe he would think it was a myth, ‘if he was alive today’? It was Jefferson who authored the First Amendment and the Virginia Statute on the Free Exercise of Religion. Do you really think that he would want religion and government to become increasingly entangled?

Here’s a good Jefferson quote, often cited to show his support of religious matters: “I have sworn upon the altar of God eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man.” It should be noted that, when one consults the context of this quotation, they find that Jefferson is vowing eternal hostility against the machinations of theocrats.

Ah, here’s a good Jefferson quote: “Religion is a subject on which I have ever been most scrupulously reserved. I have considered it as a matter between every man and his Maker in which no other, and far less the public, had a right to intermeddle.” And another: “History, I believe, furnishes no example of a priest-ridden people maintaining a free civil government. This marks the lowest grade of ignorance of which their civil as well as religious leaders will always avail themselves for their own purposes.” That’s our Founding Father Thomas Jefferson, in love with public religion and scornful of ’secular fools.’ I’ve had with O’Reilly, he’s just a damned moron.

Let us hope that a good portion of O’Reilly’s readers took it upon themselves to fact-check his error. A people should know their Founders, and know their past. For, as Jefferson said, “If a people expect to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, they expect what never was and never shall be.”

This is how it starts

A poll conducted by the Council on American-Islamic Relations found that thirty-nine percent of Americans think Muslims should wear some special identification, like an armband or a tattoo. Sound like Nazi Germany yet?

Just read Revelations

I overheard a coworker expressing her dissatisfaction with mainstream news networks. “Don’t watch the news,” she advised me, “just read Revelations.”

Religion is all well and good. Or, rather: belief is fine. As long as religion doesn’t begin to impede the progress of rational people, I don’t mind. When churches start burning scientists at the stake, barring same sex couples from marrying, or teaching creationist pseudoscience as fact is when I gear up for battle.

Such is the case in this instance: an irrational belief in Biblical inerrancy giving rise to a wholesale disregard for worldly matters. A resignation, an inevitablist attitude, or a belief in determinism and predestination: don’t all these lead to some kind of political nihilism? ‘Why vote? Your vote won’t count anyway!’, or ‘I’ll vote and leave the rest up to God’, et cetera, et cetera.

Religion is all well and good, except for when it becomes a regressive force within society, e.g. restricting the rights of consenting adults or sowing the seeds of political ambivalence.

Here’s another gem, uttered from the same mouth in the same ten minute period:

“Well,” she offered, “I vote my morals.” I took offense at the implication that liberals — for, certainly, she was a conservative — don’t vote their morals, or, otherwise, vote knowingly for immoral practices.

It’s this kind of black-and-white, on-or-off, good-and-evil perception of reality that is anathema to a productive democratic process. It is troubling, the miniscule amount of civil and informed debate that goes on nowadays, and wantonly characterizing The Other Side as brazenly, unanimously and incorrigibly immoral is meaningless conversation.

Alberto Gonzales on Habeus

I just caught a minute of Attorney General Gonzales answering questions on Habeus on CSPAN. The sentence I came in on ended with, “we’re not taking habeus corpus away from these people, because they never had it to begin with.”

Well, first of all, let’s ditch semantics. Just because militants in Iraq don’t ‘have’ habeus in their own country doesn’t mean we are denying them it when they come here. There’s the rub: by “taking it away” I understand “denying.” It is now easier to say that we are denying these people habeus.

But you don’t need to be content with that stretch of reason. Understand that American citizens, like Jose Pedilla, have been branded enemy combatants and had their right to habeus stripped from them. Indeed, any American citizen could fall into such a situation. Would Gonzales really argue that American citizens don’t have habeus to begin with? Certainly not. Additionally, Gonzales and the Administration’s platitudinal repetition of “picking people up off the battle field” is at least misleading and at worst a blatant lie. What battle field was Pedilla on? American soil? What battle field is that? Please, don’t act like every single person in Guantanamo was found holding an AK-47 and staring down US troops in the middle of a fire fight. I will grant no such absurdity.

With a somewhat loose interpretation, we can argue that the Constitution applies to all people under US jurisdiction: if we claim the ability to abduct these people, a decent respect the dignity of mankind commands we give them the chance to challenge their detention. Any other position is untenable.

With Gods like these

Some missionaries came to my door a few days ago and left a packet of brochures for me to read. I told them in essence that, though I was an atheist, I would read their brochures. I shut the door and cursed my lack of a “No Soliciting” sign for my door.

Inside, I found a brochure produced for a local Baptist Church. The back had a series of “Did you know?”s, including this gem:

Did you know: You are already condemned to hell, regardless of what you have done?

And I thought, With Gods like these, who needs the Devil, to tempt them towards Hell? To me Predestination, and all derivative forms and beliefs, are an affront to the abilities of mankind. I find it hard, if not impossible, to believe that an infinitely just and loving God would condemn scores of billions of people to eternal and infinitely agonizing flames because they had never had the Blessings of the Word bestowed upon them by some White Man.

“Question,” said Thomas Jefferson, “even the very existence of a God. For if there was, he should honor more the homage of reason than blindfolded fear.” But nevermind that atheist gibberish, we were a Christian nation in the beginning and we’re a Christian nation today!

Existential quandary

In 1991 when British troops invaded Iraq to fight the First Gulf War, they wore forest camouflage, having sold all of their desert camo to the Iraqis to fight the Iranians just a few years earlier.

Senator Orrin Hatch said that, “capital punishment is our society’s recognition of the sanctity of human life.”

Every Diebold AccuVote electronic voting machine in the country can be opened with the same key.

The US government recently put online documents that are allegedly Hussein’s government’s plans to build an atomic bomb. The plans, untranslated from Arabic, they later realized, could likely be used to actually build a bomb. In a panic, they took the documents down. Never mind that The Progressive published plans to build a hydrogen bomb in 1979 after defeating the United States government in the Supreme Court. (This is parallel to Bush lambasting the New York Times for revealing a program tracking international money transfers after Bush himself had revealed the program to the public in the aftermath of September 11th.)

The frustrated and flabbergasted state in which I now find myself, because of the contemporary political atmosphere, is the state of a man repeatedly confronted by the absurd. I’m nearly dumbfounded by the world around me, and those who are pulling the strings.

I urge all of you to vote next Tuesday (however few people will read this). As Plato said,

one of the consequences of refusing to participate in politics is that you find yourself being governed by your inferiors.