Democratic Individuality

How torturers “think”

2012-01-28T06:48:00.000-08:00

Explicitly adopting Carl Schmitt’s arguments as American "law," Adrian Vermeule and Eric Posner, Harvard and Chicago law professors, assert thunderously in The Executive Unbound: After the Madisonian Republic, would not lead to a Hitler:

“More generally, Weimar has received too much attention in this setting. Civil libertarians invoke the shadow of Weimar to imply and occasionally say that expanding government’s powers during emergencies would produce another Hitler. It would not and if it did there is nothing civil libertarian judges could do about it.” (2011, Oxford University Press, p. 39). See here.

The less anybody knows about Weimar, the more they might swallow such sentences…

The last clause is remarkable for its a) belligerent acquiescence in a police state, for example Guantanamo, accompanied by disregard for international and American law, b) downplaying of what standing up for the law by judges and lawyers may do, either as an example or to inspire fellow citizens. Standing up for the law is doing their job as justices; acquiescing in executive tyranny is the opposite…

Scott Horton has long invoked the hero Helmuth von Moltke who gave his life to fight for law in Nazi Germany and his wife Freya below.

Vermeule and Posner broaden the trite neoconservative/political Straussian meme at the opening of the Introduction to include the Alien and Sedition Acts which they do not think wrong but “useful executive action”, not to be judged ex ante, but at most ex post facto. No one should trammel the executive, they assert, by abstract rules – read: the law; they even refuse to judge morally ex post facto (after the fact). Even Hitler wasn't bad...

These author cannot see through “the eyes” of the executive, they say acquiescently, and so the executive must be allowed to act “illegally” in crisis...But empathy, for Vermeule and Posner, is cramped. They look up, never down (they are not citizens, on an equality, with others...). They do not see through the eyes of victims, for instance those in concentration camps for Japanese-Americans which they commend or of the tortured. Instead, they strut as would-be Guantanamo or Bagram guards. They offer the circumlocution “harsh interrogations” p. 1, which is of course a Bush/New York Times propaganda or a non-American English expression - they are all clear enough on torture when America "enemies" do it - to deny the rule of law

Vermeule and Posner are but vassals to a duke (in an Ezra Pound translation of an ancient Chinese poem, there are the revealing lines: “fat as snakes the duke’s vassals/glide out to consume/what they get from the duke.”)

They disparage principled judges who care for the core of law and its root in the Magna Charta (1218) – laws with regard to the rights of each citizen, notably habeas corpus and the right not to be tortured – with the certainty that they know….

They praise a pattern in American history of tyrannical acts: for instance, the Alien and Sedition Acts, Lincoln’s abridgment of habeas corpus in the Civil War, concentration camps for Japanese Americans during World War II, and Guantanamo. They insist that after the crisis, the rule of law will be restored (this is Herbert Storing’s error in his original and subtle article on Lincoln and FDR*).

They assume that the pattern will hold (for a seventh time given their six cases…). Why?

The first part of the pattern also exists, to some extent, in the Roman republic and Weimar Germany. But the emperors and Hitler were not defeated. Some argument and historical knowledge is needed here. Vermeule and Posner tell would-be serious lawyers: “it will all be all right. In any case, mere judges can do nothing…

Though they insist on ignoring Weimar, they themselves invoke…Carl Schmitt whom they misleadingly style as an advocate of Nazism before 1933 (pp. 38-39) He was an assistant, as Todd Pierce tell us, to General Kurt von Scheicher and for authoritarianism (likened to the miracles of Jesus) as opposed to the rule of law (in turn, likened by Schmitt to the “Jews” supposedly wooden affection for law). They do not know this is the pure stuff as far as anti-semitism goes, though even they might have detected a whiff...See here and here.

One might surmise that they favor some new facsimile of Nazism themselves (not a bad bet for some of the original and most important transmitters of this doctrine like Leo Strauss - see William Altman The German Stranger - see here) or , more likely, are just sycophants of executive power and contradict themselves – abandon reasoning – to flail at the rule of law.

Even Harvey Mansfield, a leading publicist in the Wall Street Journal and the Weekly Standard, for executive power - see here and here - and a knowing student of Leo Strauss, expresses some concern that they let the cat of the bag by praising Schmitt. See his somewhat arch if sharply against democracy (the mere tyranny of the majority, Leo Strauss in Tocquevillian dress), in a New York Times review here. They do not practice, as Strauss and Mansfield do, exoteric - hidden - writing...(see Leo Strauss, Persecution and the Art of Writing).

Apparently, the first draft of this volume elevated Carl Schmitt at the expense of Madison at the outset. That much was altered in the editing...

Below are two pieces by Scott Horton on Helmeth James von Moltke, son of a leading World War I general (a reactionary one), who stood up, at the cost of his life, for the rule of law. Horton draws pointed contrasts between decent lawyers and Bush administration war criminals (of whom Vermeule and Posner are would-be accomplices). In this increasingly sordid context, we might recall what integrity, courage and decency look like.

Sunday, October 08, 2006

Balkinization

When Lawyers Are War Criminals

Scott Horton

To the memory of Helmuth James von Moltke

"In France, innumerable summary executions occur, even as I sit here writing. Each day certainly more than a thousand people are killed, and thousands of German men experience murder as a matter of routine. And yet all of that is child's play compared to what's going on in Poland and Russia. Can I learn about this and just sit at the table in my heated apartment and drink tea? Don't I establish my complicity simply by doing nothing? What will I say in the future, when someone asks me: and what did you do during this time?"

- Helmuth von Moltke, in a letter to his wife, Oct. 19, 1941

Talking about the Nuremberg Tribunals inevitably seems to involve "bad Germans," so I want to talk about a man who deserves to be remembered in the course of this meeting. He was more than merely a "good German;" indeed, he was a man whose powerful moral example serves as a model for all of us today, a man who represents the ethical pinnacle of our profession. And the strange thing is that he was a staff lawyer at the German defense ministry during the Second World War. His name was Helmuth von Moltke. His tenacious advocacy of the Geneva and Hague Conventions in the face of withering criticism and suspicion from the Nazi hierarchy saved the lives of thousands of civilians and prisoners, particularly on the Eastern Front and in the Balkans. It also led inextricably to his execution at the hands of the Nazis in 1945.

Disgusted by an atmosphere in which law was constantly subverted to political expedience, Moltke envisioned harsh prosecutions of politicians and lawyers who engaged in such antics as an essential purgative. In a draft dated June 14, 1943, Moltke envisioned a special international criminal tribunal to be convened at the conclusion of the Second World War for the purpose of bringing to justice those who violated the laws of war. Lest there be any doubt, it was principally the men he worked with every day in the Wehrmacht whose punishment he foresaw. In view of mounting evidence of a crime of genocide, and out of concern that international customary law failed yet to provide a medium for its punishment, he advocated an expansive posture for prosecution. "Any person who violates the essential principles of divine or natural law, of international law, or of international customary law in such a fashion that makes clear that he contemptuously disregards the binding nature of such law shall be punished," he wrote in a plan for a post-war tribunal in 1943.

This conference has turned on a great deal of discussion of Robert Jackson and his visionary role in the Nuremberg process, but it is truly remarkable that so much of Jackson's vision was commited to paper two years earlier, and its author was not only a German, but the scion of his nation's most prominent military family.

I come to the example of Moltke for another reason, namely that he very properly puts the emphasis not on the simple soldiers who invariably operate the weaponry of war, but on those who make the policies that drive their conduct. And in that process, his stern gaze falls first on the lawyers. In a proper society, the lawyers are the guardians of law, and in times of war, their role becomes solemn. Moltke challenges us to test the conduct of the lawyers. Do they show fidelity to the law? Do they recognize that the law of armed conflict, with its protections for disarmed combatants, for civilians and for detainees, reflects a particularly powerful type of law – as Jackson said "the basic building blocks of civilization"? Do they appreciate that in this area of law, above all others, the usual lawyerly tricks of dicing and splicing, of sophist subversion, cannot be tolerated?

These are questions Moltke asked. They are questions that the US-led prosecution team in Nuremberg asked. They are questions that Americans should be asking today about the conduct of government lawyers who have seriously wounded, if not destroyed, the Geneva system.

For this issue, one Nuremberg case forms the key precedent: United States v. Altstoetter, also called the Reich Justice Ministry case. That case stands for some simple propositions. One of them is that lawyers who dispense bad advice about law of armed conflict, and whose advice predictably leads to the death or mistreatment of prisoners, are war criminals, chargeable with potentially capital offenses. Another is that cute lawyerly evasions and gimmicks, so commonly indulged in other areas of the law, will not be tolerated on fundamental questions of law of armed conflict relating to the protection of civilians and detainees. In other words, lawyers are not permitted to get it wrong.

United States v. Altstoetter: Lawyers As War Criminals

Concerned about the level of resistance faced by German troops in the occupied territories, Hitler instructed Field Marshall Keitel to issue a special decree authorizing extraordinary measures pursuant to which political suspects would simply "disappear" to special detention facilities and might face summary court proceedings. The death penalty appears as the punishment most frequently contemplated. The decree, issued on the same day the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor (December 7, 1941) and as the German drive on Moscow stalled and the Soviet counteroffensive had begun, is known as the "Night and Fog Decree" (Nacht- und Nebelerlass), a reference to the covert action it authorized. Contemporaneous documents make clear that it was motivated by the high level of casualties German soldiers were sustaining behind the front in occupied territory. Pacification of this territory was given a high priority.

A team of Justice Department lawyers worked with Keitel and his team at the German General Staff (OKW) on the drafting of the decree and further steps for its implementation. This included a series of highly particularized rules setting out how such detainees were to be treated by police, justice officials and others. The rules specified how such individuals would be permitted to make wills, issue final letters of farewell, what would be done with children born to detainees and how their death could be recorded in the registry. Other lawyers prepared parallel orders creating special secret courts and detention facilities for those interned under the Nacht- und Nebelerlass. These courts were crafted under domestic German law and thus constituted a projection of German law into the occupied territories.

These arrangements flouted the protections of the Hague Convention, specifically the right of "family honor, lives of persons" and the right "to be judged under their own laws." To the extent applied against uniformed service personnel, they also violated the Geneva Convention on Prisoners of War of 1929. However, the Justice Department lawyers advanced the view that the Hague and Geneva Conventions were inapplicable because their adversaries did not subscribe to these documents. This decree was applied brutally, and with particular force in France. A total of at least 7,000 persons were detained; a large number of them perished.

The Justice Department lawyers justified these acts as steps available to an occupying power in order to protect its troops against terrorist acts or insurgency. Further, the occupied territories could be divided, roughly, into three categories: (i) areas directly incorporated into the German State (for instance, Austria, Alsace-Lorraine, the Eupen-Malmédy region of Belgium, Danzig and portions of Poland); (ii) areas under German occupation and direct administration (such as Bohemia and Moravia); and (iii) areas under puppet régimes (such as Hungary and Slovakia). As for the first, they asserted the right to treat persons found within those territories under German law. As to the second, they claimed the right as occupier to promulgate new rules and orders, and to derive them from Germany. As to the third, they relied on the acquiescence of régimes like Vichy France and Hungary. Their positions on these points were at least colorable from a legal perspective.

The Justice Department lawyers were indicted and charged with crimes against humanity and war crimes arising out of the issuance and implementation of the Nacht- und Nebelerlass. The United States charged that as lawyers, "not farmers or factory workers," they must have recognized that their technical justifications for avoiding the application of the Hague and Geneva Conventions were unavailing, because these conventions were "recognized by all civilized nations, and were regarded as being declaratory of the laws and customs of war." That is to say, they were customary international law. Further, the United States charged, this decree "would probably cause the death of human beings," grounding a charge of homicidal intent.

After trial, the two principal Justice Department lawyers, one a deputy chief of the criminal division, were convicted and sentenced to ten years' imprisonment, less time served. This judgment clearly established the concept of liability of the authors of bureaucratic policies that breach basic rules of the Hague and Geneva Conventions for the consequences that predictably flow therefrom. Moreover, it establishes a particularly perilous standard of liability for government attorneys who adopt a dismissive attitude towards international humanitarian law.

The Present Crisis

Between the fall of 2001 and early 2004, US Government lawyers engaged many of the same issues and took decisions very close to those taken by von Ammann and his colleagues in the German Justice Department. In particular, the Nacht- und Nebelerlass has a close cousin in the United States extraordinary rendition project on a policy plain, though we should quickly note two essential distinctions: the total throughput in human terms has been dozens, not thousands of persons, and it has not involved death sentences, though not a few persons (to be exact: 98) have died in incarceration under circumstances suggesting that torture was involved, if they were not indeed tortured to death. These lawyers adopted a mantra, namely, to quote Alberto Gonzales, that the Geneva Conventions were "quaint" and "obsolete," and did not apply to a "new kind of warfare." In so doing, they thoughtlessly moved in the same paths traversed by lawyers in Berlin sixty years earlier. Indeed, at the General Staff trial, the world public learned for the first time of the valiant struggle of Moltke when one of his memoranda was put into evidence. It pleaded in forceful terms for respect of the Geneva Convention rights of enemy soldiers, civilians and irregular combatants on the East Front, mustering a series of arguments that bear remarkable similarity to a memorandum sent by Colin Powell to President Bush sixty years later. And in the margins, in the unmistakeable pencil scrawl of Field Marshall Keitel, were found the thoughts that these rules were "quaint" and "obsolete," they reflected the "outmoded notions of chivalric warfare." This was cited as an aggravating factor justifying a sentence of death against Keitel.

The Bush Administration apparently assumed that the court system would toe the political line they had drawn. It was clearly taken by surprise when the Supreme Court, in Hamdan, knocked the legal props out from under the Administration's detainee policy, validating the positions taken by the senior legal officers of the nation's uniformed military services and the State Department, which had opposed the Administration on this grounds. The Hamdan decision presents a straight-forward interpretation of the Geneva Conventions, finding that Common Article 3 was applicable to detainees in the War on Terror who did not qualify for prisoner of war protections. This position is also identical to the view embraced by the organized bar in the United States in 2003, in a series of reports that warned the Administration that its legal reasoning was both radical and isolated. But the most striking aspect of the Court's opinion was its forceful and repeated references to the War Crimes Act of 1996. There is little doubt that the Court was concerned that the Administration's policies were not just inconsistent with Geneva, but in fact potentially criminal under American law.

The Administration's response was to propose the Military Commissions Act of 2006, the thrust of which was to attempt to amend the War Crimes Act into oblivion and to make the amendment retroactive. When it became clear that the Administration could not muster a majority for this legislation in the Senate, the Administration entered into a compromise with Senators McCain, Warner and Graham, who had specifically flagged and objected to this effort.

I want to ask today: What has this legislation done to the legacy of Nuremberg? Has it granted impunity to persons who committed war crimes? Is that impunity effective, and might it have unintended consequences?

At Nuremberg, Justice Jackson promised that this process would not be "victor's justice." He said "We must never forget that the record on which we judge these defendants today is the record on which history will judge us tomorrow. To pass these defendants a poisoned chalice is to put it to our lips as well." Powerful words. A moral compact. Did the Bush Administration seek to repudiate Jackson's commitment? This can be answered quite clearly: yes. But did they succeed? That is less clear. But before getting to that point, I want to deconstruct some myths that the Administration has generated to obscure their entire process.

The Camouflage

In announcing the Military Commissions Act, President Bush insisted that he needed the legislation to lay to rest the concerns of 400-500 professional interrogators. These loyal citizens were, he said, concerned that the Supreme Court in Hamdan had called into question the legality of what he called "the Program," a set of "alternative interrogation procedures" which were developed and implemented by his Administrations. This was perhaps the most fact-free speech Bush has ever delivered. But it contained three fundamental misrepresentations.

First, he suggested that the interrogators faced the prospect of prosecution under the War Crimes Act. In fact, as a matter of long-established policy, US service personnel are prosecuted under the Uniform Code of Military Justice and not the War Crimes Act. The CIA personnel and private contractors involved in this process likewise faced no prosecution risk under the WCA because of a memorandum of agreement between the Department of Justice, Department of Defense and CIA done by Michael Chertoff when he headed the Criminal Division. Chertoff undertook that as long as a set of scheduled techniques were used, which are described on an appended memorandum he prepared with Alice Fisher, no prosecutions would be undertaken for death, dismemberment or assaults. Consequently, only one group feared prosecution under the War Crimes Act, and that is the policy makers: John Yoo, Jay Bybee, Alberto Gonzales, David Addington, Jim Haynes and a host of others. This measure was pushed at their initiative, and for their benefit. This is the first dark secret of this measure.

Second, Bush revealed that there was a new "Program," of "extraordinary procedures" that he, personally, had been advised of and had approved. The Program, he complained, had been stopped as a result of the decision in Hamdan. This is part of a general political strategy of spotlighting judges and accusing them of politics when they are bravely enforcing the law. But the facts here are different: the Program was always against the law, and the US Army's own interrogation manuals stated just that. As the current issue of Time reports, and I have corroborated from my own sources, the use of these techniques was suspended when even the President's own lawyers, and I am talking about political appointees in the DOJ as well as the interim general counsel of the CIA, concluded that it was unlawful. They were propelled to this conclusion not by Hamdan, but a half year earlier, by the passage of the McCain Amendment, which banned cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment as well as torture. Placing the blame on the Court was the second lie.

Third - and this is the darkest lie of all because it impunes the integrity of American service personnel – Bush stated that the reach for highly coercive new techniques came at the insistence of the interrogators themselves. But in fact, we now know from an array of leaked documents that these techniques were rammed down their throats, often over courageous opposition, both within the CIA and the uniformed services. When the career professionals refused, DOJ lawyers were enlisted, led by figures like Alberto Gonzales and John Yoo, to override their objections by issuing formal opinions backing orders from the White House to use abusive techniques. Consequently, when we allocate moral and legal culpability for the deaths, torment and scarred lives that this process has produced, it is the torture memo writers who surely deserve the biggest blame. It was their professional duty to say "no," but instead when asked whether they would give a green light to war crimes, they responded by doing their master's unthinking bidding.

Impunity

The Military Commissions Act seeks to accomplish its objective of granting impunity through three tools. First, it redefines "war crimes" into a series of specifically chargeable offenses, of which two, "torture" and "cruel treatment" are most important for these purposes. Second, it makes the restatement of these crimes retroactive to September 11, 2001. Consequently, a series of criminal offenses under the War Crimes Act will disappear retroactively when the Act goes into force. Third, it strips courts of jurisdiction over habeas corpus petitions and forbids litigants to cite the Geneva Conventions and related international and foreign law in those courts, in an effort to blind the courts to the law which the Constitution obligates them to enforce.

The initial draft makes clear that the White House sought impunity for crimes arising as a result of the use of three techniques that the Bush Administration (and, from the remarkable wording of one of Bush's press conferences, Bush himself) authorized and which constitute grave breaches under Common Article 3: waterboarding, long-time standing (or as it was called by its NKVD inventors, in Russian: stoika) and hypothermia or cold cell. The use of these techniques is a criminal act. The purported authorization of these techniques is a criminal act. The larger effort to employ them constitutes a joint criminal enterprise.

The Act does not alter the fact that these practices are outlawed by Common Article 3. However, by creating a series of specifically chargeable crimes that weave and bob through the historical offenses, the drafters apparently seek to make it more difficult to prosecute these offenses in US courts.

At the core, we have this question: are waterboarding, hypothermia and long-time standing "cruel treatment" as the crime is identified in the Act? And on this point, the legislation's sponsors – Senators Warner, McCain and Graham, say "yes," while the White House says "no." A fair reading would say that the Act creates ambiguity where none previously existed. However, a close comparison of the White House's original proposal with the compromise version that resulted clearly undermines the White House's claims, for the changes seem clearly keyed to forbidding the questioned tactics.

So where do we go from here? Unfortunately its track record up to this point suggests that the Administration will exploit any ambiguity to work its will. Consequently, the burden will shortly fall on Administration lawyers, who will be challenged to pick their path: will it be that of Moltke and Jackson, or will they adhere to the twisted course of Addington, Yoo and Gonzales? That's a stark choice, and one that entails absolute moral clarity.

If the consequence of the Act is to immunize those who authorized these techniques from prosecution, is that lawful? The US position, articulated most recently in connection with Yugoslavia's efforts to immunize its military leaders, was that any such act would only provide evidence of a broader conspiracy to commit war crimes. Consequently, the grant of immunity is ineffective in the contemplation of the international community; moreover, those involved in purporting to grant immunity may thereby be roped into a charged joint criminal enterprise.

Clearly there will be no prosecutions in the US, certainly not under Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, who would figure near the top of anyone's list of criminal conspirators and whose name has already appeared in a criminal indictment relating to Abu Ghraib. But what about universal jurisdiction processes? Spain, France, Belgium, Germany, Switzerland and Italy all have universal jurisdiction statutes. Germany has already entertained a complaint against Rumsfeld, Tenet and others over detainee abuse questions. That complaint was dismissed without prejudice by the German Federal Prosecutor. In his opinion, the Federal Prosecutor stated that the first predicate of the statute had not been met since there was no showing that a prosecution for the crimes shown in the home nation of the defendants would not occur. Considering the political and military position of the United States, the invocation of a universal jurisdiction statute against sitting officers of the government has to be viewed as more than an uphill task. But I think passage of the Act has just made it a whole lot easier.

Conclusion

The legacy of Nuremberg and the solemn undertaking that Justice Jackson gave for the United States at the opening session, are under assault by the Bush Administration, which has embraced a radical world view that rests on a cult of power and a disdain for law. And fundamentally, this Administration has a notorious allergy against accountability in any form. But this conference is evidence that the spirit of Nuremberg has not been extinguished in the United States. And indeed, the flickering candle that was lit at Nuremberg has developed into principles which form the heart of the international legal order. We bear witness to those principles with this conference.

Remarks delivered at the ASIL Centennial Conference on The Nuremberg War Crimes Trial, Bowling Green, OH, Oct. 7, 2006

Posted 4:10 PM by Scott Horton [link]

January 11, 11:40 AM, 2010 · No Comment · Previous · Next

Remembering Freya and Helmuth James von Moltke

By Scott Horton

This weekend we learned that Freya von Moltke died at the beginning of the year at her home in Norwich, Vermont. A lion of the resistance to Hitler and the wife of its best known leader, Helmuth James von Moltke, she was 98. The Times reports:

“He put the question to me explicitly — ‘The time is coming when something must be done,’ ” Freya von Moltke said. “ ‘I would like to have a hand in it, but I can only do so if you join in too,’ and I said, ‘Yes, it’s worth it.’ ” So, with a wife’s assent, began a famous challenge to Hitler. At the height of the Nazi victories, Count Helmuth James von Moltke invited about two dozen foes of Nazism, many of them aristocrats like himself, to imagine a new, better postwar Germany. For him, his wife’s participation was essential, as she remembered the conversation in “Courageous Hearts: Women and the Anti-Hitler Plot of 1944,” a 1997 book by Dorothee von Meding.

Moltke’s correspondence with his wife, published as Letters to Freya, constitutes, along with Anne Frank’s Diary, Primo Levi’s Se questo è un uomo, and a handful of other books, one of the great moral documents to emerge from World War II. In his letters, Moltke, the scion of Germany’s greatest military family, documents the mentality of war—what he called “cowardice, servility and mass-psychosis”–and how it undermined the moral essence of men and women, converting them to “machines with a particular function in a process.” Moltke was no pacifist, but he was a firm believer in international law and the laws of war as essential tools to protect the innocent and soften the harms of warfare. The processes he so skillfully observed can be found in some measure in every society enmeshed in war, not least of all in our own.

Today, January 11, marks the fifty-fifth anniversary of the death sentence that concluded his trial by the infamous Volksgericht for his courageous actions against the Hitler regime.

*Storing, “The Presidency and the Constitution,” in Toward a More Perfect Union, ed. Herbert Storing and Joseph Bessette, (American Enterprise Institute Press, 1995). A student and, in this respect, inspired by Leo Strauss, Storing learned the examples from the Chicago constitutional law professor C. Hermann Pritchett. In Storing's essay for the American Enterprise Institute, these ideas were not yet the awful mantra that neo-con talking heads have made them.

Carl Schmitt and Guantanamo at 10: Todd Pierce, a Judge Advocate General officer, speaks out

2012-01-25T07:36:00.000-08:00

Will Altman sent me this striking piece from Todd Pierce, a Guantanamo defense lawyer in the Pentagon* from the National Law Journal below. It tracks the introduction and dangerous near triumph of Carl Schmitt’s doctrine stated in the first sentence of his 1923 Political Theology: “he is sovereign who makes the decision in the state of the exception” in the United States at the expense of the separation and balance of powers in the Constitution.

Pierce highlights a 2010 book by Eric Posner (Chicago) and Adrian Vermeule (Harvard) – The Executive Unbound: After the Madisonian Republic, Oxford Press - which echoes and embroiders this doctrine. Vermeule and Posner use the aim of fighting abroad – and Guantanamo – to advance the “legal,” that is authoritarian and anti-Constitutional suppression of dissent here. As Vermeule put it on Balkinization blog,

“We envision the Constitution in 2020 as a plebiscitary, president-centered electoral democracy in which Congress and the courts have been reduced to marginal actors, who carp from the sidelines but for the most part end up deferring to executive power, if only because the executive is the least dysfunctional branch.”

As I stress in Must Global Politics Constrain Democracy?, executive power – put crudely, “Mussolini makes the trains run on time” in the 1930s pro-fascist colloquialization of the executive as "the least dysfunctional branch" - and the Posner-Vermeule apology for it is an example of the anti-democratic feedback of international politics: that aggressions abroad lead to abridgments of the Bill of Rights as well as tyranny at home.

For instance, the Iraq occupation, now lessened (the US has mainly Xe Corporation mercenaries "on the ground"), and the Afghanistan one, as well as the drone war in Pakistan among others, violating international law (aggression, torture, though the latter was limited by Obama who, however, still retains indefinite detention and its symbol, the colonial – seized in Cuba in the war of 1898 – “non”-US territory of Guantanamo), is today coming home to roost.

For the echo of these aggressions, as I stressed in "New Institutions for Peace and Democracy" (in Sir Nicholas Kiddrie, Sir Ronald. Mancham and H.E. Carazo Odio, eds., The Future of Peace in the Twenty-First Century, 2002), is the Patriot Act under Bush, and today, the assertion of a doctrine that the President can murder an American citizen – an “enemy” – far from the field of battle with no judicial proceeding (Anwar Awlaki, who at least arguably was an enemy; his 16 year old son, as plain and grim a war crime and an ordinary American crime as it gets), as well as the new National Defense Authorization Act, which includes an infamous provision, passed by even the Democratic Senate along with the more open authoritarians, that the President can arbitrarily detain Americans without trial. See Glenn Greenwald Monday on the murder of a "former" British citizen, Bilal El-berjawi, by an American drone here.

Pierce puts what I have named the idea of anti-democratic feedback fiercely:

“As evident in Yoo and Delahunty's legal memos asserting unitary executive authority, the legal theory underpinning Guantánamo and the military commissions were an assault upon the structure of our form of constitutional government; lawfare. It was not the inevitable conclusion required by the Sept. 11 attacks, but the exploitation of a tragedy to import a foreign legal ideology, a legal bacillus, into our legal system.”

As Pierce also indicates, Harvey Mansfield, the Harvard follower of Leo Strauss, has advocated these tyrannical doctrines in the Wall Street Journal (with the neo-con proviso – in Mansfield’s case, mere exoteric writing – that of course the Constitution will be restored once the trouble is over just as it has been in the past. See here and here. But why should we think so? When tyranny comes (when the Roman Republic was overthrown, when Hitler was in power), was there “inevitably” such a movement back?.

Lacking political sophistication, Posner and Vermeule wave away worries about Weimar and the Constitution (see especially pp. 38-39 which I will comment on in another post). But to say the least, one needs an honest assessment of what it means to abandon freedom for Americans and decency toward prisoners of war. Pierce, whose father was a prisoner of war during World War II, speaks movingly of these issues.

“I will admit a particular sensitivity to the enforcement of the Geneva Conventions as my father, along with thousands of other American and Philippine prisoners of war, survived the Bataan Death March. This was despite the best efforts of soldiers who set aside the Geneva Convention of 1929 because of their oath of allegiance to the Japanese emperor. Following that war, my father's former captors and their legal advisers were put on trial and convicted of war crimes, including waterboarding and punishing prisoners without fair trials, as required under the 1929 Geneva Convention. This treaty was replaced by the Four Geneva Conventions of 1949 due to the mistreatment of prisoners like my father. “

For the Wall Street Journal, Mansfield invokes Aristotle’s notion of the rule of the best man (Bush, in Mansfield’s patronizing idiom) from book 3 of the Politics.** Who would have the audacity to claim to rule over Zeus, Aristotle says…But, once again, does Zeus give it up? Here is the use of political "philosophy" to sanction tyranny.

In fact, the transmitting connection of Schmitt to Bush, Cheney, Posner, Vermeule, and Mansfield, inter alia, in America is the scholarly and political activity of Leo Strauss, on whose doctoral committee Schmitt served, and who recommended Strauss for a Fulbright in 1932 by which Strauss emigrated to England and then the United States. Strauss’s 1933 letter to Karl Loewith defends the “principles of the Right – fascist, authoritarian, imperial," against the "childish and ridiculous imprescriptible rights of man” as “the only dignified basis on which to oppose the mean nonentity (meskine Unwesen).” For a debate on the significance of the letter which I organized at the American Political Science Association in 2007, see here; for Scott Horton’s translation see here.

Since Strauss was a Jew and a “political Zionist” with a fascist orientation (he admired Mussolini and defended Blau-Weiss, a movement led by Walter Moses and modeled on Mussolini – See William Altman, The German Stranger, Lexington Books 2011, ch. 2 , here and here - it is common sense to imagine that he thought the Right could provide an alternative to Hitler (my friend Peter Minowitz makes this mistake in Straussophobia, pp. 154-63; I was involved in Scott Horton’s fine translation of the letter and made the same mistake initially as did the first translator Eugene Shepherd). But Michael Zank was responsible for the right translation: meskine refers often to Shylock and Fagin in Italian and French and Strauss invoked the Nietzschean thought - it is an aspect of anti-semitism that also comes from Nietzsche, however much he opposed gutter anti-semitism - that Jewish slaves transformed morality into something resentful and slavish and that this extends subtly and consciously – as a Jewish trick – through Christianity, democracy, socialism and communism to the deteriorated “last men.” However much one may otherwise admire and learn from Nietzsche, the direct connection of this view to fascism and Nazism – in, for example, Heidegger, see here and here – and Strauss and those among his American followers who despise “the last men,” is worth taking in.

In a June 23, 1935 letter to Loewith, Strauss emphasizes that Nietzsche had long "ruled and enchanted him (beherrscht under entzaubert) him" and that he had believed every word of Nietzsche’s “that he understood” (Strauss, Gesammelte Schriften, 3:648-50). In 1929, however, he would trade Nietzsche for Heidegger (see Altman, ch. 3), but he retained this central idea. Thus, in Strauss's 1930 “Religioese Lage der Gegenwart” [“Religious Situation of the Present”], he despises the prophets, with Nietzsche, and stands with the kings.

“The end of this struggle is the complete rejection of tradition neither merely of its answers, nor merely of its questions, but of its possibilities: the pillars on which our tradition rested; prophets and Socrates/Plato have been torn down since Nietzsche. Nietzsche’s partisanship for the kings and against the prophets, for the sophists and against Socrates – Jesus neither merely no God, nor a swindler, nor a genius, but an idiot. Rejected are the theorein and “Good-Evil” – Nietzsche, as the last enlightener.”

“Through Nietzsche, tradition has been shaken at its roots. It has completely lost its self-evident truth. We are left in this world without any authority, without any direction."

"...and even so, the Bible: we can no longer assume that the Prophets are right; we must earnestly ask whether the kings are not right.” (Gesammelte Schriften 2:389; trans. Michael Zank).”

These thoughts underlie his phrase about the “meskine Unwesen,” the usurious or Jewish reality which needs to be destroyed, in the 1933 letter.

In the first section of the Genealogy of Morals, this connection of the inversion of values, slavery, Jewishness, Christianity, democracy, socialism and communism is startling. Nietzsche repeatedly refers to the impotence and vengefulness of this view, its stench (he repeats the mantra about the smell) in the smallness of what he calls in Thus Spoke Zarathustra/Also Sprach Zarathustra, “the last men” who huddle together and blink . He idealizes the warrior as much as Schmitt (The Concept of the Political/Der Begriff des Politischen) or Strauss - see his Remarks (Anmerkungen) on Schmitt’s essay, a refinement of it to the Right.

One might even say, of the transformed master morality that Nietzsche seems to endorse and the Uebermensch, the solitary dancer who sees the stars and affirms his existence (eternal recurrence) that it has, in this regard, some element of projection in it. In any case, the genocide against Jews and others which the ideas of slave morality and the last men helped spawn exemplifies accusing others of one's own crimes...Whatever fascists dementedly stigmatized Jews and others for, they in life exceeded...

Here is Nietzsche from the first section of Genealogy of Morals/Zur Genealogie der Moral:

Paragraph vii

"The greatest haters in history - but also the most intelligent haters - have been priests. Beside the brilliance of priestly vengeance all other brilliance fades. Human history would be a dull and stupid thing without the intelligence furnished by its impotents. Let us begin with the most striking example. Whatever else has been done to damage the powerful and great of this earth seems trivial compared with what the Jews have done, that priestly people who succeeded in avenging themselves on their enemies and oppressors by radically inverting all their values, that is, by an act of the most spiritual vengeance."

"We know who has fallen heir to this Jewish inversion of values…In reference to the grand and unspeakably disastrous initiative that the Jews have launched by this most radical of all declarations of war, I wish to repeat a statement I made in a different context (Beyond Good and Evil), to wit, that it was the Jews who started the slave revolt in morals; a revolt with two millennia of history behind it, which we have lost sight of today simply because it has triumphed so completely."

Paragraph viii

“You find that difficult to understand? You have no eyes for something that took two millennia to prevail?....There is nothing strange about this: all long developments are difficult to see in the round. From the tree trunk of Jewish vengeance and hatred - the deepest and sublimest hatred in human history, since it gave birth to ideals and a new set of values - grew a branch that was equally unique: a new love [Christianity]...But let no one surmise that this love represented a denial of the thirst for vengeance, that it contravened Jewish hatred. Exactly the opposite...Has not Israel, precisely through the detour of this 'redeemer,' this seeming antagonist and destroyer of Israel, reached the final goal of its sublime vindictiveness? Was it not a necessary feature of a truly brilliant politics of vengeance, a far-sighted, subterranean, slowly and carefully planned vengeance [in these sentences, Nietzsche for European fascists, makes the Protocols of the Elders of Zion look like pikers...], that Israel had to deny its true instrument publicly and nail him to the cross like a mortal enemy so that ‘the whole world’ (meaning all the enemies of Israel) might naively swallow the bait...What could equal in debilitating, narcotic power, the symbol of the ‘holy cross,’ the ghastly paradox of a crucified god...One thing is certain that in this sign Israel has by now triumphed over all other nobler values.”

Paragraph ix

“But what is all this talk about nobler values?" Let us face facts: the people have triumphed - or the slaves, the mob, the herd, whatever you wish to call them - and if the Jews brought it about, then no nation ever had a more universal mission on the earth...I don't deny that this triumph might be looked upon as a kind of blood poisoning, since it has resulted in a mingling of races [Nietzsche is metaphorical here, but ordinary Nazis and other anti-semites read him literally] but there can be no doubt that the intoxication has succeeded. The ' redemption' of the human race (from the lords, that is), is well under way; everything is rapidly becoming Judaized [Verjudung is a key word for Strauss, what the last men are the result of - see Altman, pp. 263-64 ], Christianized or mob-ized - the word makes no difference. The progress of this poison throughout the body of mankind cannot be stayed."

paragraph x

"The slave revolt in morals begins by rancor turning creative and giving birth to values - the rancor of human beings who deprived of a direct outlet of action compensate by an imaginary vengeance. All truly noble morality grows out of triumphant self-affirmation. Slave ethics on the other hand begins by saying no to an outside, an “other,” a non-self, and that no is its creative act. This reversal of direction of the evaluating look, this invariable outward instead of inward, is a fundamental feature of rancor.”

"The 'wellborn' really felt that they were also the 'happy.' They did not have to construct their happiness factitiously by looking at their enemies as all rancorous men are wont to do...All this stands in utter contrast to what is called happiness among the impotent and oppressed who are full of bottled up aggressions. Their happiness is purely passive and takes the form of drugged tranquility, stretching and yawning, peace, 'sabbath' emotional slackness.. ...[the rancorous person's] soul squints, his mind loves hide-outs, secret paths, and back doors; everything that is hidden seems to him his own world, his security, his comfort; he is an expert in silence, in long memory, in waiting...[again, note the consonance with ordinary anti-semitism, which this revs up to a very high pitch]...A race of such men will, in the end, inevitably be cleverer than a race of aristocrats.”

Paragraph xi

“The exact opposite is true of the noble-minded who spontaneously creates the notion good and later derives from it the conception of the bad. How ill-matched these concepts look, placed side by side, the bad of noble origin and the evil that has risen out of the cauldron of unquenchable hatred!...Deep within all these noble races there lurks the beast of prey, bent on spoil and conquest. This hidden urge has to be satisfied from time to time, the beast let loose in the wilderness [how many instigators/participants in Kristallnacht, had once upon a time, read this passage?]. This goes as well for the Roman [Strauss’s favorites – see the 1933 letter to Loewith], Arabian, German, Japanese nobility as for the Homeric heroes and the Scandinavian vikings.”

"These carriers of the leveling and retributive instincts, these descendants of every European and extra-European slavedom, and especially of the pre-Aryan [Nietzsche is not here courting misunderstand; it is his understanding] populations, represent human retrogression most flagrantly. such 'instruments of culture' are a disgrace to man and might make one suspicious of culture altogether. One might be justified in fearing the wild beast lurking within all noble races and in being on one's guard against it, but who would not a thousand times prefer fear when it is accompanied with admiration to security accompanied by the loathsome sight of perversion, dwarfishness, degeneracy [recall that Strauss agreed with "every word of Nietzsche...that I understood" - these are not hard...]? And is not the latter our predicament today? What accounts for our repugnance to man - for there is no question that he makes us suffer? Certainly not our fears of him, rather the fact that there is no longer anything to be feared from him; that the vermin 'man' occupies the entire stage [again, a proto-Nazi phrase...]; that tame, hopelessly mediocre, and savorless, he considers himself the apex of historical evolution; and not entirely without justice, since he is still somewhat removed from the mass of sickly and effete creatures whom Europe is beginning to stink of today."

Paragraph xii:

“Here I want to give vent to a sigh and a last hope. Exactly what is it that I, especially, find intolerable, that I am unable to cope with; that asphyxiates me? a bad smell. The smell of failure, of a soul that has gone stale. “ He elaborates this revulsion in paragraphs xii, xiii and especially xiv.

Heidegger, Strauss and other European fascists did not misunderstand this theme of Nietzsche; quite the contrary, in this respect, Nietzsche founds European fascism and licenses (not, in extenuation, that he could foresee this) its massacres of innocents. ****

Nietzsche was also a brilliant psychologist and an often magnificent writer; nonetheless, his influential idea of master “morality” is sordid, and if enacted, monstrous. The idea that a great soul, a master, relies on millions of slaves and sheds their lives to flourish, like the parasitic vine sipo matador in the sun high above the Malaysian forest (Jenseits Gut und Bose – Beyond Good and Evil, paragraph 258) denies the value of each human life. The sacrifice of millions for the advancement of the few is mass murder, not a moral point of view (hilariously, Strauss repeatedly refers to “the young nihilists” standpoint – his own – in his 1941 lecture, never given at New School, as “moral” and “decent”…(see Altman, ch. 6).

But defense of at least the life of each human is the core of a decent response to Aristotle’s core question: what is a good life for humans? Life is not yet a good life, and moderns have many apt differences with Aristotle (see my Democratic Individuality, ch 1), but the idea that there is no integrity to ethics, that mass murder and exploitation are part of a “moral” point of view, that ethics is just subjective or “phenomenological” and thus, whatever one happens to believe (“Himmler was a decent man…”), is incoherent. Following Nietzsche, this claim confuses an interesting sociological and etymological point - that there was a different kind of ethic in aristocratic times in the ancient world and that this has been replaced a new one now assumed to be general - with a reasonable, ethical examination of which of these two “ethics,” if either, is in fact decent for human beings. Taken at face value, it is evil (mass murder of the last men whose lives are worthless – wertlos – in the phrase of Nazi doctors) or in Nietzsche’s case, an instigation to it... ******

Enacting this confusion, existentialists starting with Heidegger tend to take Nietzsche seriously on this point about ethics, even Sartre and his American followers like Robert Solomon (in a series on existentialism on the web, Solomon offers a lecture on Genealogy of Morals which entirely empathizes with Nietzsche’s scorn for the idea that the “great” exploit the “weak,” and suggests that what we mean by morality is but the idea of the weak, the impotent, those who merely react to the master’s initiative, and, thus, forgetting himself completely, that there is no serious moral objection to slavery…

But is there no moral objection to holding a man or woman in servitude for a lifetime, tossing her life away on a whim? No argument that a system that rules out slavery is superior to that of slave-owners? See my Democratic Individuality, ch. 1.

For Heidegger and other fascists, including Strauss and many of his political followers (Werner Dannhauser, for example), refer routinely to the “last men” who are our fellow citizens and us, and ostensibly need, for the sake of “seriousness” in life – war and the preparation for war – to be dispensed with.*******

As Occupy shows, they mistake the actual and potential fortitude and fierceness of the nonviolent who organize a movement to stop them.

The idea that it would be good to get rid of the last men (see the last sentences of Strauss’s "Restatement" on On Tyranny******** ) is simply false and if taken seriously, monstrous. Even Altman (who is a Platonist), mistakenly takes Nietzsche to have a serious argument about ethics whereas instead, he has an interesting sociology or phenomenology of morals coupled with a psychology which sometimes identifies moralisms (people who suffer oppression are also sometimes resentful). But his claim, as it were, that apartheid is not injustice, that blacks merely “resented” it, or that Desmond Tutu and Nelson Mandela were “steeped in resentment” disintegrates with the example.

Tutu and Mandela are rather models for political healing, once the injustice was ended, and provide a far deeper understanding of the grain of truth in Nietzsche’s thought about eternal recurrence than Nietzche himself or any of his followers…See Tutu, No future without forgiveness.

The Guantánamo facility at 10: an assault on our constitutional government

Todd E. Pierce

The National Law Journal

January 10, 2012

The 10th anniversary of the opening of Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, as a detention facility and the diversion of terrorism prosecutions into a new military commission system is now upon us. Consequently, I thought I would take this opportunity to briefly explain why I, an Army Reserve Judge Advocate General officer with more than 30 years of active and reserve military service, would volunteer as defense counsel for prisoners being held there.

I might add that I consider myself to be a conservative. In the United States of America, that means to conserve the legal order that this nation was founded upon, the Constitution. In fact, as a member of the military, I took an oath to defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic. I did not take an oath of allegiance to the "leader," or to the "state," as required in some other nations. Thus, it came as something of a shock to me when Alberto Gonzalez, John Yoo and Robert Delahunty began issuing legal opinions that the Geneva Conventions, a treaty incorporated into our law, were quaint and did not apply, or that the president could, at his or her sole discretion, suspend them.

I will admit a particular sensitivity to the enforcement of the Geneva Conventions as my father, along with thousands of other American and Philippine prisoners of war, survived the Bataan Death March. This was despite the best efforts of soldiers who set aside the Geneva Convention of 1929 because of their oath of allegiance to the Japanese emperor. Following that war, my father's former captors and their legal advisers were put on trial and convicted of war crimes, including waterboarding and punishing prisoners without fair trials, as required under the 1929 Geneva Convention. This treaty was replaced by the Four Geneva Conventions of 1949 due to the mistreatment of prisoners like my father.

Back in 2001 and 2002, when these legal opinions were being issued, astute critics immediately recognized that these opinions were regurgitated leftovers of President Richard Nixon's belief that if the president did something, it could not be illegal — the dictator's prerogative. But this crude anti-American notion had been refined into the "unitary executive theory." Vice President Richard Cheney seemed to take credit for it. But more astute commentators noted that these ideas were actually legal theories expounded by Carl Schmitt, the Nazi "Crown Jurist" of the 1930s. But that seemed a little extreme, or at least bad manners, to point out.

Once the unitary-executive theory began to gain credibility, other advocates of this form of government came out of the shadows, perhaps from "the dark side." One was Harvard Professor Harvey Mansfield in The Wall Street Journal in 2007, who opined about the benefits of "one man rule." But it remained to two law professors, dedicated to the study of arcane legal texts, Adrian Vermeule of Harvard Law School and Eric Posner of the University of Chicago Law School, to openly resurrect Schmitt's authoritarian legal ideology. Or, as they put it, "political theorists interested in emergency powers, and some academic lawyers as well, are much taken with Schmitt; nearly every discussion of emergencies pores over the canonical texts yet again."

In fairness to Vermeule and Posner, leaving them to pore over the Nazi's canonical texts, it should be remembered that Schmitt was not a founder of the Nazi movement. Schmitt only joined the Nazi party when it triumphed over its rival elements in the German military establishment. Schmitt had been legal adviser to those rivals, particularly General Kurt von Schleicher. But what should equally be remembered is that this military faction was seeking to impose its own brand of militaristic dictatorship on Germany, along with an expansionistic foreign policy. These German generals aspired to the form of governance most recently practiced by the dictator Hosni Mubarak and the Egyptian Supreme Council of the Armed Forces.

Schmitt's writings consistently were an apologia for dictatorship and centralized power, whether under military dictatorship of the German High Command or under the Nazis, having further developed his ideas from his book, Die Diktatur. These ideas culminated in 1934, when he justified the murders following the "Night of the Long Knives" as the "highest form of administrative law." Most odiously, he legitimated the authority of Hitler afterward with a paean translated in English as "The Leader Defends the Law."

In Terror in the Balance, Posner and Vermeule argued that the threat of terrorism constitutes a state of emergency necessitating the suspension of our Constitution. Consequently, "Constitutional rights should be relaxed so that the executive can move forcefully against the threat. If dissent weakens resolve, then dissent should be curtailed. If domestic security is at risk, then intrusive searches should be tolerated." Posner and Vermeule followed this in 2010 withThe Executive Unbound: After the Madisonian Republic. Cribbed from Schmitt's Legality and Legitimacy, it seeks to legitimize the administrative state of the sort Schmitt worked to create. Any concern with this centralization of power in our system is dismissed as "tyrannophobia." Evidently, a mental disorder that our founders were afflicted with. As in Schmitt's "dual state," they seek to move us toward a constitutional breakdown through the creation of an administrative state under the exclusive control of the executive, "the Extraordinary Lawgiver" in Schmitt's terminology. Or as Posner and Vermeule ask and answer: "What comes after the Madisonian regime of liberal legalism and the separation of powers? Our answer is a new political order in which government is centered on the executive."

Why does all of this matter? In part, because constitutions and constitutional ideas matter. As evident in Yoo and Delahunty's legal memos asserting unitary executive authority, the legal theory underpinning Guantánamo and the military commissions were an assault upon the structure of our form of constitutional government; lawfare. It was not the inevitable conclusion required by the Sept. 11 attacks, but the exploitation of a tragedy to import a foreign legal ideology, a legal bacillus, into our legal system.

But it matters also because on this 10th anniversary, Guantánamo and the military commissions are metastasizing into our whole legal system. As the French war against the anti-colonialist insurgents of Algeria highlighted, the growing disrespect for "legal niceties" would come to be applied in France itself against political adversaries. Could that happen here? Posner and Vermeule suggest that dissent to policy may need to be controlled, that is, free speech curtailed. Putting aside the potential for misuse against political enemies, is that even desirable for national security? Our allowance of dissent led to our withdrawal from the Vietnam War before the collapse of our economy which, with hindsight, few question any more. Contrast that with the Soviet Union's defeat and total collapse resulting from its war in Afghanistan, purely at the insistence of the Communist leadership.

We have used the vague and overbroad charge of "material support for terrorism" as cause to investigate anti-war groups in Chicago and Minneapolis, predictably chilling speech and dissent. Critics have suggested that recent legislation passed would now require the military to detain such dissidents. Or what about gun store owners, gun manufacturers and the National Rifle Association, all of whom could be accused of having a hand directly or through propaganda in providing firearms downstream to drug cartels in Mexico, alleged to have ties with Mideast terrorist groups? Military detention for them?

We must ask ourselves, because we are passing this nation on to our children and their children: Were the authors of the American Constitution wrong or suffering from a mental disorder (tyrannophobia as described) in believing that blind faith was not sufficient as a bulwark against incompetence, if not tyranny? My father and my uncles, along with the rest of the Greatest Generation, did not think so when they fought against the political ideas of Carl Schmitt in World War II. I think Schmitt's ideas are still worth fighting against today.

Todd E. Pierce is a major in the U.S. Army and has been assigned to the Office of the Chief Defense Counsel since 2008. The views expressed are solely those of the author and do not reflect the official policy or position of the Department of Defense or the U.S. government.

· * I have previously noted the role of Sam Madison, another Pentagon defense attorneys fighting for law. Many of these lawyers really have put themselves on the front line of fighting of Anglo-American justice against the emerging police state, exemplified in the legal black hole of Guantanamo…

**Leo Strauss has a far sharper depiction in his lectures on Aristotle which I tracked, with the help of Mike Goldfield, in "Do Philosophers Counsel Tyrants?," Constellations, March, 2009 here. Finding this hidden message is the source of Heidegger’s and Strauss's reactionary misinterpretation of Plato: that the regimes that decline from philosopher king to tyrant must be made “perfect and a circle” (kuklos), in Aristotle’s words, by a tyrant of a certain kind becoming a philosopher-king.

***See Strauss, "Introduction to [Heideggeriian] Existentialism” and Altman’s instructive ch. 4.

*****The psychology is, sadly, not a feature which influences, for instance, Foucault or Strauss or Heidegger, but one which shook Freud who was superstitious about reading Nietzsche because he was afraid he would find all of his insights already named…

******That Fred was personally an admirable character himself as well as a magnificent writer is true. That these facts rule out the hideous political impact of his views in Europe is false

*******Altman pursues the theme of how Strauss and Heidegger hypocritically shirked World War I while (guiltily?) invoking “manliness” (cf. Harvey Mansfield’s book of that title and his interview with Stephen Colbert where he indicts the unmanliness of Kerry and praises the manliness of Bush – who flew planes for the National Guard and then ducked out even of that, in a war he believed in here) for the rest of us.

Of course they believed in the wars they avoided, whereas opposition to unjust wars, notably civil disobedience, is courageous and willing to pay a price…. In avoidance, they emulated Cheney who had “other things to do” and many neocons who supported recent American aggressions.

********In the peroration of his “Restatement” in On Tyranny, speaking elliptically in the voice of “another,” a courageous nihilist, and joking about Marxism, Strauss was happy with the idea as opposed to the last men and “universal tyranny of technology” that rebellion and nuclear war might produce a “new spring” of stone age humanity:

“There will always be men [andres] who will revolt against a state which is destructive of humanity or in which there is no longer the possibility of noble action or of great deeds. They may be forced into a mere negation of the universal and homogeneous state, into a negation not enlightened by any positive goal, into a nihilistic negation. While perhaps doomed to failure, that nihilistic revolution may be the only action on behalf of man’s humanity, the only great and noble deed that is possible once the universal and homogeneous state has become inevitable. But no one can know whether it will succeed or fail. We still know too little about the workings of the universal and homogeneous state to say anything about where and when its corruption will start. What we do know is only that it will perish sooner or later (see Friedrich Engels, Ludwig Feuerbach). Someone may object that the successful revolt against the universal and homogeneous state could have no other effect than that the identical historical process that has led from the primitive horde to the final state will be repeated. But would such a repetition of the process – a new lease on life for man’s humanity – not be preferable to the indefinite continuation of the inhuman end? Do we not enjoy every spring although we know the cycle of the seasons, although we know that winter will come again? Warriors and workers of all countries, unite, while there is still time to prevent the coming of ‘the realm of freedom.’ Defend with might and main, if it needs to be defended, the ‘realm of necessity ”- On Tyranny, 209.

As the first non-Straussian admitted to Regenstein, I discovered Strauss’s memos to future Senator and would-be Republican presidential candidate Charles Percy; to read them in the context of this conclusion is frightening. For instance, on October 24, 1961, Strauss recommends a merciless conquest of Cuba which he thinks will cow the Soviet Union into submission. His words seek a Nietzschean or Heideggerian depth about eschewing the fight against poverty which opposes modern liberalism and radicalism:

“There cannot be a modus vivendi until Russia abandons Communism, in the sense that it ceases to act on the premises of Communism; for it is utterly uninteresting to us and the rest of the non-Communist world whether the Russians go on paying lip-service to Communism, provided they have become convinced that the Free World is here to stay, and they act on this conviction. To bring about this change of mind, the West must be as tough and, if need be, as brutal as the Communists are to the West. The West must demonstrate to the Communists, by words and deeds which allow no possibility of error, that they must postpone forever the establishment of the Communist world society.

But the modus vivendi demands also a radical change on our part – a change of outlook or expectations which will necessarily issue in a change of policies. I can only speak of the change of outlook. Hitherto the West has believed in the possibility of a perfectly just society (federationist or unitary) comprising all mankind – a society rendered possible in the first place by universal affluence and ultimately by the increase in human power to be brought about by technology or science. Everyone has now become aware of the fact that the great enterprise which was meant to bring about the abolition of misery, has in fact brought about what we may call the absolute misery: namely the possibility that, so to speak, a single tyrant can destroy the human race. We must rethink radically the expectation which has pervaded our thoughts and actions in all domains, that the human condition is thinkable without the accompaniment of misery. By this I do not deny that it is the duty of humanity to relieve misery wherever one can [an exoteric remark, for Percy].”

After the Cuban missile crisis and the narrowest miss at nuclear war (Cuba had over 100 armed nuclear missiles of which the Kennedy administration was unaware), Strauss wrote on February 12, 1963:

“Dear Mr. Percy,

I believe that the following points have not been made, or at least have not been made with sufficient audibility: 1) To speak in the only language which Khrushchev understands, Cuba is our Hungary; just as we did not make the slightest move when he solved the problem in his back yard, Hungary, he cannot, and will not make the slightest move if and when we take care of the problem in our back yard, Cuba.”

Compare Minowitz, Straussophobia, pp. 80-82

Crime - torture - and punishment

2012-01-20T19:21:00.001-08:00

A small item from the Miami Herald, one of the McClatchy newspapers, the only papers that did serious coverage of the lies involved in the Iraq aggression, but have no publications for the “important people” in Washington and New York, talks of the torture and rape of three Frenchmen picked up by the United States in 2001 and held for four years in Guantanamo. The pictures of rape at Abu Ghraib were one of the things that shocked even Rumsfeld – as the SecDef reported of seeing the photographers, perhaps bringing home to him for a moment who he was, a war criminal (with the legal doctrine of command responsibility, the US executed Japanese generals who had not explicitly warned their troops against committing war crimes...).

Over a hundred prisoners were murdered in the course of torture, in American custody, according to the Pentagon (see “Taxi to the Dark Side” concerning the murder of Mr. Dilawar)...

It is the third international judicial inquiry into American war crimes, the article reports, in the past week. The Convention against Torture, here, though international law and American law (signed by President Reagan, ratified by Congress, part of the highest law of the land under Article 6, Section 2 of the Constitution, the Supremacy Clause) may be ducked by the Obama administration as well as the Bush administration, but European judges do not agree.

Will the Obama administration provide Judge Sophie Clement with the secret records from Guantanamo she is asking for?

If it does not, will the provision about what happens when a national court refuses to prosecute grave crimes be brought into effect, and will international courts move, even more determinedly, against American war criminals?

Bush and Cheney and Rumsfeld and Rice, the formerly well-travelled Secretary of State, and Gonzaelz and Yoo among others, can no longer go abroad. See here, here, here, here and here.

They occasionally tour in the United States, make book sales, face demonstrations (in classrooms at Stanford and Berkeley or at Auraria in Denver or at the University of Virginia or at the American Political Science Association, or as with Bush in Montreal…), and perhaps have odd dreams

Drip, drip, drip…

Report: French judge wants to probe Guantanamo torture claims

Related Content
• Spanish judge reopens Guantanamo torture probe
BY CAROL ROSENBERG
MIAMI HERALD

GUANTANAMO BAY NAVY BASE, Cuba — A French judge is seeking U.S. permission to visit the prison camps here to investigate claims by former French inmates that they were tortured, the Associated Press reported from Paris on Tuesday.

The AP reported that it saw a formal international request from investigating judge Sophie Clement to U.S. authorities to see the prison here that Tuesday held 171 captives, none of them French citizens. Clement also seeks copies of all documents relating to the arrest and transfer of three Frenchmen who were held there.

The three men are Nizar Sassi, now 31, Mourad Benchellali, now 30, and Khaled Ben Mustapha, now 40. They were arrested on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border in late 2001 and transferred to Guantánamo. They were sent back to France in 2004 and 2005, held for a time for trial there, but then released.

The men told the judge during questioning in France that they were subject to violence including torture and rape during their detention.

At Guantánamo, a Pentagon spokesman, Army Lt. Col. Todd Breasseale said it was not immediately known whether U.S. officials had received the request.

The request is the third indication in less than a week that international authorities have renewed their interest in the legality of Bush-era policies on the treatment of war-on-terror captives. On Friday, a Spanish judge decided to go forward with torture investigations involving four other former Guantanamo captives now living in Europe, one day after British authorities said they would probe British links to a CIA-organized rendition program that delivered opponents of now dead Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi to Libya, where they allege they were tortured.

Poem: kin g of fears

2012-01-19T07:31:00.000-08:00

1

I wrote my parents
of the anti-nuclear march
in Washington
freedom ride
to Chestertown
explosions of silvering
world and glass
so fragile in our hands

(not of clumsy love
ardent and fragile
on the trip back)

my dad – HARVARD WORLD BANK FORD
advisor to dictator Ayub Khan –
dictated a letter
“you’re a fresh ma n
think
don’t act
there’s so much

not yet Montaigne
nonchalant among cabbages
I wonder

will the world
outlive its gardens

2

that summer in Pakistan
sun soaked
my father’s house
Taj – man of many languages
and hopes for his son –
served the meal

five other servants
moved quietly
behind the doors
and in Karachi gardens
where the cobras glide

naga
hooded king of fears
rears
fanged flower among flowers

“aren’t you a socialist?”
my father asked,
“every on e
should be a socialist

when young”

Tucson: "I am a decent writer, burn mine..."

2012-01-17T08:37:00.000-08:00

If one builds a wall to keep latinos out of the United States, if racist militias hunt in the desert the immigrants who do the hardest work of the United States, if Alabama passes fierce immigration policing that drives the farm laborers out of the state and causes the crops to rot, the farm owners (when still ordinary people or “small businesses”) despairing and going out of business, how can the mind be far behind?

Texas last year – it’s state “school” committee, dominated by people who do not value what is decent about the United States, let alone read – banned the teaching of Thomas Jefferson, author of the Declaration of Independence, from history in the public schools…

Texas is a big market. Text book companies, seekers of profit, are now adapting and will put out books without each person’s natural right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness…

In South Africa under apartheid, McGraw Hill published 40 books with titles such as Managing Black Workers. Teachers and students demonstrated and protested against McGraw Hill, including me (I was in demonstrations against the sale of the Kruggerrand – an apartheid gold coin - in Denver, and attacked by KMGH, ch. 7, owned by McGraw Hill, as a “dangerous radical” teaching at the University of Denver... That was the year before I came up for tenure).

The new textbooks, excluding Jefferson, will not be different in Mississippi or Delaware...

And now, in Tucson, the books of Leslie Marmon Silko and Henry David Thoreau are banned and no one may teach about the children dying in the desert. No oppression exists, the State says – teachers may not speak to students about anything but that Chicanos (citizens and immigrants) are as likely to be employed as whites or not beaten or shot by the police. A “Dream Act” is not needed for any who live in America and study hard and would, of course, be allowed to go to college and join the military (to march and impose Tucson’s values at gun point elsewhere) – just ask Mitt Romney…

Columbus did not murder the Taino in his search for non-existent gold on Hispaniola and there is no truth to be told about the disappearance of the indigenous population, greeting him Eden-like (Columbus’s words) in 1492, by 1523...

And the books of the Maya were not burned at Mani, Yucatan in 1562.

Shakespeare’s Tempest was not banned in these “public” schools...

Corky Gonzalez was not banned in these “schools”…

Sherman Alexie…

Books were seized from Tucson classrooms, “out of the students’ hands…” Students report trouble sleeping

Bertolt Brecht’s short poem of a writer, who ran defiantly to the Nazi book fires, shouting “I am a good writer. Burn mine…” and threw his novel on the pile, fits Tucson and America.

Texas and Arizona are no small part of the American territory…

Remember that Mayor Bloomberg's police destroyed the library of 5,000 books, down to the last one, in Zuccotti Park...

If the books are burned, can the students be far behind?

Every one who has a voice should find a way to make it heard…

(h/t Jack Womack)

Tucson Schools Bans Books by Chicano and Native
American Authors

List of Books Being Banned

by Brenda Norrell

The Narcosphere January 14, 2012

http://narcosphere.narconews.com/notebook/brenda-norrell/2012/01/tucson-schools-bans-books-chicano-and-native-american-authors

Breaking news: Updated Sunday with response from banned
author Roberto Rodriguez

TUCSON -- Outrage was the response to the news that
Tucson schools has banned books, including "Rethinking
Columbus," with an essay by award-winning Pueblo author
Leslie Marmon Silko, who lives in Tucson, and works by
Buffy Sainte Marie, Winona LaDuke, Leonard Peltier and
Rigoberta Menchu.

The decision to ban books follows the 4 to 1 vote on
Tuesday by the Tucson Unified School District board to
succumb to the State of Arizona, and forbid Mexican
American Studies, rather than fight the state decision.

Students said the banned books were seized from their
classrooms and out of their hands, after Tucson schools
banned Mexican American Studies, including a book of
photos of Mexico. Crying, students said it was like
Nazi Germany, and they were unable to sleep since it
happened.

The banned book, "Rethinking Columbus," includes work
by many Native Americans, as Debbie Reese reports, the
book includes:

Suzan Shown Harjo's "We Have No Reason to Celebrate"
Buffy Sainte-Marie's "My Country, 'Tis of Thy People
You're Dying" Joseph Bruchac's "A Friend of the
Indians" Cornel Pewewardy's "A Barbie-Doll Pocahontas"
N. Scott Momaday's "The Delight Song of Tsoai-Talee"
Michael Dorris's "Why I'm Not Thankful for
Thanksgiving" Leslie Marmon's "Ceremony" Wendy Rose's
"Three Thousand Dollar Death Song" Winona LaDuke's "To
the Women of the World: Our Future, Our Responsibility"

The now banned reading list of the Tucson schools'
Mexican American Studies includes two books by Native
American author Sherman Alexie and a book of poetry by
O'odham poet Ofelia Zepeda.

Jeff Biggers writes in Salon:

The list of removed books includes the 20-year-old
textbook "Rethinking Columbus: The Next 500 Years,"
which features an essay by Tucson author Leslie Silko.
Recipient of a Native Writers' Circle of the Americas
Lifetime Achievement Award and a MacArthur Foundation
genius grant, Silko has been an outspoken supporter of
the ethnic studies program.

Biggers said Shakespeare's play "The Tempest," was also
banned during the meeting this week. Administrators
told Mexican-American studies teachers to stay away
from any class units where "race, ethnicity and
oppression are central themes."

Other banned books include "Pedagogy of the Oppressed"
by famed Brazilian educator Paolo Freire and "Occupied
America: A History of Chicanos" by Rodolfo Acuna, two
books often singled out by Arizona state superintendent
of public instruction John Huppenthal, who campaigned
in 2010 on the promise to "stop la raza." Huppenthal,
who once lectured state educators that he based his own
school principles for children on corporate management
schemes of the Fortune 500, compared Mexican-American
studies to Hitler Jugend indoctrination last fall.
http://www.salon.com/2012/01/13/whos_afraid_of_the_tempest/singleton/

Bill Bigelow, co-author of Rethinking Columbus, writes:

Imagine our surprise. Rethinking Schools learned today
that for the first time in its more-than-20- year
history, our book Rethinking Columbus was banned by a
school district: Tucson, Arizona ...

As I mentioned to Biggers when we spoke, the last time
a book of mine was outlawed was during the state of
emergency in apartheid South Africa in 1986, when the
regime there banned the curriculum I'd written,
Strangers in Their Own Country, likely because it
included excerpts from a speech by then- imprisoned
Nelson Mandela. Confronting massive opposition at home
and abroad, the white minority government feared for
its life in 1986. It's worth asking what the school
authorities in Arizona fear today.
http://rethinkingschoolsblog.wordpress.com/2012/01/13/
rethinking-columbus-banned-in-tucson

Roberto Rodriguez, professor at University of Arizona,
is also among the nation's top Chicano and Latino
authors on the Mexican American Studies reading list.
Rodriguez' column about this week's school board
decision, posted at Censored News, is titled: "Tucson
school officials caught on tape 'urinating' on Mexican
students." http://drcintli.blogspot.com/

Rodriguez responded to Narco New about the ban on
Sunday.

"The attacks in Arizona are mind-boggling. To ban the
teaching of a discipline is draconian in and of itself.
However, there is also now a banned books list that
accompanies the ban. I believe 2 of my books are on the
list, which includes: Justice: A Question of Race and
The X in La Raza. Two others may also be on the list,"
Rodriguez said.

"That in itself is jarring, but we need to remember the
proper context. This is not simply a book-banning;
according to Tom Horne, the former state schools'
superintendent who designed HB 2281, this is part of a
civilizational war. He determined that Mexican American
Studies is not based on Greco-Roman knowledge and thus,
lies outside of Western Civilization.

"In a sense, he is correct. The philosophical
foundation for MAS is a maiz-based philosophy that is
both, thousands of years old and Indigenous to this
continent. What has just happened is akin to an Auto de
Fe -- akin to the 1562 book- burning of Maya books in
1562 at Mani, Yucatan. At TUSD, the list of banned
books will total perhaps 50 books, including artwork
and posters.

"For us here in Tucson, this is not over. If anything,
the banning of books will let the world know precisely
what kind of mindset is operating here; in that
previous era, this would be referred to as a reduccion
(cultural genocide) of all things Indigenous. In this
era, it can too also be see as a reduccion."

The reading list includes world acclaimed Chicano and
Latino authors, along with Native American authors. The
list includes books by Corky Gonzales, along with
Sandra Cisneros' "The House on Mango Street;" Jimmy
Santiago Baca's "Black Mesa Poems," and L.A. Urreas'
"The Devil's Highway." The authors include Henry David
Thoreau and the popular book "Like Water for
Chocolate."

On the reading list are Native American author Sherman
Alexie's books, "Ten Little Indians," and "The Lone
Ranger and Tonto Fist Fight in Heaven." O'odham poet
and professor Ofelia Zepeda's "Ocean Power, Poems from
the Desert" is also on the list.

DA Morales writes in Three Sonorans, at Tucson Citizen,
about the role of state schools chief John Huppenthal.
"Big Brother Huppenthal has taken his TEA Party vows to
take back Arizona...take it back a few centuries with
official book bans that include Shakespeare!"

http://tucsoncitizen.com/three-sonorans/2012/01/13/did-
you-know-even-shakespeare-got-banned-from-tusd-with-mas
-ruling/

Updates at www.bsnorrell.blogspot.com

[Brenda Norrell has been a news reporter in Indian
country for 29 years. She is publisher of Censored
News, focusing on Indigenous Peoples, human rights and
the US border. Now censored by the mainstream media,
she previously was a staff reporter at numerous
American Indian newspapers and a stringer for AP, USA
Today and others. She lived on the Navajo Nation for 18
years, and then traveled with the Zapatistas. She
covered the climate summits in Cochabamba, Bolivia, and
Cancun, Mexico, in 2010.]

==========

BANNED MEXICAN AMERICAN STUDIES READING LIST Curriculum
Audit of the Mexican American Studies Department,
Tucson Unified School District, May 2, 2011.
http://www.bsnorrell.blogspot.com/

High School Course Texts and Reading Lists Table 20:
American Government/Social Justice Education Project 1,
2 - Texts and Reading Lists

Rethinking Columbus: The Next 500 Years (1998), by B.
Bigelow and B. Peterson

The Latino Condition: A Critical Reader (1998), by R.
Delgado and J. Stefancic

Critical Race Theory: An Introduction (2001), by R.
Delgado and J. Stefancic

Pedagogy of the Oppressed (2000), by P. Freire

United States Government: Democracy in Action (2007),
by R. C. Remy

Dictionary of Latino Civil Rights History (2006), by F.
A. Rosales

Declarations of Independence: Cross-Examining American
Ideology (1990), by H. Zinn

Table 21: American History/Mexican American
Perspectives, 1, 2 - Texts and Reading Lists

Occupied America: A History of Chicanos (2004), by R.
Acuna

The Anaya Reader (1995), by R. Anaya

The American Vision (2008), by J. Appleby et el.

Rethinking Columbus: The Next 500 Years (1998), by B.
Bigelow and B. Peterson

Drink Cultura: Chicanismo (1992), by J. A. Burciaga

Message to Aztlan: Selected Writings (1997), by C.
Jiminez

De Colores Means All of Us: Latina Views Multi-Colored
Century (1998), by E. S. Martinez

500 Anos Del Pueblo Chicano/500 Years of Chicano
History in Pictures (1990), by E. S. Martinez

Codex Tamuanchan: On Becoming Human (1998), by R.
Rodriguez

The X in La Raza II (1996), by R. Rodriguez

Dictionary of Latino Civil Rights History (2006), by F.
A. Rosales

A People's History of the United States: 1492 to
Present (2003), by H. Zinn

Course: English/Latino Literature 7, 8

Ten Little Indians (2004), by S. Alexie

The Fire Next Time (1990), by J. Baldwin

Loverboys (2008), by A. Castillo

Women Hollering Creek (1992), by S. Cisneros

Mexican WhiteBoy (2008), by M. de la Pena

Drown (1997), by J. Diaz

Woodcuts of Women (2000), by D. Gilb

At the Afro-Asian Conference in Algeria (1965), by E.
Guevara

Color Lines: "Does Anti-War Have to Be Anti-Racist
Too?" (2003), by E. Martinez

Culture Clash: Life, Death and Revolutionary Comedy
(1998), by R. Montoya et al.

Let Their Spirits Dance (2003) by S. Pope Duarte

Two Badges: The Lives of Mona Ruiz (1997), by M. Ruiz

The Tempest (1994), by W. Shakespeare

A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America
(1993), by R. Takaki

The Devil's Highway (2004), by L. A. Urrea

Puro Teatro: A Latino Anthology (1999), by A. Sandoval-
Sanchez & N. Saporta Sternbach

Twelve Impossible Things before Breakfast: Stories
(1997), by J. Yolen

Voices of a People's History of the United States
(2004), by H. Zinn

Course: English/Latino Literature 5, 6

Live from Death Row (1996), by J. Abu-Jamal

The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fist Fight in Heaven (1994),
by S. Alexie

Zorro (2005), by I. Allende

Borderlands La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1999), by G.
Anzaldua

A Place to Stand (2002), by J. S. Baca

C-Train and Thirteen Mexicans (2002), by J. S. Baca

Healing Earthquakes: Poems (2001), by J. S. Baca

Immigrants in Our Own Land and Selected Early Poems
(1990), by J. S. Baca

Black Mesa Poems (1989), by J. S. Baca

Martin & Mediations on the South Valley (1987), by J.
S. Baca

The Manufactured Crisis: Myths, Fraud, and the Attack
on America's Public Schools (19950, by D. C. Berliner
and B. J. Biddle

Drink Cultura: Chicanismo (1992), by J. A Burciaga

Red Hot Salsa: Bilingual Poems on Being Young and
Latino in the United States (2005), by L. Carlson & O.
Hijuielos

Cool Salsa: Bilingual Poems on Growing up Latino in the
United States (1995), by L. Carlson & O. Hijuielos

So Far From God (1993), by A. Castillo

Address to the Commonwealth Club of California (1985),
by C. E. Chavez

Women Hollering Creek (1992), by S. Cisneros

House on Mango Street (1991), by S. Cisneros

Drown (1997), by J. Diaz

Suffer Smoke (2001), by E. Diaz Bjorkquist

Zapata's Discipline: Essays (1998), by M. Espada

Like Water for Chocolate (1995), by L. Esquievel

When Living was a Labor Camp (2000), by D. Garcia

La Llorona: Our Lady of Deformities (2000), by R.
Garcia

Cantos Al Sexto Sol: An Anthology of Aztlanahuac
Writing (2003), by C. Garcia-Camarilo, et al.

The Magic of Blood (1994), by D. Gilb

Message to Aztlan: Selected Writings (2001), by Rudolfo
"Corky" Gonzales

Saving Our Schools: The Case for Public Education,
Saying No to "No Child Left Behind" (2004) by Goodman,
et al.

Feminism if for Everybody (2000), by b hooks

The Circuit: Stories from the Life of a Migrant Child
(1999), by F. Jimenez

Savage Inequalities: Children in America's Schools
(1991), by J. Kozol

Zigzagger (2003), by M. Munoz

Infinite Divisions: An Anthology of Chicana Literature
(1993), by T. D. Rebolledo & E. S. Rivero

...y no se lo trago la tierra/And the Earth Did Not
Devour Him (1995), by T. Rivera

Always Running - La Vida Loca: Gang Days in L.A.
(2005), by L. Rodriguez

Justice: A Question of Race (1997), by R. Rodriguez

The X in La Raza II (1996), by R. Rodriguez

Crisis in American Institutions (2006), by S. H.
Skolnick & E. Currie

Los Tucsonenses: The Mexican Community in Tucson,
1854-1941 (1986), by T. Sheridan

Curandera (1993), by Carmen Tafolla

Mexican American Literature (1990), by C. M. Tatum

New Chicana/Chicano Writing (1993), by C. M. Tatum

Civil Disobedience (1993), by H. D. Thoreau

By the Lake of Sleeping Children (1996), by L. A. Urrea

Nobody's Son: Notes from an American Life (2002), by L.
A. Urrea

Zoot Suit and Other Plays (1992), by L. Valdez

Ocean Power: Poems from the Desert (1995), by O. Zepeda

==========

The importance of words

2012-01-12T09:46:00.000-08:00

10 years of now infamous torture by the United States at Guantanamo, the horror at least of indefinite detention continues, and the criminals responsible are subject to no hearing or investigation. Of course, they, the former President, the Vice President, the Pentagon secretary, and my former student, the well-traveled Secretary of State, inter alia, can no longer go abroad. See here, here and here. Under Reagan and then the 1994 Congress, the United States has signed and ratified the Convention against Torture which bars torture in any circumstance. It calls for prosecution of torturers in the country responsible. See here. Obama has thus made himself the accomplice of Bush and the others by not pursuing such prosecutions as well as the torture, stopped under protest after 9 months, of Bradley Manning.

Witness against Torture has acted courageously against Guantanamo. Matt Daloisio sent me a newsletter about the heroic protests of people, including hunger strikes, in Washington against the continuing – still, 10 years later – crimes at Guantanamo, the prisoners detained, often mistakenly, and in any case, illegally, indefinitely – like the man in the iron mask with no future. But of course, Guantanamo creates a future of justified hatred for the United States; it nurtures enmity. Now, Arab Spring has blown a great breath of fresh air through movements in the Middle East (rendered Al-Qaida ineffectual) and inspired international protests – particularly the Occupy movements – which need to learn that torture and aggression, leading crimes of the 1% - must be stopped.

The New York Times has led the way in 1984 style misuse of words. For instance, water-boarding has been recognized as torture since the Inquisition and has long been barred under international treaties – the Geneva Conventions (styled “quaint” by the war criminal Alberto Gonzalez – see here) and the Convention against Torture – and American law (Article 6, section 2 of the Constitution, the Supremacy Clause, makes treaties signed by the United States the highest law of the land). When others commit torture – Iran, for example – the Times has no difficulty with ordinary English and names it. But when the US government does it, the Times' editor (now embarrassingly poking his head out as a columnist) encourages circumlocutions – “enhanced” or “harsh” or “brutal interrogations”…

What removed the crime? Cheney breathed on the Times' s editorship. Or to put it differently, he reminded the Times of its slogan “all the news that’s fit to print” – news that would name the American government in committing war crimes (see Richard Falk and Howard Friel, The Record of the Paper, which points out that in 50 years of American aggressions, for example in Vietnam, the Times does not allow the word – identifying a crime barred by Article 2 section 4 of the UN charter and which the Allied prosecutors led by later American Supreme Court Justice Robert L. Jackson, had indicted, tried and executed Nazi and Tokyo war criminals for – to be used in relation to American…aggressions

In addition to Matt’s reports which are very moving (and thus do not find their way into the Times), Iranian scientists, civilians, are being murdered (very likely by the increasingly police state Israeli government). When governments strike at civilians, with large and explosive displays (Masoud Ali Mohammedi was a fifty year old college teacher whose car was blown up), the message to all is clear. Though Israel is probably responsible, it could be the United States – and Santorum waxed on at one of the Republican debates explicitly about how the US government should murder Iranian scientists. The US under cleverer leaders, including Obama. tries to keep its murders of civilians with drones, for example, in a haze of denial. But none of it is secret (and the Democratic think-tank "experts" and pundits here like Roger Cohen , the neo-neo cons, still baying for drones and saying, murder of innocents by drone is superior to invasion, are refusing to look a) at the crime and b) at the fact that every drone that falls on civilians makes, justifiably, new enemies). In Pakistan or Yemen or Somalia, the innocents and their relatives all know who sent the drones.

The world cries out…

Santorum's criminal fecklessness compounds George W. Bush’s avowal of water-boarding last year....

The American elite becomes more and more crass, does not so much need phony or imitation words any longer, reaches for, gets high on criminality. “I am a torturer” says Bush brashly, “I did it to protect…you” [torture is repulsive and does the opposite]. Bush no longer blinks an eye… (though at night, it comes to him perhaps and he will not travel to Europe – he never liked travel anyway…).

Similarly, the murder of civilians is for the New York Times no longer a great crime of war (see Michael Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars). The US, under Obama, is supposedly not already engaged in covert operations, including murders, in Iran, or not looking the other way or secretly cooperating in, Israeli murders of civilians...

If the US, through bombing, commits a more full-scale aggression against Iran, it will reverse all the slow movement toward getting out of its occupations and new reliance on the largely secret Joint Special Operations Command (the new center of American military/intelligence policy, the folks who justly murdered Bin Laden, the mass murderer, but in their 12 operations a night - at least - murder a large number of civilians and innocents. And then there are the drones…

Even in the Bin Laden case, the US government was afraid of a trial and daylight, for its effects in American politics – the desperate fear of Republicans and Democrats that “criminals” might “be” on American soil (they do not hear their own shrill cowardice), the lack of confidence in a serious judicial and prison system in contrast to the trials of accused terrorists in Madrid and the actions of civilized countries, the reason why the special infamy of Guantanamo continues after 10 years and Obama’s promise, and finally, the possibility that Bin Laden, at trial, might have highlighted important and embarrassing matters, like his long cooperation with American crimes (the US set him to overthrow the pro-Soviet Afghan regime by terror).

If the US or Israel attacks Iran, the possibility of world war in the Middle East, with in the midterm, use of nuclear arms, becomes increasingly likely, the way back to a frail peace, darkened…

But the New York Times, as Glenn Greenwald and Andrew Sullivan relate below, will not name terror against civilians – the murder of Iranian scientists – as terror (since neither Israel nor the United States is at war with Iran, these incidents stand out for their horror). And today comes news of the assassination of Mostafa Ahmadi Roshana, a 32 year old nuclear scientist. The Times' frontpage headline “Bomb kills scientist” and no whisper of terror in the article. Who are the “terrorists”?

It was said long ago by Thucydides, describing the Athens’ led butchery of aristocrats taken out of sanctuary in temples in Corcyra that words change their meaning in war. What is rash becomes good counsel (Santorum as well as Romney’s speech in New Hampshire two nights ago –“ the US will have the strongest military which will prevent anyone from attacking the US” – talk about idle promises – and in a depression), what is sensible is ignored. The shifts in these words now about torture and terror is public corruption heading toward an end which Thucydides once named. It needs to be stopped.

Here is Thucydides on the dynamic in Corcyra:

"Words had to change their ordinary meaning and to take that which was now given them. Reckless audacity came to be considered the courage of a loyal ally; prudent hesitation, specious cowardice; moderation was held to be a cloak for unmanliness; ability to see all sides of a question, inaptness to act on any. Frantic violence became the attribute of manliness; cautious plotting, a justifiable means of self-defence. The advocate of extreme measures was always trustworthy; his opponent a man to be suspected. To succeed in a plot was to have a shrewd head, to divine a plot a still shrewder; but to try to provide against having to do either was to break up your party and to be afraid of your adversaries. In fine, to forestall an intending criminal, or to suggest the idea of a crime where it was wanting, was equally commended until even blood became a weaker tie than party, from the superior readiness of those united by the latter to dare everything without reserve; for such associations had not in view the blessings derivable from established institutions but were formed by ambition for their overthrow; and the confidence of their members in each other rested less on any religious sanction than upon complicity in crime. The fair proposals of an adversary were met with jealous precautions by the stronger of the two, and not with a generous confidence. Revenge also was held of more account than self-preservation. Oaths of reconciliation, being only proffered on either side to meet an immediate difficulty, only held good so long as no other weapon was at hand; but when opportunity offered, he who first ventured to seize it and to take his enemy off his guard, thought this perfidious vengeance sweeter than an open one, since, considerations of safety apart, success by treachery won him the palm of superior intelligence. Indeed it is generally the case that men are readier to call rogues clever than simpletons honest, and are as ashamed of being the second as they are proud of being the first. The cause of all these evils was the lust for power arising from greed and ambition; and from these passions proceeded the violence of parties once engaged in contention. The leaders in the cities, each provided with the fairest professions, on the one side with the cry of political equality of the people, on the other of a moderate aristocracy, sought prizes for themselves in those public interests which they pretended to cherish, and, recoiling from no means in their struggles for ascendancy engaged in the direst excesses; in their acts of vengeance they went to even greater lengths, not stopping at what justice or the good of the state demanded, but making the party caprice of the moment their only standard, and invoking with equal readiness the condemnation of an unjust verdict or the authority of the strong arm to glut the animosities of the hour. Thus religion was in honour with neither party; but the use of fair phrases to arrive at guilty ends was in high reputation. Meanwhile the moderate part of the citizens perished between the two, either for not joining in the quarrel, or because envy would not suffer them to escape."

(for more of Thucydides' account, see here).

Athens, the leading democracy of the time, got hungrier and hungrier, waged increasingly crazy and criminal wars, and was ultimately defeated in Syracuse (Sicily) as the US has been defeated in Vietnam and Iraq. (see W. Robert Connor, Thucydides, and my Must Global Politics Constrain Democracy?, ch. 4). The internal consequences of American war - depression, the war complex, a vast prison/probation system, and the increasing misuse of words - are all of a piece. This decadence can be reversed or stopped to a large extent, with a new movement toward green productivity; that was the promise of Obama, the new hope in his campaign. That hope is now with the Occupy movement and other courageous resisters like Witness against Torture to pressure this regime of the 1% for decency, for the rule of law, and not to destroy us (and the world) through ever expanding war and militarism. We should all work to further it…

Witness Against Torture 2012 – “HUNGERING FOR JUSTICE”

DAY 9 – January 11, 2012

Dear Friends,

When Joanne in New York heard that the ten-day forecast for Washington DC during our fast would be rather beautiful and warm except for Wednesday, January 11th, which was predicted to be cold and rainy, she remarked, “You see, even the earth will be weeping that day.” And it was. But as you will read below in the various reflections on today’s rally and events afterwards, we could not have had a more solemn and powerful marking of the tenth anniversary of the opening of the Guantánamo as a detention center for the US “War on Terror.”

In tonight’s reflection circle, Kevin from the Dorothy Day Catholic Worker shared that “hearing the reflections, names and stories of the men at Guantánamo” this past week, then seeing everything today come together, seeing all of the different groups and people form this demonstration and march in solidarity with the detainees—all of this together created “the most powerful experience.” What was so powerful was that this was for him evidence of the “connection of the human race…we don’t even know them [the men at Guantánamo]” and we didn’t even all know each other here today. But today we rallied, marched, and bore witness that we do not want to live in a world where indefinite detention and torture are justified.

And our work continues tomorrow…sentencing for Carmen, Brian & Judith in Superior Court, and then back to the White House before breaking our fast in the evening.

In peace,

Witness Against Torture

*** In this e-mail you will find:

1) Rally and March to the Supreme Court (Reflection by Mike Foley)

2) Frida Berrigan’s Opening Remarks for the Rally

3) Post-event Interfaith Prayer Service (Reflection by Martha Hennessy)

4) Fragments from this Evening’s Circle (Compiled by Amy Nee)

4) Letters of Support (Northern Iraq; Madison, Wisconsin)

* PLUS LINKS TO ARTICLES, PHOTOS AND VIDEOS *

1) “Protesters Mark Guantanamo Prison’s 10th Anniversary” (Reuters)

http://tinyurl.com/72jpfma

2) “Protesters Condemn Guantanamo Bay on 10th Anniversary with March from White House” (Washington Post) http://tinyurl.com/6owh7ht

3) “Guantanamo’s 10th Anniversary Marked by Protests” (video & article from VOA) http://tinyurl.com/6qz8d7m

4) “Gitmo 10 Years On: So Much for Closure” (video from Russia Today) http://rt.com/news/guantanamo-years-closure-failed-513/

5) “Opponents Start Guantanamo’s Second Decade with Jumpsuit Protest” (Miami Herald) http://tinyurl.com/7se96qa

6) “Hundreds Protest on 10th Anniversary of Guantanamo Prison”

(LA Times) http://tinyurl.com/73yxfll

7) “Activists at Rally Call on Obama to Keep Promise,

Shutter Guantanamo Bay” (CNN)

http://edition.cnn.com/2012/01/11/us/guantanamo-activists/

8) “Guantanamo 10th Anniversary Protests: Demonstrators March From White House To Supreme Court” (photos from the Huffington Post) http://tinyurl.com/6qe5q6h

9) “Rights groups protest to mark Gitmo decade” (Peter Finn)

http://tinyurl.com/8xd9ter

===================================

RALLY AND MARCH TO THE SUPREME COURT

(Reflection by Michael S. Foley)

Today, January 11, 2012, marked ten years to the day since the first prisoners arrived at Guantanamo. You've seen the photos of that first day - of the men shackled, masked, kneeling before their shouting captors. Ten years later, and three years into the Obama administration, 171 men remain in Guantanamo with no end in sight. They can expect no release, no day in court, no end at all. All three branches of the United States government are responsible for this atrocity - and the hidden unending detention of more than 2,000 prisoners in Bagram - and today each branch was visited by more than 1,000 Americans who have had enough of the government's moral failings. It was the biggest demonstration against detention policies since the "War on Terror" began, organized by an historic coalition of human rights, religious, and activist organizations, including Witness Against Torture, Amnesty International, the Religious Campaign Against Torture, and the Center for Constitutional Rights. World Can't Wait and Occupy DC also joined in, as did Code Pink.

The forecasters predicted rain, but the morning began brighter. When we first arrived in Lafayette Park across from the White House, the sun kept trying to warm us. The Park Ranger in her Smokey-the-Bandit hat did her best to rain on us, telling us that we had no permit to carry juice - juice! - in the park [how the words and the basis of authority degenerate here…- AG]. And maybe she summoned the actual rain, too, but nothing got in the way of an historic assembly and moving program of speakers. As buses came in from distant cities, the coalition partners gathered their people, handing out jump suits, t-shirts, stickers, signs. The mood was alternately somber, effusive, and angry. To begin the program, habeas attorneys occupied the stage with the names of their clients, some of whom had won their habeas cases before federal judges but whose clients remain in prison. As the rain came, speakers huddled under umbrellas to move and inspired us with their words of anger and hope, criticism and conviction.

At the end of the program, more than 171 jump-suited "detainees" - one for every man still held at Guantanamo - led a spectacular human chain of citizens from the White House to the Justice Department to the Capitol and, finally, to the Supreme Court. The rain continued as we walked past the White House in a line that seemed unending. At the front, the detainees moved silently, as police on motorcycles blocked traffic. Police cruisers buzzed by, sirens chirping and lights swirling; as Bill Frankel-Streit said afterward, it seemed as though they were shining a light on our procession.

It is humbling, as ever, to march in a jump suit and hood - to think about the men in Guantanamo who have no such freedom of movement, many of whom have languished there for most of a decade, and more than half of whom have been cleared for release...

As the march proceeded up Capitol Hill, the usual array of tourists, curious onlookers, and apparently annoyed pedestrians looked on, but one group appeared as we reached the top of Capitol Hill whom we had never before encountered. Turning the corner from Constitution Avenue on to 1st Street, we could hear a small smattering of applause, most of it coming from the left hand side of the street, outside the Hart Senate Office Building. Senate staffers had come out of their offices to stand with us, signaling their own disapproval for policies that their bosses seem unable or unwilling to end.

At the Supreme Court, the detainees filed in four lines before the plaza; Supreme Court police guarded the steps of the plaza as if they expected us to follow past years' examples, and take our protest to the Justices more directly. Instead, British journalist Andy Worthington spoke to us about the US District Court we had passed at the base of Capitol Hill, and the judges there who had effectively gutted the Boumediene v. Bush decision; Andy called on the Supreme Court to intervene and reinforce that decision. Former Guantanamo guard Daniel Lakemacher spoke of the various methods of dehumanizing detainees at Guantanamo and how this march helped to make visible the humanity of the men held there. Vince Warren, the Executive Director of the Center for Constitutional Rights, which represents many of the men at Guantanamo, spoke of the hard and important work the attorneys do, but also of the vital importance of citizen action. And Tom Wilner, one of the first American lawyers to represent Guantanamo detainees, described the ongoing struggle to secure justice for the detained men, while Steven Aleski, Boumediene's attorney, urged the participants to take the struggle for human rights and the rule of law back to their communities. Leili Kashani of CCR concluded by telling the moving story of CCR client Djamel Ameziane, and reading a poem, Is it true, written by Osama Abu Kabir while in Guantanamo.

===================================

FRIDA BERRIGAN’S OPENING REMARKS AT THE RALLY

Welcome. My name is Frida Berrigan and I work with Witness Against

Torture, a proud member of the vast coalition that organized this day

of action. On behalf of the coalition, I say again “welcome.”

Thank you so much for coming, for caring, for insisting—still, again,

after all these years—in justice, in the rule of law, in human rights.

Today, January 11, 2012, is the 10th year since the first "war on

terror" detainees were brought to the US Naval Base at Guantánamo.

This as a day of great shame -- ten years of torture, indefinite

detention, violation of the human rights and rule of law. This tragic

and criminal anniversary comes just 10 days after the US Congress and

President acted, through the NDAA, to make GTMO near-permanent, commit

more deeply to reprehensible policies, and expand detention powers at

precisely the time when we should be dismantling this pseudo-legal and

immoral detention apparatus.

So here we again. Grudgingly, unwillingly, but with outrage and energy

and even HOPE. I find a lot of hope in what Witness Against Torture

has been doing for the past nine days-- fasting, living in community,

and acting each day to draw attention to the scourge of indefinite

detention at Guantánamo and Bagram.

We are about to finish a 92 hour vigil in front of the White House

which we began on Saturday—with a representation of a Guantánamo cage

and a person inside of it. We have had countless profound and

educational conversations—alerting the tourists who come here from all

over the United States and all over the world that not all Americans

are comfortable with torture, abuse, indefinite detention. Are you

comfortable with that? No.

I also find a lot of hope in this extraordinary coalition. This “Ten

Years Too Many National Day of Action” is the result of months of hard

work by major human rights and civil liberties organizations, legal

collectives, advocates and citizens—like myself and my friends in

Witness Against Torture—who are of no special rank and have no

position other than to see justice done.

You are part of the biggest demonstration against detention policy

since the "War on Terror" began; we are part of a rising tide of

consciousness in this country to say no to torture, indefinite

detention, and the savaging of our rights.

Yes, despite everything (and despite the rain) this is a day of hope

because that so many people are gathered to say that we have neither

forgiven nor forgotten: that Guantánamo and indefinite detention and

torture are as wrong today as they were ten years ago; that there are

innocent men who must be released; that all detainees should be fairly

charged and tried or released; that those abused by US power should be

entitled to confront their captors and receive true justice.

Americans -- across the political spectrum -- are rising to say that

rights can't be taken away without us speaking out, that the men at

GTMO and Bagram cannot and will not be the forgotten victims of

American policy.

And it is a day of action. We are going to hear from a number of

brilliant and powerful speakers—we will learn and feel and connect and

then we will act. We will hear more specifics on this later, but

immediately following the rally we will begin a procession led by 171

"detainees" representing those who are still at GTMO.

The procession will form a "human chain" linking the institutions of

government-- Presidency, Department of Justice, Congress and the

Courts-- responsible for this shameful situation. At each site we

will hold a brief rally. These four nearly simultaneous events will

all end around 2:30 will the reading of a poem by a detainee

expressing his simple desire: to at last see justice done, to be

freed, to go home.

===================================

POST-EVENT INTERFAITH PRAYER SERVICE

(Reflection by Martha Hennessy)

It is our ninth day of the fast and following a long procession to the Supreme Court we attended an interfaith prayer service for Guantánamo at the New York Avenue Presbyterian church. The National Religious Campaign Against Torture sponsored it with speakers from Presbyterian, Catholic, Jewish, and Muslim faiths. Despite my fatigue and late arrival I was able to take in the beauty and simplicity of the service. Sister Patricia Chappell, executive director of Pax Christi caught my heart and attention when she said. “When there is brokenness in the world God arrives there first.” After days of hearing stories about the trauma of war and torture I felt a ray of sunshine come through. The exquisite hope of this! She also quoted William T. Cavanaugh, author of “Torture and Eucharist” describing torture as “the sacrament of the liturgy of the state.” After ten years of the “war on terrorism” we have dismembered our own souls and the bodies of countless others.

Dr. Sayyid Syeed, national director of the Islamic Society of North America’s Office for Interfaith and Community Alliances also shared reflections of reconciliation. He spoke of whole countries functioning as huge Guantánamos where dictators sacrifice their own peoples while suppressing uprisings against injustice. Several Muslim countries were named but I couldn’t help think about my own country practicing similar brutality here.

The service ended with a beautiful sounding of the shofar and a moment of silence for the prisoners of Guantánamo and victims of torture. In this brief interlude of the faiths coming together to declare our ultimate purpose of loving one another and seeing the image of God in each other, we were given sustenance and courage to continue with these small efforts against colossal forces in bringing mercy to the prisoners.

===================================

FRAGMENTS OF THIS EVENINGS CIRCLE

(Compiled by Amy Nee)

Chrissy began the circle quoting the mother, Talat Hamdani, of a young man who died in the 9/11 attacks in 2002. “[This campaign against Guantánamo is] giving humanity a chance to redeem itself.”

Mike commented as many would concur, that the rain-soaked hoods were impossible to see through, and in our weariness “we were a ramshackly group, a beautifully ramshackly group.” An enlivening interruption as we trudged toward Capital Hill was “applauding senate staffers” who had emerged on the sidewalk to cheer us on.

Helen: “I was glad that it was grueling. The challenge made it more real.”

Dan shared that he has been carrying with him the theme of faithfulness and effectiveness – two aspects of action that are often presented in opposition, as an either or – and considering how to find the dynamic between the two. Thinking of all of the people involved in today’s demonstration, those symbolizing detainees, speakers, media, viewers there was the feeling that this was “as effective as I could wish it to be while being faithful at the same time.”

Beth had been responsible for coordinating a bus from North Carolina, a biodielsel van with composting toilet and dumpstered food! She spoke of her joy at the arrival of her family and friends and the struggle to separate herself from them by donning the hood. It was so sad, she added, considering her struggle with this “momentary separation when compared to ten years for the men at Guantánamo.”

Brian had started the day with a feeling of fear, having felt so weak yesterday, to the point that he considered eating something in the morning to fortify himself for the arduous day ahead. “But now, I don’t even feel like I am fasting. I feel so nourished by all that has transpired today.”

Mike, quoting the exclamation of a friend overlooking the long line of men and women in orange jumpsuits and black hoods winding through the capital, “looks like Guantánamo’s about to get it’s ass kicked!”

Tim talked about the fear that accompanied the obfuscation of the hood. He was all but blinded but felt guilty at raising it to clarify his vision because as he did so he thought of the men he was representing, and remembered, “they don’t have a choice, to pull off their hood or break a fast. And that is so sad.”

Lauren from N.C., in the circle for the first time was grateful to have come across this community. “I have been desiring a more grounded approach to activism…a group that takes the energy of anger and channels it…I feel like I’ve found that here.”

Erika had the opportunity, while waiting in line for the woman’s bathroom to open up, to share with a dozen Amnesty volunteers the story of Jumah Mohammed Abdul Latif Al Dossari who they knew only to be a Bahraini. “I didn’t know his story ten days ago, but now I was able to share it; now they know it not only because of me, but because of all of you.”

Josie had the opportunity to give an interview with a Turkish t.v. station. As she shared about how we were sending groups to connect these places of power that players in the continuation of indefinite detention her voice broke, “sometimes giving voice to something lets you get in touch with emotion.” She went on to talk about the buildings in the capital themselves, the feelings they build up. The architecture itself can be a source of awe and pride but from the context of our action the feelings associated with them are now sadness and tragedy. Yet, as we move amongst them together, taking action, “we find our voice.”

“What we contributed,” Paki shared, “was the Soulforce that Gandhi writes about.”

Experiencing a persistent irritation from the way his jacket rubbed him under the hood, John reflected on “how a little thing can become torture,” and while he could choose to adjust his position, step out of procession or bear with it, those who are tortured are not given that choice. And in the midst of this, still, his meditation became, “All is grace.”

===================================

LETTERS OF SOLIDARITY

From Northern Iraq with the Christian Peacemaker’s Team–

unwinding this afternoon, snapped on Al Jeezera and they did a piece on 10 years of Guantánamo and you folks were shown in front of the white house. i could hear Carmen's voice. i felt very much at home and grateful for your presence.

made me feel connected

bud courtney

* * *

From Madison, Wisconsin –

Dear Fasters in DC,

Just wanted to let you know I'm with you in spirit and hope the Day of Action tomorrow will be a good one. Here in Madison, WI our little committee has worked with local groups on raising the issue of torture and closing Guantánamo.

Yesterday (Jan 9) we joined an ongoing Monday noon peace vigil (My reflection on that is at the bottom of this e-mail.)

This evening (Jan 10) Joy First and I did the program for the monthly meeting of the Dane County Chapter of the United Nations Association. It was titled "Guantánamo, Military Tribunals and the Rule of Law." Joy talked about Guantánamo and WAT and I reviewed the provisions of the UN Convention Against Torture. We also showed the documentary titled "The Response."

Tomorrow (Jan 11) we're having a gathering co-sponsored with the Wisconsin Network for Peace and Justice at a local coffee shop. We'll write letters to elected officials and to prisoners still at Guantánamo.

I think I'm the only one here fasting, but I didn't start until Jan 7th because our family celebrates the full 12 Days of Christmas and Epiphany so I wasn't ready to start the fast on Jan 2nd.

Blessings to you all,

Peace,

Bonnie Block

WEDNESDAY, JAN 11, 2012 1:57 AM MST

More murder of Iranian scientists: still terrorism?

BY GLENN GREENWALD

In this photo provided by the semi-official Fars News Agency, people gather around a bombed car in Tehran, Iran, Wednesday, Jan. 11, 2012 (Credit: AP Photo/Fars News Agency, Mehdi Marizad)

(updated below – Update II – Update III – Update IV)

Several days ago I referenced a controversy that arose in 2007 when the law professor and right-wing blogger Glenn “Instapundit” Reynolds criticized President Bush for not doing enough to stop Iran’s nuclear program and then advocated that the U.S. respond by murdering that nation’s religious leaders and nuclear scientists. “We should be responding quietly, killing radical mullahs and Iranian atomic scientists . . . ,” he argued. The backlash against Reynolds’ suggestion was intense, especially among progressive writers.

Back then, I wrote about Reynolds’ suggestion several times, but I was far from alone. Law Professor Paul Campos wrote a column in the Rocky Mountain News denouncing Reynolds for publicly advocating “murder,” which, he pointed out, is exactly what this would be given that the U.S. is not at war with Iran (he went on to suggest that targeting civilian religious leaders and scientists would still be murder even if the U.S. were at war with Iran); Campos added: “government-sponsored assassinations of the sort Reynolds is advocating are expressly and unambiguously prohibited by the laws of the United States.” Law Professor Kevin Jon Heller documented with absolute clarity that such assassinations would be illegal in the absence of a formal war.

But the angriest reactions came from progressive bloggers, who widely denounced Reynolds as “contemptible” for suggesting this; one progressive writer, Lindsay Beyerstein, was horrified that one could even suggest such a thing, explaining that she ”despair[s] for our society when it’s necessary to supply a rigorous analytical exposition of why our government shouldn’t have scientists and religious leaders whacked.” Scott Lemieux railed against what he called Reynolds’ “kooky scheme for illegal death squads” as “crackpot,” “dumb” and “nuttier than a Planters factory.” And Kevin Drum, then of Washington Monthly, went the furthest of all — in a post he entitled “Terrorism” — branding the killing of Iran’s scientists as “Terrorism”:

I imagine a lot of people agree with [Reynolds], but his recommendation really demonstrates the moral knot caused by George Bush’s insistence that we’re fighting a “war on terror.” After all, killing civilian scientists and civilian leaders, even if you do it quietly, is unquestionably terrorism. That’s certainly what we’d consider it if Hezbollah fighters tried to kill cabinet undersecretaries and planted bombs at the homes of Los Alamos engineers.
If you think Iran is a mortal enemy that needs to be dealt with via military force, you can certainly make that case. But if you’re going to claim that terrorism is a barbaric tactic that has to be stamped out, you can hardly endorse its use by the United States just because it’s convenient in this particular case.

What is most amazing about all this is that, a mere three years later, some combination of Israel and the U.S. are doing exactly that which Reynolds recommended. Numerous Iranian nuclear scientists are indeed being murdered.

In January, 2010, a remote-controlled bomb attached to a motorcyclekilled Masoud Ali Mohammadi, 50, who “taught neutron physics at Tehran University.” In November, 2010, two separate car bombs exploded within minutes of each other on the same day, one that killed nuclear scientist Majid Shahriar and wounded his wife, and the other which wounded another nuclear scientist, Fereidoun Abbasi, along with his wife. Then, in July of last year, Darioush Rezaei, 35, was shot dead and his wife was wounded by two gunmen firing from motorcycles outside of their daughter’s kindergarten; Rezaei “did his doctorate in neutron transport – which lies at the heart of nuclear chain reactions in reactors and bombs” and “was a member of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran, the country’s official atomic energy commission.”

And now, yet another Iranian scientist has been killed. According to Iranian media, a 32-year-old university professor, Mostafa Ahmadi-Roshan, died when an assailant riding on a motorcycle attached a magnetic bomb to his car, which then detonated and killed him. According to The Washington Post‘s Thomas Erdbrink, a conservative news outlet in Iran reported that the young scientist “was believed to be involved in procuring materials for Iran’s main nuclear enrichment facility in Natanz.”

What’s most remarkable here is to compare the boisterous, furious denunciations of the mere suggestion by a blogger on the Internet that Iranian scientists be killed, versus the relative silence in the face of its actually being done in real life, now that the corpses of murdered Iranian scientists are beginning to pile up. Does anyone doubt that some combination of the two nations completely obsessed with Iran’s nuclear program — Israel and the U.S. — are responsible? (U.S. officials deny involvement while pointing the finger at Israel, whose officials will not comment but “smile” when asked; the CIA has “targeted” Iran’s scientists in the past, several of whom have disappeared only to end up in U.S. custody, including one who “resurfaced in the United States after defecting to the CIA in return for a large sum of money”). At the very least, there has been no denunciation from any Obama officials of whoever it might be carrying out such acts.

I have no doubt that Professors Campos and Heller would apply the same legal rationale now that it’s actually being done, but what about the progressives who so stridently denounced Reynolds? Does Lemieux still believe that whoever is responsible — Israel, the U.S., or some combination — is guilty of dispatching “illegal death squads”? Does Beyerstein still “despair for our society” that such acts could even be contemplated? Does Drum still believe that whichever political leaders are responsible for these killings are Terrorists; specifically: if, as is widely assumed, the Israelis are responsible, does that mean that Israel is a Terrorist state, and if U.S. agencies are complicit in some way, does that mean President Obama is a Terrorist, a state sponsor of Terrorism or, at the very least, a supporter of Terrorism?

In general, the American covert war against Iran is extraordinarily dangerous and probably illegal (it’s certainly unauthorized), but in particular, the assassination of Iran’s scientists is just reprehensible. Now that it’s actually happening, one wishes the reaction to it were even partially as aggressive as it was when a right-wing blogger suggested it.

* * * * *

Three other brief noteworthy items: (1) yet again, the New York Times’ Public Editor admonishes that newspaper for baseless reporting about Iran that overstates the threat it poses (specifically for overstating the IAEA’s assessment of Iran’s nuclear program); FAIR first raised objections to the offending article last week; (2) here is a telling scene from Tom Friedman’s current field trip to Cairo; and (3) a sixth-grader named Wolf writes a nice little school report for his civics class on the presidential race.

UPDATE: This morning, Haaretz has a timeline of what it calls “Mysterious deaths and blasts linked to Iran’s nuclear program” — and by “linked to,” they mean: “aimed at” (h/t James Carter). It includes the murder of these scientists as well as various explosions killing many people. If you removed the proper nouns from this timeline (Iran, Ahmadinejad, Natanz), very few people would have any doubt that this is Terrorism.

UPDATE II: The right-wing religious extremist Rick Santorum said previously: ”On occasion scientists working on the nuclear program in Iran turn up dead. I think that’s a wonderful thing, candidly”; he added: “I think we should send a very clear message that if you are a scientist from Russia, North Korea, or from Iran and you are going to work on a nuclear program to develop a bomb for Iran, you are not safe.” This is how he justified all that:

If people say, “well, you can’t go out and assassinate people” — well, tell that to Awlaki. OK, we’ve done it. We’ve done it to an American citizen, so we can certainly do it to someone who’s producing a nuclear bomb that can be dropped on the state of Israel . . . .

We better hope and pray Rick Santorum never becomes President or else the legal prohibitions against assassinations will simply be ignored and that will become standard American policy — oh, wait. Meanwhile, long-time commenter DCLaw1 poses this question:

Even for people who don’t believe the US has anything to do with the assassination of Iranian scientists, just flip the scenario: how would they react to news that Israeli scientists were being systematically murdered, and Iranian officials just smiled and acted coy when asked about it? What would they say about that, and what would they say the US and Israel would be justified to do in response?

To answer that, just consider the consensus outrage that spewed forth when it was claimed (ridiculously) that Iran was sponsoring a Terror plot on U.S. soil to have a failed Texan used car salesman hire Mexican drug cartels to kill the Saudi ambassador: Terrorism!

UPDATE III: Lemieux responds by saying: “If the United States was involved in the killings — and we should stress the ‘if’ here — the Obama administration’s actions were both illegal and immoral, for the same reasons stated in my earlier posts.” Similarly, Drum strongly implies that he believes the assassinations are Terrorism. Meanwhile, Professor Campos, writing on the blog where Lemieux writes, tries to explain to Lemieux’s angry commenters what the point is of asking these questions and what the benefit is of hearing denunciations not only when a right-wing blogger proposes it, but also when it’s done in reality (in comments, David Mizner attempted the same).

For its part, the U.S. denied involvement in today’s murder and said they “strongly condemn all acts of violence, including acts of violence like what is being reported today,” while ”in Israel . . . the denial was much more vague. Brig. Gen. Yoav Mordechai, the Israeli military spokesman, wrote on his Facebook page that ‘I don’t know who took revenge on the Iranian scientist, but I am definitely not shedding a tear,’ Agence France-Presse reported.” Nonetheless, “Theodore Karasik, a security expert at the Institute for Near East and Gulf Military Analysis in Dubai, said the assassination fit a pattern over the past two years of covert operations by the West and its allies to ‘degrade and delay’ Iran’s nuclear program.”

UPDATE IV: Beyond what’s discussed here, John Glaser looks at the publicly available evidence, including what has been reported in The Guardian and Der Spiegel, regarding who is likely behind this spate of killings of Iranian scientists.

11 Jan 2012 Andrew Sullivan

NYT Fail

They refused to use the word torture to describe torture because it offended Republicans. Now they refer to an incident in which a mysterious figure on a motorcycle sticks a highly sophisticated bomb on the side of a car in Tehran, assassinating a scientist, and it's not an act of terrorism. It's an act of "terrorism". Maybe they're just using it in the British fashion to indicate the Iranians are merely describing it thus. But what word would the NYT use to describe a targeted car bomb, if, for example, it was planted by Hamas in, say, Tel Aviv or New York and killed a government scientist? Seriously, this matters. If this was not an act of terrorism, designed to create terror among scientists and others in Tehran, then it was an act of war.

My fear is that this is state terrorism directed by Netanyahu, in an attempt to increase tensions to bring about the full-scale war against Iran's nuclear program, over Washington's objections. But once US allies sanction car-bombing assassinations, it is legitimizing their use by others here. You reap what you sow.

12 Jan 2012 11:45 AM

What Civilization Means

I do not know the life, background or motivations of one Mostafa Ahmadi Roshan, who was killed, along with another passenger, when a motorcycle rider out of a Bourne movie stuck a plastic explosive on his car door and blew him to smithereens. What I do know is that he was a scientist working, we're told, as a procurer in Iran's nuclear power/arms program. Does he make the decisions in this theocratic tyranny? Is he responsible for the policy? Maybe he is an adamant Khamenei supporter. Maybe not. But he has been assassinated by someone. How should we respond?

Here's how Rick Santorum responded to these kinds of killings:

On occasion scientists working on the nuclear program in Iran turn up dead. I think that’s a wonderful thing, candidly.

There is no way in Catholic - or indeed any moral - teaching that such assassinations can be celebrated as "wonderful". The person saying so is attacking some of the core truths of Christianity. Here's the response from the Israeli military spokesman, Brig. Gen. Yoav Mordechai:

I don’t know who took revenge on the Iranian scientist, but I am definitely not shedding a tear.

Not even for his fatherless child? Or wife? Here's Greenwald's account of one of the previous assassinations:

In November, 2010, two separate car bombs exploded within minutes of each other on the same day, one that killed nuclear scientist Majid Shahriar and wounded his wife, and the other which wounded another nuclear scientist, Fereidoun Abbasi, along with his wife. Then, in July of last year, Darioush Rezaei, 35, was shot dead and his wife was wounded by two gunmen firing from motorcycles outside of their daughter’s kindergarten.

I fear sometimes that we have badly lost our way here. When Americans rejoice in the assassination of scientists, they have lost their moral compass. When they cannot shed a tear for a dead man's wife or child, they are becoming dangerously close to the barbarians they claim to be fighting.

Poem: Burn in g

2012-01-09T18:43:00.000-08:00

Blake

dreamed snow

and voiced a brother

who brought Will

dead at 20

words from the far

tiger in the snows

Blake was a tiger

brought by brother

against forest

across the stripe

of space

Aesop, Plato and barking dogs: a note from Gregory Nagy

2012-01-08T07:14:00.001-08:00

In response to my post on "Socrates’s worst argument ever: the philosopher and the barking dog" here, my friend Gregory Nagy sent me a breathtaking article which includes stories of Aesop and a barking dog. See below and here.

In the Harry Potter series, J.K. Rowling, a classicist herself, tells of stored memories in a memory pool, a pensieve, into which one can plunge and see what happened once upon a time. This invention is a little like Plato, the master of stories, but in addition, Plato, also a magician, changes every one. Tracking the sources in Plato is thus revelatory (see the ring of Gyges here and here).

Here is Greg’s account of the story:

“§100. The fable I have chosen is “Aesop and the Bitch” (Fable 423 ed. Perry), which is attested only in the Wasps of Aristophanes (1400-1405). One evening, according to the fable as narrated here in verse, Aesop was walking along after having attended a deipnon ‘dinner’ (1401), and he encountered along his way a bitch that started barking angrily at him (1402). Aesop responded to the dog by saying to her, and the iambic verses quote his words, that she would be sensible if she were barking for the purpose of getting wheat as a payment for putting a stop to her barking (1403-1405).

§101. Why wheat and not meat? In terms of the convoluted logic of the narrative, it is because it would not make any sense for the bitch to be barking so furiously at Aesop unless it was wheat that she wanted as payment for putting a stop to her angry barking. I think it is the convolutedness of the logic here that makes the narrative amusing. The premise that is built into the narrative, I further think, is that dogs crave to eat meat, not wheat, and, presumably, there was meat to be eaten at the ‘dinner’ that Aesop had just attended. But the bitch is barking up the wrong tree, as it were, if what she really wants to get from Aesop is a cut of meat as a payoff for stopping her furious barking. Aesop has no meat to give to the bitch. And so the dog deserves to get nothing to eat by barking so angrily. In terms of such a convoluted logic, I think, the moral of the fable would be something like this: you can’t always get what you want, no matter how hard you try.

§102. Here is the actual wording of the fable as the narrator tells it within the comedy:

Αἴσωπον ἀπὸ δείπνου βαδίζονθ’ ἑσπέρας

θρασεῖα καὶ μεθύση τις ὑλάκτει κύων.

κἄπειτ’ ἐκεῖνος εἶπεν· “ὦ κύον κύον,

εἰ νὴ Δί’ ἀντὶ τῆς κακῆς γλώττης ποθὲν

πυροὺς πρίαιο, σωφρονεῖν ἄν μοι δοκεῖς.”

One evening, when Aesop was walking along after having taken his leave from a dinner,

an audacious and drunken bitch started barking at him.

And that famous man said: “Bitch, bitch,

I swear by Zeus, if you could somehow use that nasty tongue of yours

to get paid off in wheat, then I think you would be sensible.”

Aristophanes Wasps 1400-1405

§103. Although it is not essential for sustaining my argument, I now add here a further point. I think that this narrative featuring the words that Aesop said to the angrily barking bitch while he was departing from a ‘dinner’ that he had attended is linked to the narrative in Oxyrhynchus Papyrus 1800 about the words that the same Aesop had said while attending a primal feast: in that narrative, as I already noted, Aesop reproached (ὀνιδίζων [sic]) and ridiculed (ἐπέσκωψεν) the wrangling and general strife he saw at a sacrifice in Delphi where sheep were being slaughtered and where bystanders at the sacrifice, carrying concealed makhairai ‘sacrificial knives’, competed at the altar with the initiator of the sacrifice and with each other by indiscriminately slicing for themselves with their makhairai whatever portions of the sacrificial meat they could capture and then taking their prizes back home with them. Presumably, when Aesop left that feast, he had taken no meat with him. So if a bitch were to bark at Aesop angrily while he was leaving that feast, he would have no meat to give her as a payoff to put a stop to her barking.”

Plato probably had Aesop’s stories in mind in having Socrates ironically compare both guardians and philosophers as barking dogs, as he had Herodotus’s tale of Gyges, the King's chief minister, without a ring but hiding to spy on the Queen naked and becoming not quite invisible, in his own tale of the ring of Gyges, the original ring of invisibility and hidden injustice - here. Socrates amusingly can be taken to compare both himself and Aesop by implication to barking dogs, highlighting ironically that these poor or enslaved wise men are by no means hounds…

First, Aesop’s report in Aristophanes’ Wasps - a fable misappropriated by Philocleon to accuse a woman he had injured by drunkenly knocking over her bread basket and destroying the bread she was selling - of being a barking and (to boot!) drunken bitch, the sheerest form of projection - calls to mind the thought that guardians and philosophers (cf. Diotima in the Symposium) can be male or female. Note: that women could be sellers of bread in Athens is an aspect of independence, outside the prison of the home.

That guardians may be female is suggested both by the dog who barks and by the woman injured and intelligently responding to the malaproprisms of the angry and drunken Philocleon. Though this association with Aesop and Aristophanes is a kind of joke common in Plato, I think this is also a serious thought on Plato’s part as is, in a sense, the philosopher-king (philosopher-kingship, as I see it, is mainly Socrates standing for philosophy against the persecution of the democracy in the Apology and Crito; Plato also explored this idea in Syracuse in his advice to the tyrant Dionysius to give laws. The philosopher-tyranny of the Republic is largely ironic, however. See here).

Plato sought to inspire or provoke further questioning and, ultimately, argument on a higher level (an ascent) by his students, present and future (the latter: serious as distinct from sleepy readers). Most of what is in the dialogues is not to be – literally – agreed to or swallowed. Some of “Socrates’s” thoughts are foolish or at best incomplete and all are an invitation to question, to think further. For instance, the comparison of a philosopher to a barking dog is funny and little else, as is the second image from the city in speech, that of women and men wrestling naked together; the latter is merely and patriarchally - the snickering of boys - a send-up of ancient, egalitarian Cretan rituals: the girls and boys vaulting over a bull’s horns. (We know from surviving statues and frescos from 3600 years ago of these practices, but the full meaning of the rituals is lost. See here for an account of what I discovered about this in Crete.)

Plato would have had the Wasps in mind not just because it was part of the cultural life of Athens. Aristophanes and Socrates were friends; they have the two most brilliant speeches and talk deep into the night, beyond the narrator's sleepy hearing, in the Symposium; and Plato, it is told, as he was dying, had a copy of Aristophanes’ plays (some of them) under his pillow. More darkly, the Apology suggests that the send-up of “Socrates” in Aristophanes, “The Clouds,” nurtured the old slander that caused the jury to convict the real Socrates; that slander's longterm impact may be hard to answer in a single speech or a single day...

The Wasps' retelling of Aesop’s story of the drunken dog also recalls, as Greg wonderfully suggests, the story of Aesop reprimanding those who stole the sacrificial meat at Delphi for not growing wheat. The latter then sacrificed him. For Socrates, too, was sacrificed…

Recalling the tale from The Wasps and Plato’s oblique reference to it in the barking dogs of the Republic also strengthens the argument, offered by Socrates in book 1, that those who are stronger- including democrats of a McCarthyite sort like Meletus - often mistake their advantage. They bark hopelessly for meat - steal it hungrily from the gods - when they should grow wheat (and of course, dogs, except those unluckily fed by today’s American manufacturers of “food-like substances,” do not eat wheat). By implication, the "stronger" often commit horrors for their cities…

Another thought given Aristophanes’s/Aesop's tale: it would be wise not to become such a dog, even the refined version (Glaucon). The city in speech in fact would often be a city of angry and drunken (methuse) dogs…See here and here.

Plato's use of this fable is, as Greg says, also diachronic (in this case, a use over time in different media with different bearings). And it shows, along with Socrates’s direct invocation of Aesop in the Phaedo, how the wise slave, though low, is in some subtle conversation with the Athenian wise man about death. At the behest of a dream, a kind of divine omen or message, Socrates, Greg notes, writes poems based on Aesop's tales, the swan singing in the days before he takes the hemlock...

Socrates does not write, so the poems - and his relationship to Aesop - have an unusual character; though some of his speech is musical (see Phaedrus) and he is a kind of shape-shifter, he is not ordinarily a poet, either.

Aesop is a slave to a philosopher, his tales low (not aristocratic culture) and also high (appearing in writing by Socrates, the comedy of Aristophanes, the words of Plato). In the Wasps, the aristocrats' symposium suggests things to pacify angry democrats - the imitation Philocleon does the opposite, of course - which are...Aesop's. Some of the aristocrats were into helpful advice for haughty parasites - slave-owners - to get out of a scrape (Philocleon was a would-be haughty non-parasite)...Those who look down on democrats and slaves rely for their survival on...the words of a slave. The well-to-do, one might say, are always searching, sometimes intelligently but particularly drunkenly, for something to say...

One might think of the misappropriation of the Bible and Jesus - one of the 99% - by Bush, Santorum, Southern aficinados of torture, and others (capitalist appropriations of Christianity, in Max Weber's sociology, are a very peculiar thing)...

But there is an egalitarian wisdom in the invocation of Aesop by Socrates. More deeply the egalitarianism of philosophy (and such tales) is also underlined strikingly in the Meno where Socrates shows that any slave can prove advanced theorems of Greek geometry under questioning. Further, the slave, he suggests, knew this from eternity - questioning leads to aletheia, not-forgetting (a strikingly abolitionist argument, one ignored once upon a time when I was a graduate student doing political theory but talking with many philosophy students in the Harvard Philosophy Department; we were all colleagues in the anti-Vietnam War movement and the rumor was that no Greek philosopher was theoretically opposed to slavery...). See here and here on the Meno and here on aletheia.

In a lovely way, Greg also invokes that beggar in disguise - Odysseus - talking with the haughty suitors of Penelope (paragraph 137) before slaying them. Appearances - deception in war particularly - can be lethal.

What is or appears to be “low” may thus turn out to be high – in Odysseus's case, defending a just claim, or more commonly in Plato, true. And what appears high may turn out under questioning to be the most ignorant…

In Greek culture, though not in Plato, consider, also, Oedipus and his son Creon (Antigone).

Recall the main claim of Socrates in the Apology – that those who are most powerful or famous think they know but are often the most ignorant. In contrast, Socrates who does not know the ideas, who is always searching, is wise in one respect: he neither knows nor think he knows. Socrates's defense captures this same theme of high and low, beautiful and ugly, the kaloskagathos (beautiful and good, the puffed-up name for an Athenian gentleman like Anytus in the Meno who says any Athenian can teach virtue except Socrates…) and Socrates. Plato and Socrates thus diachronically develop further a central theme of Greek culture.

Third, this thought leads directly to another Platonic thought about Socrates's words and how they are to be taken by students which emphasizes the relation of Aesop the slave to a philosopher Xanthos, his master. As Greg notes, Aesop was told by his master to serve a meal to “she whom the philosopher loved.” But the wife, in the spirit of Philocleon, had taunted Aesop. So Aesop served the meal instead to the master’s wolf-dog Lukaina: she whom the philosopher loves...

As in Aesop's tale, one should be careful about the meaning of words when reading a Platonic dialogue. As Socrates says in the Phaedrus,

“Socrates: Writing Phaedrus, has this strange quality, and it is very like painting; for the creatures of painting stand like living beings, but if one asks them a question, they preserve a solemn silence. And so it is with written words; you might think they spoke as if they had intelligence, but if you question them, wishing to know about their sayings, they always say only one and the same thing. And every word, when once it is written, is bandied about, alike among those who understand and those who have no interest in it, and it knows not to whom to speak and to whom not to speak; when ill-treated or unjustly reviled, it always needs its father to help it; for it has no power to protect or help itself.

…in my opinion, serious discourse about them [justice and similar subjects] is far nobler when one employs the dialectic method and plants and sows in a fitting soul intelligent words which are able to help themselves and him who planted them, which are not fruitless but yield seed from which there springing up in other minds other words capable of continuing the process for ever and which make their possessor happy, to the furthest possible limit of human happiness.” Plato, Phaedrus, 275d-277a.

This fable about Aesop parallels Leo Strauss's tale from Al-Farabi - the 13th century Arab Platonist - about the variation in a repetition being significant as a way to reveal a hidden meaning. A pious ascetic, Farabi relates, is hunted by a tyrant and dresses up as a drunken musician with a cymbal making noise and staggering toward the city gate. "Who goes there?" asks the nightwatchman. "That pious ascetic you are looking for..." slurs the seeming musician, banging his cymbal. The watchman lets him pass out of the city. As Strauss emphasizes, the pious ascetic has literally told the truth - this is what Strauss names probite (French for probity) about his own writing - but of course, his disguise provides the needed ambiguity which fools the watchman.

On one level, this is a tale about what Farabi learned from Plato. In contrast, the Aesop tale suggests how Plato himself learned the importance of ambiguity, as a way of suggesting and not suggesting implications, from Greek culture itself. The sleepy sayer, listener, reader looks away...

Consider another of Strauss's examples in his beautiful lectures on the Symposium compiled by his fine student Seth Benardete (the correspondance between the two is often about the meaning of difficult passages in Greek; Benardete has little of Strauss's interest in authoritarianism...). Strauss suggests that Socrates conjures Diotima to tell a tale of Eros as the son of Poros and Penia, resource and poverty. Eros was conceived when Resource was drunk at a celebration of Aphrodite's birth (he had lain down in a park and Penia got the idea of conceiving some benefit from him, and lay down beside him).

Plato's reason for creating the tale, Strauss suggests, is to make it clear that for Socrates, Eros is not a god. In terms of the Athenian charge - disbelieving in the Athenian gods - Strauss thinks that Plato here demonstrates Socrates's guilt - as well as suggesting, he thinks, that Socrates and not so much Alcibiades is really the impious one, though Alcibiades in banished for it. Thus, he has a stranger, a prophetess, seemingly speak the blasphemous words and not Socrates. Strauss also infers his own point of view (roughly Xenophon's) from this.

On Strauss's behalf, I might add, in Phaedrus, Eros is previously a god whom Socrates is taking in vein, telling a tale about how horrid the love of an aging man, going sour, for a young thing is (how ugly it appears to the younger person). Socrates hears his inner voice, his daimon, warning him not to continue; he changes course and apologizes to the god. But of course, the earlier account remains; one need not take the apology fully seriously...

In contrast, according to Diotima in the Symposium, Eros is no god. This difference in the paired dialogues about love is striking, and Strauss's inference a plausible way to look at it.

But it is not the only way. That Plato thinks that Socrates as well as the Athenians disbelieve the gods of Athens (this is the point of the opening of the Republic: the procession to the Thracian moon goddess Bendis by the democrats of the Pireaus show that Athenians, too, stray from their gods) suggests that the law is bad, not that Socrates is an enemy of Athens.* He wasn't.

The story of Eros is both low - Penia - and high - Poros. Eros, says Diotima, is always fainting, fading away, exhausted, and then suddenly, resourceful, empowered and empowering, on his journey. He is like Socrates, the philosopher who does not know...and yet daily fashions arguments, takes steps...

Socrates, too, is between humans and the the divine, searching through questioning, making an ascent (the Mystery religions used, as I discovered in Crete, poppies/opium; clay sculptures of goddess had snakes coming out of their heads - they are often snake goddesses prefiguring Athena - as well as poppies and more rarely, birds. See here, here, here, here, here, and here. Questioning and the ascent for Socrates and Plato were, one might say, a better "high"...).

In the Symposium, Alcibiades describes Socrates as ugly on the outside like the Silenuses - one can find these figures on the first floor walking up on the left in the new Acropolis Museum - but full of the greatest beauty within (Alcibiades just can't quite reach it). When Alcibiades is with Socrates, he has a nearly religious experience with philosophy. He wants to sit there forever. For a time as it were, Socrates teaches Alcibiades virtue (Glaucon is even less involved with philosophy than Alcibiades, but somehow, in the Republic accepts this teaching more fully and unlike Alcibiades, is unknown otherwise to history).

Socrates, however mysterious in some respects, is also exactly, in this fundamental way, like Aesop. See here and here on the Symposium. More importantly, what appears ugly or plain on the outside – some of the words in the dialogues - may have another meaning within…

Socrates asks simple questions. He seems common and proclaims not to know. But his questions reveal depths and beauties. Open him up…

In Alcibiades 1, we get an additional picture of this: if you will think about a question, Socrates suggests, you will arrive yourself, through questioning, at the opposite (or at least something quite different) from the opinion you currently express. You yourself turn out not to believe the opinion you are currently expressing (these are also Diotima's words to Socrates, the befuddled interlocutor, in her speech recalled by Socrates in the Symposium).

And if you are proud or “high,” your words, as Euthyphro puts it, get up and walk away from you.

Fourth, Greg’s article wonderfully traces ainos - praise and blame. This relates to the idea in Book 1 of the Republic espoused by Polemarchus that justice is to benefit friends and injure enemies (one of the turns of Socrates in the discussion of the dog in book 2 is just to praise friends i.e. not to injure enemies – see here).

Praise and blame, friends and enemies, is the material of a kind of justice a la Polemarchus initially and of politics a la the fascist/Nazi Carl Schmitt (The Concept of the Political). And of course today in America enmity in the corporate or war complex political parties is common enough (and Obama is wonderfully different about this, whatever his problems; Karen Feste, the head of the conflict resolution program at the University of Denver, often reminds me that Barack is and would be, in important respects, the conflict resolution president).

Breaking this wretched belittling down is why I have come so forcefully to nonviolence (it is also one of the virtues of Greg’s elegant defense of his work**). One should criticize and develop a mass movement to stop the policies or consequences, but not demonize the people. Everyone has a soul, everyone forgets themselves some times and can learn…

Fifth, the passage from Plutarch, "On the Controlling of Anger" (113c below) - “‘we often get angry, feeling that we are being disrespected, whenever we get into nasty encounters with beggars or sailors or drunken mule-drivers, and we are similarly irked by barking dogs or by donkeys that bump into us’" - echoes the Republic, book 8, on the cycle of regimes, where in a democracy, donkeys rub up against one in the street (Socrates speaking perhaps exaggeratedly in the voice of Plato son of Ariston, the best). I often contrast this passage with the laws in the Crito speaking to Socrates with the force that the Corybants hear the flutes. Socrates could not go to his death with that mocking of democracy in his ears (that is where Leo Strauss's subtle interpretation goes haywire). So some other unstated argument must convince Socrates rather than the clashing ones which silence Crito. See here. That speech, too, reveals Plato’s art to his students (it is self-contradictory and in a certain way, sophistic/rhetorical, appealing to Socrates first, intimidatingly as a slave, then reasonably as a free man. Of course, the Aesop story of feeding the meal to the wolf-dog suggests an apt response by Socrates to the first, authoritarian “argument.”)

On my understanding, Greg’s context of Aesop’s stories of the angry dogs and meat (and wheat) mocks the guardians of Glaucon’s city and deepens one's sense of the ironic analogizing of philosophers and dogs that bark. Neither Aesop nor Socrates is a barking dog….

Here are some relevant passages from Greg’s article:

§99. I will now focus on another example of Aesopic fables embedded within the verses of Aristophanes. In this example, we will see once again the narrative frame of Aesop’s own life and times. I will then follow up with a set of related examples.

§100. The fable I have chosen is “Aesop and the Bitch” (Fable 423 ed. Perry), which is attested only in the Wasps of Aristophanes (1400-1405). One evening, according to the fable as narrated here in verse, Aesop was walking along after having attended adeipnon ‘dinner’ (1401), and he encountered along his way a bitch that started barking angrily at him (1402). Aesop responded to the dog by saying to her, and the iambic verses quote his words, that she would be sensible if she were barking for the purpose of getting wheat as a payment for putting a stop to her barking (1403-1405).

§102. Here is the actual wording of the fable as the narrator tells it within the comedy:

Αἴσωπον ἀπὸ δείπνου βαδίζονθ’ ἑσπέρας

θρασεῖα καὶ μεθύση τις ὑλάκτει κύων.

κἄπειτ’ ἐκεῖνος εἶπεν· “ὦ κύον κύον,

εἰ νὴ Δί’ ἀντὶ τῆς κακῆς γλώττης ποθὲν

πυροὺς πρίαιο, σωφρονεῖν ἄν μοι δοκεῖς.”

One evening, when Aesop was walking along after having taken his leave from a dinner,

an audacious and drunken bitch started barking at him.

And that famous man said: “Bitch, bitch,

I swear by Zeus, if you could somehow use that nasty tongue of yours

to get paid off in wheat, then I think you would be sensible.”

Aristophanes Wasps 1400-1405

§104. The scholia for the Wasps of Aristophanes (1445.5) preserve a relevant detail from the Life of Aesop tradition: it was said that the people of Delphi had resolved to kill Aesop because he insulted them by ridiculing (ἀποσκῶψαι) the fact that they had no land of their own for growing their own produce. Because they had no land for agriculture, according to the scholia here, the people of Delphi had to depend for their sustenance on the meat they obtained from the sacrifices made by visiting sacrificers. This insult, I think, is built into the fable of “Aesop and the Bitch,” where the dog who angrily barks to get meat is like the people of Delphi, who would be well advised to use their barking to get wheat instead of meat.

§105. Some think, however, that this fable “Aesop and the Bitch” is not a genuine Aesopic fable, explaining it instead as an ad hoc invention by Aristophanes. One reason given for such an explanation is that Aesop himself is featured here as a character inside the narrative of the fable (for more, see MacDowell 1971:312). But that is not a good reason, I think, for doubting that this fable is genuinely Aesopic. I can cite other examples of Aesopic fables where Aesop himself is featured as a character inside the narrative of the fable, as in the case of “Aesop and the Shipbuilders” (Fable 8 ed. Perry). Another example is “Aesop and the Corinthians” (Fable 424 ed. Perry), where we see two verses of an elegiac couplet being spoken by Aesop himself to the people of Corinth: according to Diogenes Laertius (2.5.42), who is our source here, Socrates himself had composed those verses.

§106. I should add, in arguing that this story of “Aesop and the Bitch” is a genuine Aesopic fable, that there is in the Life of Aesop narratives an attestation of another story about Aesop and a bitch. In this case, the action takes place on the island of Samos, and the dog is described as a purebred female house pet living in the residence of a philosopher named Xanthos, who is at the time the master of the slave Aesop (VitaG+W 44-46). Summoning the bitch by calling out her name, Lukaina ‘She-Wolf’ (VitaG+W 45), Aesop proceeds to feed her a basketful of food that he had been instructed by Xanthos to give as a dinner gift ‘to her who loves me’. By giving the whole dinner to the bitch and not to the wife of Xanthos, Aesop has his revenge on a nasty aristocratic woman who had been tormenting him with her insults. In terms of this fable, then, Aesop has something of a reputation for giving generous handouts to bitches.

§107. Even if the story of “Aesop and the Bitch” as narrated in the Wasps of Aristophanes is a genuine Aesopic fable, as I think it is, it is a failure as a fable in the context of this comedy. What makes it a failure is the fact that it is badly applied. But that is actually good for comedy. The bad application is exactly what makes the fable work successfully in the comedy. The fact that the fable is badly applied is what gives the fable a comic twist. The narrator of the fable here has actually botched the application of his narrative to his own circumstances. And that is what makes the fable a failure in this context, since the narration of a fable can succeed only if its narrators are successful in applying it to suit their own intentions. As I have argued (BA 282§5n4), the moral of a fable must be applicable to the circumstances of the narrator of the fable. That is the synchronic reality of applying fables.

§108. In the case of this particular narration in the Wasps, as I will now show, the narrator of the fable fails badly in applying the myth for his own purposes, but the comic effect of this failure makes it a most successful application in comedy as comedy.

§109. The narrator of “Aesop and the Bitch” in the Wasps of Aristophanes is the unsophisticated character Philocleon. His comic name means ‘the one who loves Cleon’ and he is the comic antithesis of the sophisticated character Bdelycleon, who is the son of Philocleon and whose comic name means ‘the one who is disgusted with Cleon’. The unsophisticated father Philocleon is a populist who takes the side of the radical democrat Cleon, while the sophisticated son Bdelycleon is an elitist reactionary who takes the side of those who are opposed to all forms of populism. In this comedy of Aristophanes, produced in the year 422 BCE, a prime political target for elitist reactionaries like the character Bdelycleon is the Athenian system of jury duty, which had been radically reshaped by Cleon in his role as the self-declared champion of populism.

§110. As the comedy progresses, the elitist son manages to persuade the anti-elitist father to abandon his democratic addiction. From now on, the father will no longer spend all his time as a juror in Cleon’s jury system. Now the father will become an elitist reactionary, like his son. But now that Philocleon is persuaded to go over to the side of the elites, he becomes even more elitist than Bdelycleon. In a comic reversal of roles, the father Philocleon can now take on the role of a childish son while the son Bdelycleon can now take on the role of a somewhat more sensible father. Whereas Philocleon as a juror had been an advocate of the common people, he can now become a noisy parody of the elitist reactionaries.

§111. Philocleon gets drunk and rowdy while attending a symposium attended by drunken and rowdy aristocrats (Wasps 1299-1321), and then, on his way home from the symposium, he gets into violent fights with common people he happens to encounter along the way (1322-1323). Then, the morning after, Philocleon is being confronted by common people he had assaulted during his nighttime rampage, and he is being served summonses by these people. So Philocleon is now faced with the prospect of having to appear in court to answer charges and be judged by the same kinds of jurors he once had been himself before he went over to the other side.

§112. The first claimant to confront Philocleon with legal threats is a woman whose profession is selling bread, and she accuses him of violently knocking to the ground the loaves of bread she was carrying in her breadbasket. The alleged deed was committed by Philocleon in his drunken state of wanton violence as he was making his way home after attending the symposium (Wasps1388-1391, 1396-1398). Philocleon, now hoping to avoid being taken to court for damages, tries to assuage the angry woman (1393-1395). He does so by using, as he describes them, logoi dexioi ‘dexterous words’ (1394 λόγοι … δέξιοι). He announces to her that he will now deliver a discourse, alogos, that is kharieis ‘graceful, elegant’ (1398-1399 λόγον … χαρίεντα). As I have already pointed out, this term kharieis ‘graceful, elegant’ was used in the classical era with reference to measuring various different degrees of sophistication in the practice of verbal arts bysophistai ‘sophists’. So the character of Philocleon is trying to act here like a sophisticated member of elite society. And it is at this point that Philocleon narrates the fable of “Aesop and the Bitch,” which I have already quoted. Of course the fable as he tells it is not at all ‘dexterous’, not at all ‘graceful’ or ‘elegant’. Just the opposite. And that is because the application of the fable is disastrously inappropriate and even malaprop. It is bad enough for the words of Philocleon to set up a parallelism between an angry bitch and the angry woman who had lost the bread she was selling, but the drawing of parallels gets even worse, since the angry bitch is now described further as a drunken bitch: she is methusē ‘drunk’ (Wasps 1402).

§113. Though Philocleon would have no motive here for insulting the woman, he manages to insult her anyway. In his pretentious attempt to assuage her by resorting to the sophisticated discourse of telling fables, he is stuck with using words that are typical of that discourse, and those words will only get him into further trouble. I now give three examples of such wording, which are all typical of the fable.

§113a. We know for a fact from other Aesopic fables that the word methusos ‘drunk’ used here to describe the bitch who barks angrily at Aesop is part of the vocabulary of fables (as in Fable 246 ed. Perry, “The Woman and her Drunkard [methusos] Husband”) as also of comedy (Aristophanes Clouds 555).

§113b. And we also know from the evidence of Aesopic fables that the barking of dogs is associated primarily with anger: in the fable “The Years of Humans” (Fable 105.13 ed. Perry), the words used to describe dogs, ὀργίλους καὶ ὑλακτικούς ‘angry and barking’, highlight such an association. Further, as we read in traditional descriptions of potentially comic situations, aristocrats are prone to experiencing flashes of anger in public spaces whenever they experience chance encounters there with drunkards or barking dogs or other such annoyances (Plutarch On the controlling of anger 460f): ἀλλὰ καὶ πανδοκεῦσι καὶ ναύταις καὶ ὀρεωκόμοις μεθύουσι πολλάκις ὑπ’ ὀργῆς συμπίπτομεν οἰόμενοι καταφρονεῖσθαι, καὶ κυσὶν ὑλακτοῦσι καὶ ὄνοις ἐμβάλλουσι χαλεπαίνομεν ‘we often get angry, feeling that we are being disrespected, whenever we get into nasty encounters with beggars or sailors or drunken mule-drivers, and we are similarly irked by barking dogs or by donkeys that bump into us’.

§113c. Finally, we can see that barking and getting drunk go together in comic descriptions of drunkards: for example, the comically drunken Herakles in the Alcestisof Euripides barks (760 ὑλακτῶν) rather than sings as he guzzles vast quantities of intoxicating wine (757 μέθυ).

§114. In short, the words used by the character of Philocleon in the Wasps (1400-1405) when he narrates the fable about a drunken bitch who barks at Aesop are all compatible with the world of fable, but they are comically incompatible with the situation of Philocleon himself. The only part of the fable that can be made compatible with his situation is where Aesop says that the bitch would be well advised to use her barking to get wheat. At least, this part is compatible to the extent that Aesop recommends wheat as a form of compensation. After all, wheat would be a suitable compensation for the woman who is suing Philocleon, since wheat is presumably the primary ingredient of the bread that she sells for a living. But the problem is, the intended parallel brings with it an unintended parallel. The intended parallelism between the need for wheat in the fable and the need for wheat in the present situation brings with it an unintended parallelism between the bitch in the fable and the woman in the present situation. The woman is of course outraged when she hears that a parallel has been drawn between her and the angry bitch. So she responds to Philocleon by saying in effect: “This is adding insult to injury … so now you are saying I’m an angry bitch!” And so, instead of succeeding in his attempts at assuaging the woman who is angrily threatening to take him to court, Philocleon has by now unintentionally guaranteed the certainty of his being sued for damages.

§115. Besides his narration of the fable “Aesop and the Bitch” (1400-1405; = Fable 423 ed. Perry), Philocleon narrates three other fables in rapid succession within the brief space of this comic scene in the Wasps of Aristophanes: “The Chariot Driver from Sybaris” (1427-1431; = Fable 428 ed. Perry), “The Woman from Sybaris and the Jug” (1435-1436, 1437-1440; = Fable 438 ed. Perry), and, finally, “The Dung Beetle and the Eagle” (1446-1448; = Fable 3 ed. Perry). The first two of these three fables are narrated by Philocleon to a man whom he assaulted on the previous night and who now claims he had suffered a skull fracture from the assault. And the only thing that these two fables have in common with each other and with the present situation of Philocleon is the idea of a fractured skull:

(1) In “The Chariot Driver from Sybaris,” a driver falls off his chariot and suffers a skull fracture; a friend who sees the injured man as he is lying there on the ground goes up to him and advises him to go and look for a different profession that better suits his abilities.

(2) In “The Woman from Sybaris and the Jug,” a woman accidentally drops a wide-mouth jug and breaks it; the personified Jug then sues the woman for fracturing the skull of his jug-head, but the woman says that it would have been more advisable for the Jug to get some adhesive for fixing its skull fracture right away.

Finally, we come to the third example:

(3) In the case of “The Dung Beetle and the Eagle,” Philocleon is telling this fable to Bdelycleon while he is being dragged offstage by his son, who is now desperately attempting to prevent any further damage resulting from any further retellings of fables by his father. The parallelism in this case between the fable and the present situation of Philocleon is simply the idea that “The Dung Beetle and the Eagle” was a fable told by Aesop in response to the false charges made against him by the people of Delphi,*** just as this same fable is now being retold in response to the supposedly false charges made against Philocleon by the people of Athens.

§116. Having seen these three examples and having earlier seen the example of “Aesop and the Bitch,” we have by now reviewed all four of the fables narrated by Philocleon in the Wasps of Aristophanes. And we have seen that he fails in his narration of each one of these fables because he is simply unable to apply any of them in a sophisticated way. Seeing his lack of sophistication, we need to ask ourselves: where on earth would Philocleon have learned these four fables in the first place? The answer is, he learned them at that same symposium that got him so drunk on the night before—and that got him into so much trouble after he had left the party to make his way home. At that symposium, attended by the most sophisticated elites of Athens, Philocleon got to hear how these sophisticates tell fables and how they apply them. At an earlier point in the comedy, such an experience of learning fables at a symposium is previewed in an exchange between Philocleon and Bdelycleon, where the father is being advised by the son to start consorting with elites at aristocratic symposia. At this earlier point in the comic action, the old man is still expressing some degree of hesitation about the young man’s advice, but Bdelycleon finally persuades Philocleon by promising the old man that he will learn at such symposia the sophisticated art of telling fables:

1252 {Φι.} μηδαμῶς.

κακὸν τὸ πίνειν. ἀπὸ γὰρ οἴνου γίγνεται

καὶ θυροκοπῆσαι καὶ πατάξαι καὶ βαλεῖν,

1255 κἄπειτ’ ἀποτίνειν ἀργύριον ἐκ κραιπάλης.

{Βδ.} οὔκ, ἢν ξυνῇς γ’ ἀνδράσι καλοῖς τε κἀγαθοῖς.

ἢ γὰρ παρῃτήσαντο τὸν πεπονθότα,

ἢ λόγον ἔλεξας αὐτὸς ἀστεῖόν τινα,

Αἰσωπικὸν γέλοιον ἢ Συβαριτικόν,

1260 ὧν ἔμαθες ἐν τῷ συμποσίῳ· κᾆτ’ ἐς γέλων

τὸ πρᾶγμ’ ἔτρεψας, ὥστ’ ἀφείς σ’ ἀποίχεται.

{Φι.} μαθητέον τἄρ' ἐστὶ πολλοὺς τῶν λόγων,

εἴπερ γ’ ἀποτείσω μηδέν, ἤν τι δρῶ κακόν.

ἄγε νυν, ἴωμεν· μηδὲν ἡμᾶς ἰσχέτω.

[Philocleon says in response to the advice that he attend symposia:]

1252 No,

drinking is bad. Wine makes you

break doors down or hit people or throw things at them.

1255 And then, while you are still having your hangover, you have to pay money for the damages.

[Bdelycleon persists with his advice that Philocleon should attend symposia:]

No, that won’t happen if you are in the company of the elites [kaloi k’āgathoi].

For they can talk the plaintiff out of taking action.

Or you can tell a logos that is very sophisticated [asteios],

something funny that is Aesopic or Sybaritic—

1260 one of those logoi you learned at the symposium. And then you can turn into laughter

the whole affair, so the plaintiff will let you off and just go away.

Philocleon

So I’ve got to learn many of these logoi

if I want to make sure I don’t have to pay anything when I do something bad.

Let’s get going, then. I don’t want anything to hold us back.

§117. As we see from this description of ‘Aesopic’ and ‘Sybaritic’ fables, called logoi here (Wasps 1258-1259 λόγον … Αἰσωπικὸν … ἢ Συβαριτικόν), they are considered to be a most sophisticated medium, suitable for performance at aristocratic symposia. And the fable is evidently a medium of choice to be used by the elites to advance their own purposes. That is why, later on in the comedy, Philocleon claims that the fables he is about to perform are most sophisticated: as we have already seen, he describes these fables as logoi dexioi ‘dexterous words’ (1394 λόγοι … δέξιοι). And, as we have also already seen, he describes the first fable that he performs, “Aesop and the Bitch,” as a logos that is kharieis ‘graceful, elegant’ (1398-1399 λόγον … χαρίεντα). As I pointed out earlier, this same term kharieis ‘graceful, elegant’ is used by Plato’s Protagoras in referring to his narration of a fable about Prometheus and Epimetheus and Hermes (Protagoras 320c).

§118. As I have shown, then, from the overall context of the four fables narrated in theWasps of Aristophanes, such fables could be used as the elevated and sophisticated discourse of powerful elites. To put it another way, such fables were not at all confined to the lowly discourse of disempowered non-elites. As for the distinction that is being made between ‘Aesopic’ and ‘Sybaritic’ fables in the Wasps (1258-1259 λόγον … Αἰσωπικὸν … ἢ Συβαριτικόν), we can find an explanation in the scholia for the Birds of Aristophanes (471): Aesopic fables concentrate on animals as characters, as we see in the first and the fourth of the four fables retold in the Wasps, whereas the Sybaritic fables concentrate on human characters, as we see in the second and the third fables. I have highlighted this distinction between Aesopic and Sybaritic fables in the course of analyzing these kinds of fables (PH 11§21 with n59; §35 = pp. 325, 334-335). And, as I have shown here, these kinds of fable can be viewed as aristocratic discourse in form as well as in content, even if the actual characters that figure in the narratives can range from the highest to the lowest in social status, as in the case of the Aesopic pairing of the eagle and the dung beetle, or in the case of the Sybaritic pairing of the woman and the wide-mouthed jug. I elaborate on this last point in a separate project, “Homo ludens and the Fables of Aesop,” which is a twin to the present project about diachrony and the case of Aesop. In the twin project, I also review my earlier research on the genre of the Sybaritic fable and on its relevance to the Histories of Herodotus (PH 11§21 = pp. 324-325, 11§35 = 334-335).

§119. By now we have seen that fables, including Aesopic fables, are compatible with the poetic medium of Aristophanes. And what I have shown here with specific reference to one particular comedy of Aristophanes, the Wasps, can be extended to classical comedy in general. I argue, then, that the fables narrated in the classical poetry of comedy are cognate with the fables narrated in the preclassical poetry of figures like Stesichorus and Archilochus. And it would be unjustified, I further argue, to think that the medium of comedy is somehow imitating a performance that can only be imagined as a prose performance whenever a character is narrating a fable. The fables we have already noted in the poetry of Stesichorus and Archilochus show clearly that fables could be narrated in poetry as well as in prose.

§120. It remains to ask why the word logos can be used with reference to the four fables performed by Philocleon in the Wasps of Aristophanes (1258, 1394, 1398). My answer is that this word does not mean that such fables were confined to the medium of prose: as we will see at a later point, logos as used in poetry can refer to poetry as well as to prose.

*The Athenians have on the Acropolis a monument to the unknown god. In its heyday, that society was remarkably tolerant. I saw it the first time I took students to Athens; the account of strictness about the Athenian gods, except in the rare and desperate circumstances of defeat in the long war (the Peloponnesian war ended in 404 BC; the trial and execution of Socrates occurred in 399), is false.
**Classics 9, "Defense Mechanisms" is devoted to serous but non-violent or non-lethal defense of views or self-assertion. Leonard Muellner, another classicist, deals with an hilarious sociobiological excursion into classics; and Carol Gilligan has a fine essay on the 50th anniversary of In a Different Voice. The whole issue here is well worth reading.
***It is a prayer for the lives of the weak - the rabbit about to be rended - by the seemingly weaker. It is a tale of Aesop, who was to be killed, and by extension, perhaps Socrates. As the beetle destroyed the eagle's eggs and startled even Zeus, so one might say, Socrates's words on behalf of philosophy and the Athenian McCarthyites murdering Socrates discredited, for a long time, "democracy" and highlighted its odious possibilities. One needs a Gandhi or a King to fight against the evils of a regime, while not trying to cut off its children or kill its current beneficiaries, i.e. not just, when a movement triumphs, being ever-vengeful beetles. For Gandhi and King help Zeus out, not just removing the eagles from the beetle's sight, but creating movements through which humanity might survive together, and with the rest of the planet, decently.
Quasi-fascist "Nietzscheans," like the politically active followers of Strauss - see here - should meditate on this fable:
"153. THE DUNG BEETLE AND THE EAGLE
Perry 3 (Life of Aesop 135)
As he was being chased by an eagle, the hare ran to the dung beetle, begging the beetle to save him. The beetle implored the eagle to respect the hare's asylum, solemnly compelling him by the sacred name of Zeus and pleading with the eagle not to disregard him simply because of his small size. But the eagle brushed the beetle aside with a flick of his wing and grabbed the hare, tearing him to pieces and devouring him. The beetle was enraged and flew off together with the eagle to find the nest in which the eagle kept his eggs. After the eagle was gone, the beetle smashed all the eggs. When the eagle came back, he was dreadfully upset and looked for the creature who had smashed the eggs, intending to tear him to pieces. When it was time for the eagle to nest again, he put his eggs in an even higher place, but the beetle flew all the way up to the nest, smashed the eggs, and went away. The eagle grieved for his little ones and said that this must be the result of some angry plot of Zeus to exterminate the eagle race. When the next season came, the eagle did not feel secure keeping the eggs in his nest and instead went up to Olympus and placed the eggs in Zeus's lap. The eagle said to Zeus, 'Twice my eggs have been destroyed; this time, I am leaving them here under your protection.' When the beetle found out what the eagle had done, he stuffed himself with dung and went straight up to Zeus and flew right into his face. At the sight of this filthy creature, Zeus was startled and leaped to his feet, forgetting that he held the eagle's eggs inside his lap. As a result, the eggs were broken once again. Zeus then learned of the wrong that had been done to the beetle, and when the eagle returned, Zeus said to him, 'It is only right that you have lost your little ones, since you mistreated the beetle!' The beetle said, 'The eagle treated me badly, but he also acted very impiously towards you, O Zeus! The eagle did not fear to violate your sacred name, and he killed the one who had taken refuge with me. I will not cease until I have punished the eagle completely!' Zeus did not want the race of eagles to be wiped out, so he urged the beetle to relent. When his efforts to persuade the beetle failed, Zeus changed the breeding season of the eagles, so that it would take place at a time when the beetles were not found above ground.
Note: The fable of the dung beetle and the eagle is alluded to on three occasions by Aristophanes: Wasps 1448, Lysistrata 695 and Peace 127-34. In Caxton (6.2), the dung beetle is replaced by a weasel!"

Woody Guthrie and Paul Robeson: letters from Mary Baine Campbell, Tracy Strong and Steve Wagner

2012-01-03T17:27:00.000-08:00

In response to my post on Woody Guthrie here, Mary Baine Campbell sent yesterday Guthrie’s New Year's resolutions for 1942. They are full of charming drawings and from wearing fresh clothes, something major to concentrate on being poor and ever on the road, to taking care of others, writing a song a day, beating fascism, and keeping up the fight, they are quite wonderful. See here.

Tracy sent the following note on the words:

"For those who don't know them, see the two last verses:

Chorus: This land is your land, this land is my land

From California, to the New York Island

From the redwood forest, to the gulf stream waters

This land was made for you and me

As I was walking a ribbon of highway

I saw above me an endless skyway

I saw below me a golden valley

This land was made for you and me

Chorus

I've roamed and rambled and I've followed my footsteps

To the sparkling sands of her diamond deserts

And all around me a voice was sounding

This land was made for you and me

Chorus

The sun comes shining as I was strolling

The wheat fields waving and the dust clouds rolling

The fog was lifting a voice come chanting

This land was made for you and me

Chorus

As I was walkin' - I saw a sign there

And that sign said - no tress passin'

But on the other side .... it didn't say nothin!

Now that side was made for you and me!

Chorus

In the squares of the city - In the shadow of the steeple

Near the relief office - I see my people

And some are grumblin' and some are wonderin'

If this land's still made for you and me.

Chorus (2x)."

The New York Times also ran a good editorial yesterday on the new museum to Woody Guthrie in his home town. Perhaps the words of his fellow troubadour, Pete Seeger, most resonate. It is not the keeping of all the papers or getting lost in canonizing them; it is the living words, today in Madison and at Occupy, that ring out. The editorial also captures Guthrie’s sly sense of humor and marvelously emphasizes “Deportees,” his words that should rattle the repulsive Republicans (particularly the plastic Romney who in addition to blowing up Iran promises not to sign up the Dream Act) and the Democrats who do too little good even when not things harmful.

EDITORIAL

Homeward Goes the Dust Bowl Balladeer

Published: January 1, 2012

The news that Oklahoma is now ready to accept and celebrate Woody Guthrie, the seminal American folk singer who died in 1967, as a native son with an exhibition and a study center for his archives is welcome if long overdue. The state resisted honoring him for decades, because of his leftist politics. “I ain’t a Communist necessarily,” Guthrie said, “but I been in the red all my life.”

Guthrie, who wrote hundreds of songs during the Great Depression — about the jobless, the impoverished, the socially ostracized — is as relevant today as he was when he wandered and sang across the old Dust Bowl. His songs, some updated, could be heard during the recent Occupy protests. Any academic approach at the Tulsa center must not lose his fundamental sense of humanity or fallibility. “I hope that Woody will not be canonized where people try to examine every little word,” Pete Seeger, his friend and fellow proletariat-troubadour smartly cautioned decades ago.

There may be no sadder or more current song about the xenophobic demeaning of immigrants than Guthrie’s “Deportee,” a tragic ballad about Mexican farmworkers. Anybody caught singing his songs without permission, Guthrie once advised, “will be mighty good friends of ours.”

He wrote “This Land Is Your Land” to reach beyond the national anthem to the ordinary citizens facing life’s ups and downs with a lyrical edge. “As I go walking that freedom highway/ Nobody living can ever make me turn back/ This land was made for you and me.” Guthrie would probably not have been surprised by Oklahoma’s late embrace. “Life has got a habit of not standing hitched,” he said. “You got to ride it like you find it.”

On a bleaker note, my friend Steve Wagner sent a note about my post on Paul Robeson here, and the CIA’s likely role in slipping him a mind-altering drug and nearly destroying his life. Being an American citizen, particularly among the poor and radical, but in this case, among the famous, even legendary, is no protection against crimes by the US. Government, long before the new Congressionally-approved, Obama-signed indefinite detention. This is an article from the Times of London in 1999 which highlights the grim tale:

US Poisoned Paul Robeson with Mind-Bending Drug

By Tom Rhodes, New York, Sunday Times of London, 14 March 1999

The round of meetings, interviews and speeches had been strenuous, but by the time Paul Robeson reached Moscow on a spring evening in 1961, the singer, actor and Black American, was in usually good spirits.

He was planning to meet Fidel Castro in Cuba before returning to the US to join the growing wave of civil rights activism led by Martin Luther King and Malcolm X. It was a very exciting prospect for Robeson.

However Robeson never made it to Cuba. A surprise party was arranged for him at a Moscow hotel suite, after which he was hit by an extreme paranoia and tried to kill himself by slashing his wrists.

Three weeks later Cuban Exiles from USA, led by the CIA, landed on the Island's Bay of Pigs in an unsuccessful attempt to overthrow Castro. This led to an international crisis that brought the world to the brink of nuclear war.

On the surface, these two events appear unconnected. But, now Robeson's son is blaming the CIA for the sudden deterioration of his father's health, from which the singer never fully recovered before his death in 1977.

Paul Robeson Jr. claims that his father had been poisoned by the CIA to prevent what would have been a very high profile visit to Havana at the time of the American-backed invasion of Cuba. He believes, that his father was part of a wider plot to ensure that the charismatic activist never assumed his place in the vanguard of the US civil rights movement.

According to Robeson Jr., his father's symptoms at the time of the attempted suicide were identical with those produced by BZ, a mind-altering drug developed by the intelligence agencies in Britain and in the USA for use in a highly classified psychological warfare programme known as MK-Ultra. He found out that at least two Doctors that treated him in London and in New York had links to this programme.

Robeson Jr. on the anniversary of his father's death has approached the US, British agencies, demanding the release of all the classified documents relating to his father's visit to Moscow and the medical treatments.

Paul Robeson was more than a singer, and actor. He learned more than 20 languages, including several African dialects, Chinese and Russian. He was also the first Black man to be employed by a leading New York law firm.

For the intelligence agencies in America and in Britain, Robeson's stature as an artist, combined with his increasing radical political activities, made him a serious threat to the establishment. He was a close friend not only of the American civil rights activists, but also a leading light of the colonial independence movement, such as Jawaharlal Nehru and Jomo Kenyatta.

As early as 1936, MI5 of Britain officers visited Robeson on the set of Sanders of the River, an Alexander Korda epic film that was the first to feature a powerful Black male star. The CIA (or its previous title) opened also a file on Robeson in 1943. At the end of World War II his case was assigned to a special agent who was directly responsible for covert operations.

According to his son, Robeson had several close brushes with death in the next decade. In 1947, a car in which he was a passenger suddenly lost a left wheel and it was found later that it was sabotaged. He was a target of Senator Joseph McCarthy's 1950-54 anti-communist witch-hunt and, with the onset of the cold war, his politics effectively ended his mainstream musical and theatrical careers.

Robeson Jr. found out that there were attempts to "neutralize" his father, and after more than 35 years of investigations and the gradual declassification of some intelligence documents. Robeson Jr. is a fluent Russian speaker and he had interviewed senior Russian officials in Moscow during the Khrushchev period and perestroika period – who were guests at the "surprise" party - which he found out that this party was filled with by all of the anti-Soviet dissidents.

Robeson Jr. said that after he visited his father the day after the suicide attempt, Robeson Sr. said that he had felt trapped in a real life "James Bond nightmare". The walls were always closing around him. He shut himself in his bedroom, suffering extreme depression and feelings of utter worthlessness – all symptoms that is induced by hallucinogenic drugs that were given to him.

Shortly after he left Moscow, he was admitted to the Priory hospital in London, England. Within 36 hours of his arrival in London, and against the advice of Soviet doctors, Robeson was subjected to the first of 54 electro-convulsive shock therapy sessions.

Mike Miniccino, an MK-Ultra historian with very close contacts in the American intelligence, said that the allegations that Paul Robeson was really targeted by the CIA were "entirely plausible." His family kept the suicide attempt and depression a secret. But, between April and June of 1961, the FBI kept a dossier and a "status of health" file of Robeson, which reveals that plans were already made to prevent the world communist movement from exploiting Robeson's "imminent" death.

"The fact that such a file was opened at all, is very sinister in itself," said Robeson Jr. now 71, at his house in Brooklyn, New York. "This indicates a degree of prior knowledge that something was about to happen to my father."