I've spent some time analyzing what has gone wrong with people operating in the world of religion. It comes down to three things;
1. Ignorant layfolks,
2. Greedy and Ambitious teachers,
3. Twisted Sages.
That list should look familiar. It's the "Three powerful enemies."
But how do we combat these three forces?
How to Combat "Ignorant layfolks"; Fundamentalism and fanaticism;
More fundamental than fundamentalists
The answer: "Being more fundamentalist than the fundamentalists." That means studying the religions in existence, in context and mastering their teachings in context.
Loving the roots of goodness
That also means mastering our own hearts. which gives the second principle:
Loving meditation to critique religion and distinguish what is true and what is false
Use "loving meditation" to critique religious groups rather than mere criticism. When one truly understands and appreciates a group, it's leaders and its founders, understands them in context and has penetrated what they did right as well as what they did wrong -- how can one then hate anyone? It is appropriate to hate abstract enemies like fundamental darkness, ignorance, religious distortion and fear-teaching, but it is not appropriate to hate those who practice those ways. As my brother said about some of his own negative experiences "it is better to not repeat those experiences by perpetuating them."
Starting inwardly
There is nothing to fear but fear itself is a principle of joyous struggle. Even the terms people learn to fear have no meaning independent of their context. Orthodoxy just means "correct path", why let liars and twisted people own that term? Jihad just means struggle, why let foolish and ignorant people own that term and keep it dark? Sin just meant departing from guidance. Why let people who are lost pretend to guide us if we can open one eye and see better than they?
These techniques fight the fundamental darkness and ignorance that are at the root of the three powerful enemies and offer hope that we can enlighten otherwise ignorant people to a better way to approach religion.
Walking among the teachers
If we use these techniques then we neither have to join with incorrect teachings nor defeat them in battle. If we can't convince the teachers we can simply sit by the fireplace, until like Devadatta in the classic story, the teacher falls asleep or otherwise shows his/her true face. So the third method of fighting the three powerful enemies, is to master "upaya", or to study religion broadly and deeply. If we master the principles at the root of religion then we can master our own minds. That isn't a complex thing. Nichiren advocated chanting the Daimoku. By itself it may not be enough to root out evil, but it at least can set people on the road to studying and mastering the lotus Sutra. And with the Lotus Sutra as a guide, the hermaneutics of the Nirvana Sutra, then we can look for the "gems" of religious teachings that are already there.
Fiction is not false
The root of evil teachers is the notion that religious stories are false simply because they are fictional. When we look at evil groups, they inevitably are led by completely corrupt and cynical leaders, followed by ambitious, partisan and often duplicious followers, and finally preceded in battle by people who genuinely believe the lies put out by the two groups of people. This is true in the secular as well as the religious world.
Lies often seem more "True" than mundane truths
How many people have been set to kill or lock up medical doctors in the name of "life." Or to believe in fantasy and childish interpretations of faith and religion because others benefit from it. Even secular people who don't believe in the 'older religions' sell themselves on political philosophies that have nothing beneath them but sophist arguments that sound plausible but have no logic, history, or consistancy.
These are not genuine offerings. Paul said "when I became a man I gave up childish ways." Christianity no more need resemble the inquisition or 15th century Europe than it need be ennervated by the 19th century notion that it was a pack of lies and fairy tales.
And this leads to the final principle
Master the teachings but do not become slaves to the teachers
Most religions have gone astray because people have enslaved themselves to hierarchy, to people speaking in the name of a teacher, or to people setting themselves up as sages who have kept them in darkness, or substitute "childish ways" for adult ones. So the way to combat this is to always study religion by comparing and contrasting teachings and teachers. If one loves Jesus, one should equally love Gandhi.
Loving Critiques
If one loves Gandhi one should love Martin Luther King. If one is impressed by Mandala one should study Desmond Tutu. If one knows Desmond Tutu, one should compare and contrast him with Idi Amin. What was good about Idi Amin? What was right in what Lenin said? What was wrong in what Gandhi did and said? Once one opens up this way, the evil of those like Lenin or Idi Amin hurts all the more for seeing the light that shone beneath the iron doors of their will.
Study widely and Deeply
The best antidote to fanaticism and literalism is to study widely and deeply on one's own, with help if one can get it, but always with an independent spirit. Ikeda used to call this "standing alone." We don't have to break with our present traditions to do this. Martin Luther King could study great ideas and great men without giving up his position in the Methodist AME Church. There is no reason we can't learn from him and all the others who have come before us.
We are Whisterias not Oaks
Nichiren once compared himself and his female disciples to Whisteria Bushes. None of the branches of a Whisteria Bush can stand up strait on its own. Their strength comes from their togetherness. I am giving suggestions. These are not perfect suggestions. But they do make a start. Democracy's power starts with this realization.
Chris
There are a lot of people who claim that they know better than anybody else what the Constitution says, much the same way people with similar attitudes claim to understand the bible and Christianity, or the Koran and Islam, or any other body of religious or human knowledge. My observation is that people who make such claims often haven't really read those documents in their complete context, or haven't bothered to understand that context. Instead they trust people who set themselves as "experts" and buy into various dogmas. The trusting of some purported "sages" over other sages on a particular subject, rather than leading to wisdom, often leads to literalism, dogmatism, fanaticism and conflictive behavior. The enemy of true religiousity (or good political philosophy), is literalism and fanaticism.
People who believe in a religious approach usually come at their religion from a faith perspective. Faith is the belief that a thing can be true despite the lack of immediate evidence. Faith is meant to guide us when life is too dark to see the path we need to be on. Faith, however, is used by religious authority and corrupt teachers to create an artificial barrier between the reality of the world around us and the reality of the mind. Fundamentalism, dogmatism, and fanaticism, all tend to substitute a childlike, literalist, and fantasy version of faith for the real thing.
The primary reasons why teachers get away with teaching such things, and believers continue to believe in such things, are the power of faith and the laziness of the people who come to believe in a thing. But there are logical reasons why people get mislead as well.
If a person hears something that sounds good but represents only one view, the logic of that view will sound unassailable. One of my favorite of Nichiren's writings was actually not written by Nichien at all, but by one of Nichiren's disciples. It is called "dialogue between a sage and a foolish man" and it is told as a series of dialogues between a "foolish" man and a series of "sages." Each sage criticises his rival and proposes a plausible sounding alternative. If the author had been telling a joke instead of putting forth his own views, he probably would have had the poor fool come back to where he started.
Religious dogmatism starts because people make choices between views not realizing that religion is highly figurative, and that to be religious demands that we get beyond a fantasy interpretation of such figurative language and learn from it. Actually the dialogue ends with promoting the Lotus Sutra, which teaches exactly this. Even so many who "believe" in the Lotus Sutra don't believe in it in such a way as to get beyond the second chapter. Even people who study the Lotus Sutra should master its context and study it in relationship to other teachings.
Which brings us to the next point, that of studying things in context. The Lotus Sutra was first taught in one context, first transmitted and developed as a set of oral teachings, then written down and "redacted" or edited, and finally transmitted to China and from there to other countries. Read in each context it was interpreted different. Translated into Chinese it was even "redacted" or edited, to fit the needs of a chinese audience. Something similar has happened to the Bible. Oral teachings are committed to words that are easy to remember. They are conveyed in the form of poems, stories, and parables, that are easy to remember.
Their historical value is sometimes remarkable, but usually they are more valuable and valued as fiction. For every Icelandic Saga that has been transmitted faithfully, there are many more stories that were first converted to mythological form before they were ever transmitted. Sages doing battle with hunger are depicted as fighting a dragon. Stories are told as allegories meant to convey a point about the teller more than about the subject. And these may be finalized into versions authored many years after the time of their purported authors, and written down many years after even those times.
This is true of Buddhist and Jewish teachings, including the Lotus Sutra and the Bible. This doesn't detract from their value or their truth. On the contrary, the stories contained were picked out because they contain universal and eternal truths. Just not literal ones. Even when a sage has some historical reality, his works are written down by disciples. The founder of Islam, Mohammed, recited his Koran. He doesn't seem to have written it down. The authors collected those poems and are rightfully proud of their efforts to create a work completely fidel to the poet/prophet. But even they have to concede that for all the beauty and wisdom of each of those poems they represent transmissions of a fallible man, and thus are "two flights" from God. According to legend they came from Gabriel. They are not meant to be taken completely literally, they are meant to be studied, even "struggled with." Literalists take "jihad" to mean war with everybody. The truly religious take "jihad" to mean that inward struggle.
Even Mohammed has to be taken in context. God may be perfect but no human being is perfect, and while every sage claims to be perfect, and may well be for his time and place, all of them must be understood in their time and their place. No one gets to put a "seal" on human understanding or transmissions from the eternal. It just doesn't work that way. Today is different from yesterday. Even if the text is the same the text will be read differently today. But of course that is not an orthodox view. I can only hope that what today seems heterodox will one day be seen as simply true.
This leads to the final source of religious confusion. Claims to Orthodoxy was created by secular authorities and enforced with beheadings, burnings, or lesser punishments, and has resulted in more than a thousand years of conflict as people still ended up fighting over what that means. Authoritarian claims of orthodoxy are the source of hell. When someone says that their opponents are on a 'path of hell' it usually means that they are headed that way themselves. Most human beings don't see all the sides of the "world elephant" and so are only exercising their arrogance when they claim to understand life. Religious dogmatism, conflict, and religion based violence, reflect irreligiousity and hypocrisy not a genuine spiritual path. Those who engage in it are on a path of selfishness and darkness, not a path to enlightenment or the "kingdom of heaven."
Faith is meant to guide us when the path is otherwise unknown. It is a powerful thing. Faith can build pyramids, or palaces, cities, or graveyards. It can produce prosperity or it can build extermination camps. Faith in lies can only produce failure and conflict. Faith that guides reality is wisdom. Faith that fights with and contradicts the possible is anti-faith. And faith that dwells in fantasy is childish. Eventually we have to put aside the "things of childhood" and stop playing with reality. Faith is serious. We can transform this world with it. But not if we believe in lies or fail to do the work of understanding our own faith in the context of reality, and applying the ideations of faith to mastering that reality.
Chris
This article is in the Chicago Tribune:
http://tinyurl.com/y9b5fn
Titled "`And they call me unpatriotic' Ex-GI's anti-war stance recalls
McGovern's bid, By Tim Jones Tribune national correspondent, Published
October 22, 2006
He is quoted, while speaking in JOHNSTOWN, Pa: -- "John Murtha, the
gruff Marine and Vietnam War veteran, remembers Sen. George McGovern, a
decorated World War II bomber pilot, barnstorming the country in 1972
as the Democratic presidential nominee, calling for the pullout of all
American troops from Vietnam."
Yesterday I was at the Naval Academy with my Father touring. And one
picture struck me. It was a depiction of one of the many graduates of
the Naval Academy performing a feat of heroism. In 1972 this John Ripley fellow "saved the day" for the South Vietnamese and the US war effort. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Ripley_(USMC)
He took some five hundred pounds of explosive (probably semtex) and
single-handedly, while under fire, loaded the semtex onto a bridge that
marked the road between the interior and the ancient capital of Hue. He
did this while an entire division of NVA troops and tanks was headed
his way. This action prevented these troops from achieving a victory
over the South Vietnamese forces.
This was 1972 and the US had pulled
back to an advisory position. According to the article if it hadn't
been for this man's heroism the US might have lost militarily in 1972.
I don't know if I buy the single hero narrative of warfare, but the
mural was interesting, because I was seeing it at the same time as
Murtha was citing McGovern in 1972, and as I thought about Richard
Nixon's corrupt and paranoid re-election campaign. McGovern was right.
MacNamara had seen it in 1968 when he realized that Vietnam was a
stalemate. Without the help of the South Vietnamese, all our acts of
heroism and violence could only keep the North Vietnamese from winning.
The only people who could win the Vietnamese Civil War, were the
Vietnamese. I know they tried, for example this story here tells of one soldiers bravery:
http://www.rfa.org/english/about/oped/2006/03/24/southerland_vietnam/
But the fact is, it wasn't our war to win. It was there war and we didn't even have a clue about what that meant. That made our hero's actions all the more poignant. What cause did they serve? What strategy did they advance? They certainly helped the CREEP in his re-election efforts, but otherwise they were like the little boy with his finger in the dyke.
And Murtha has been the target for the obvious reason:
"I did not agree," Murtha said, firmly embracing a diplomatic nicety.
"But now Murtha, a 32-year Democratic veteran of Congress and one of
the best friends the Pentagon has in Washington, is on the campaign
plane to dozens of congressional districts, echoing a McGovern-esque
call to get the U.S. out of Iraq.
"The spin from the White House is that there will be chaos if we pull
out. It's chaos now, for Christ's sake," Murtha grumbled. "This is the
most important issue in the election. You can't solve any other problem
unless you solve the war.
"And they call me unpatriotic," Murtha said, shaking his head.
Murtha talks about how the far right is building a similar narrative
now. They don't want to face reality, and like with Vietnam, they'd
rather build up a divisive and anti-patriotic (but Nationalistic)
narrative about the US as Empire savaged from within. You know the
narrative, the Ann Coulter narrative of treason and enemies within.
"Next month's midterm elections will be a test of national tolerance
for the war and could, as opinion polls suggest, negatively affect the
chances of Republicans maintaining control of Congress. The war already
has eroded support for President Bush, whose approval ratings range
from 35 percent to 40 percent. At least 78 U.S. servicemen and women
have been killed in Iraq so far in October, the highest monthly toll in
nearly two years."
But Republicans have achieved most of their goals; a Conservative
Supreme Court, money transfered to their backers, and a situation in
which anything the Democrats do to try to right will look like the
Democrats doing something wrong.
"While polls suggest that a majority of Americans now think it was a
mistake to invade Iraq, the 74-year-old Murtha is leading an almost
singular political charge to bring the troops home. Eleven months after
Murtha stunned Washington with a call to withdraw from Iraq, there is
no boisterous band of incumbent Democratic brothers joining the old
Marine against the barrage of cut-and-run and defeat-o-crat charges."
This is the same old tired narrative I hear from Vietnam Veterans and
veterans around my age. "We coulda won if only we hadn't been stabbed
in the back!" Not able to blame the enemy. Not being able to tell
friend from foe, and not being able to understand the nuances of
strategy or military reality, these otherwise intelligent people resort
to narratives of betrayal and hatred in which they project their own
feelings unto civilians and folks like McGovern or Murtha. Nevermind
that these folks had a valid view.
"It took a long time to realize that George McGovern was way ahead of
everyone else," he said.
"As McGovern, who won only one state in the 1972 election, will
testify, being ahead of everyone is not necessarily an essential
ingredient in successful election campaigns. And that may explain why
Murtha, a prolific bring-home-the-bacon pol who ran unopposed in this
southwestern Pennsylvania district two years ago, isn't only being
challenged but is hearing his military and patriotic credentials called
into question."
We've already passed our 1972 moment. It came fast because this war is
so obviously FUBARed that it doesn't even compare to Vietnam
"Recent dueling rallies on successive days alternately praised Murtha
as a profile in courage and defender of the troops, and derided him as
a practitioner of treason."
In Vietnam we did turn things back over the Vietnamese. They could have
failed in 1972 (to Nixon's embarrassment) or in 1975. Our failures on
that score made little ultimate difference. In Iraq, we failed in 2003. Our failure to communicate in both cases did make the ultimate difference. The guys with guts were folks like Ripley, but also McGovern, and Murtha. If people fight for what they believe in, do the right thing that the situation demands they do, then they are heros. Our relatively honorable behavior in Vietnam has led to us having real relations with that country in the present that would have surprised even Kissinger in 1972. If we had kept fighting, we'd still be fighting today.
Chris
Politics, religion and intentions go together.
We've all seen wonderful ideas come and go. Those ideas that are viable, "true" and that are self-consistent in theory should be the ones that win the competition for ideas and become adopted. Hegel talked of his "dialectic." Others have talked about how ideas are argued and go through their cycle of ideation, critique (or thesis, antithesis) and synthesis. In ideal theory self-apparant ideas like "Democracy" or "dictatorship of the proletariat" or "shariah/dar Salaam" ought to result in paradise. Yet the reality is often so miserably different.
Yes, the reality is otherwise. Why do bad concepts win out in political discourse? Why is that? Even after ideas are prooved to not match reality.
The twentieth century was a constant riot of Ideas that are associated with tired, destructive, larcenous, and even murderous concepts. And these tired ideas somehow keep resurfacing even though they have done nothing but exacerbate the misery they claimed to totally solve.
The land of "Salaam" is a land of eternal warfare. Arabic speaking Moslems murder non-Arabs. Sunnis murder Shia. Shia murder Sunni. Yet ideologues would throw up the same tired ideas and try to recreate the murderous and corrupt reigns of the Caliphate or revive the missing Imam. Some Christians would revive the crusades, the guilds, the inquisition. Ideas that have no relationship to reality are being danced around as if they were viable ideas. Those who know better are seduced by dreams of wealth and power by riding these foolish myths. Those who believe these things somehow are more willing to believe a living con artist claiming to speak for long dead people all of whom claim to speak for God. How can this be?
The alternatives to these religious insanities; The "Dictatorship of the Proletariate" was a lie. The "vanguard of the proletariate" was just a generation of pigs who turned into thugs and set themselves up as a class of rich folks ruling a beaten down population.
The noble ideas of democracy were corrupted by elitism, slavery, racism, bribe-taking, mobocracy, kleptocracy, and propaganda leading to these very idealistic democracies overthrowing themselves and throwing up degenerate dictators in their place. When things got bad enough, military leaders claiming to clean up the mess, set themselves up on thrones and try to become Emperors or Kings, only to be thrown up themselves by a society that cannot digest the contents of a modernization they cannot immediately understand.
The ideas of capitalism, that by specialization and trade all could do better, instead of being used to float all boats, was used to throw up mighty men of commerce who played poker with people's possessions and sold poison to their children, stole the commons to burn them in order to sear the lungs of those they enslaved to work their factories and their plantations. Instead of floating all boats we see a world where most people are being dispossessed in the name of "progress" while some do quite well. And then others, claiming to be reformers, simply steal all these things and change the name on the office doors, meet the new bosses. Who cares about the "People" when the election or the revolution is over?
What is it about our system that throws up such people? Why do we have so many good seeming ideas and so little progress? Why would countries engage in nationalism, "ethnic cleansing," genocide? Why do people do these things?
Well the answer is fundamental darkness. But fundamental darkness isn't simply "ignorance," but is "ignore-ance" combined with human needs; hunger, animosity, fear. The "Devil" isn't image-able, anymore than "God" is. Good and evil are distinctions we have to make as human beings. And we fail at this because we find it more expedient to fight than to cooperate, more productive individually to gamble on winning it all than to play it safe. These are all choices. There is nothing in capitalism, marxism, Islam, or Christianity that mandates incessant and permanent human conflict. These are choices we make. We make the choice to stake out territories and to fight over them. To play king of the hill, and combine that win "winning is everything" philosophy so that the losers instead of being simply pushed off the hill are killed.
And this game of "king of the hill" is a phyrric one. Those who win these battles do so at the expense of their own enlightenment, their own long term advancement, even their own long term happiness. Adam Smith was right about the advantages of specialization and trade. Marx, and Andrew Jackson, were right about the evils of Class Warfare, and the stupidity of creating classes of permanent wealth. Jefferson was right about "all men are created equal." Mohammed was creating a moderately improved concept over that of the Polytheistic Arabs he lived among and the Jews and Christians of the time.
The founder of Christianity were seeking to improve the lot of the Jews of Palestine and bring about a better world. They didn't expect that their Messiah would be turned into an Anti-messiah (Anti-Christ) by the Romans and Greeks. And the early Christians were trying to create a "Kingdom of Heaven" that would be reflected on Earth as well as Heaven. Why Christians aren't more fundamentalist and less willing to accept the cons of later generations I do understand -- but I don't accept.
We've had the heroes with their better concepts. Why do we listen to the anti-heros with their anti-religion concepts? Why listen to Osama and preachers of hate? Why be literalist when the context demands figurative, and be figurative when something is so baldly put as "Do Unto Others as you would have them do unto you?" Why because of anger, hunger, fear and hate. If we conquer those things we may make progress.
In today's Washington Post is an article by a professional and former JAG officer who details the "unlearned lessons of Abu Gharaib." He is assuming that the Administration ever really cared about the science or the ethics of "aggressive interrogations" -- or the rule of law. This is an administration that never cared to learn the difference between Shia and Sunni, or to put enough "boots on the ground" to secure the country during the invasion. They are led by a man who has had the reverse Midas touch since his College days. But that is a side issue.
Anyway he says a number of important things:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/10/18/AR2006101801501.html
In his article The Unlearned Lessons of Abu Ghraib, By Christopher Graveline, Thursday, October 19, 2006; Page A29, Washington Post Christopher Graveline, a former JAG officer writes about the new "Torture legalization" legistlation:
He says it represents "Congress's latest attempt to clarify our country's position on proper treatment of detainees and the boundaries of legitimate interrogation techniques."
Unfortunately, as the Torture Memos show in parsed and "Camouflage" language, and Dick Cheney states pretty baldly in discussions detailed by Ron Ruskind in his 1% solution statements, this "clarification" isn't meant to "clarify" anything. It is meant to ratify the brutal and illegal procedures already being used by the CIA to conduct interrogations, and to cover up these legal violations by denying detainees rights to habeas corpus.
That is why he is being more than charitable when he says next:
"Unfortunately, this legislation demonstrates that both the administration and Congress have failed to learn important lessons from what Bush described as the "biggest mistake that's happened so far" in Iraq: the detainee abuses at Abu Ghraib."
They haven't learned any lessons, because this legislation wasn't about learning lessons, it was about avoiding culpability for demonstrated crimes by trying to legalize them after the fact and before Democrats or progressives could start using subpoena power to demonstrate just how awful those crimes really are.
He says next:
"By dissociating potential criminal responsibility from overly aggressive interrogation practices that could be classified as "minor" breaches of the Geneva Conventions, and setting up a situation in which different interrogation practices can be used by our military and the CIA, our national leadership has ensured more abuse scandals."
There is no such thing as a "minor breach of the Geneva Convention" when one is talking about water-boarding, sexual humiliation, and pain generating positioning. They are trying to set up a situation in which the military is held to international law, while the CIA is allowed to continue to flout it. Pure and simple.
He writes:
"As part of the Army judge advocate general team investigating and prosecuting the Abu Ghraib soldiers, I crisscrossed the globe interviewing witnesses, collecting documents and studying our national policies, searching for went wrong at that prison. The evidence demonstrated that most of the photographed abuse had little or nothing to do with interrogation; it was done for sport by prison guards."
Well and Good. But then he writes:
"But we also found disturbing conduct by military and civilian interrogators."
And those "disturbing conducts, were crimes that went unpunished because they were conducted under the cover of secrecy. As he notes later in his article:
"The CIA conducted its own internal abuse investigation but never reported the results to any military authority in Iraq, creating resentment, the impression of a double standard and confusion in the military ranks as to what were acceptable practices. Having strict controls over interrogations and the ability to hold individual interrogators responsible for their actions is another important lesson stemming from abuses seen in Iraq."
And the administration would like to reinforce and continue this double standard. They want the appearance of abiding by the Geneva Convention, while flouting it completely. But this doesn't work. It will further detroy the military (which might be a goal as well):
"The interrogation abuses could be linked to three main areas of breakdown: confusion in the military ranks about what was acceptable behavior, given the conduct of civilian contractors and "other governmental agencies"; migration of certain techniques within the intelligence community without an understanding of how to implement them properly; and exploitation of the ambiguity in apparently innocuous interrogation tactics."
Now these "certain practices" were the practices of "torture lite" which are designed to use psychological methods to completely break down the victim and thus get him, or her, to submit to his or her Jailors and spill everything to them. It works, more or less, but doesn't produce the best intelligence in the world, and many interrogators swear that there is no need to use torture at any point during such interrogations.
He concludes: "The new law does nothing to remedy these weaknesses."
Some of those techniques cross the line of legality and should never have been employed within the CIA itself, except that the CIA, apparantly, like most "Intelligence" services exempts itself from following the letter of the law for "Reasons of State," leaving it in the murky world of James Bond imagination and Saddam Hussein, Idi Amin, Hitler, Castro, and Pinochet reality. The whole idea of romanticized "Covert" activities is that sometimes normal laws and rules have to be violated to accomplish some noble end. He writes:
"First, our military and civilian intelligence agencies do not operate in mutually exclusive bubbles. A great deal of interaction occurs as military units capture suspected personnel, hand them over to interested agencies and, often, witness the interrogations. Our service members, especially Special Operations forces, will see the double standard -- the CIA's and the military's. This blurring was a main complaint of Abu Ghraib prison guards."
It also was demonstrated in numerous other incidents that never hit the radar screen but were hauntingly similar to Abu Gharaib, with the twist of not being "for sport" but being at the behest of Military "Intelligence."
"Army Maj. Gen. George Fay, who investigated Abu Ghraib, wrote in his report that "CIA detention and interrogation practices led to a loss of accountability, abuse, reduced interagency cooperation, and an unhealthy mystique that further poisoned the atmosphere."
This romanticizing of the CIA, epitomized by the famous cliche "If I told you I'd have to kill you" used by so many people with access to classified information. [The actual line should be 'if I told you I'd have to report myself and you, and we'd both be in a whole lot of trouble'] People think of Smiley or James Bond, but they don't realize that even the CIA has to operate in a world where ultimately even the executive is accountable to the people who elect him and nobody should be above the law. But the "mystique" is infectious.
"The power of the CIA's mystique to influence our soldiers should not be underestimated. Army guards reported seeing unknown men in civilian clothes dropping prisoners off and telling the guards not to give the detainees identification numbers, contrary to usual practices under the Geneva Conventions. The civilians exuded an air of confidence that suggested they knew exactly what they were doing and that this departure from the norm was allowed. Similar issues were unearthed in the interrogation booth, including one instance of a man dying during a CIA interrogation at Abu Ghraib."
After all, if the CIA can use brutal, ham-handed, and civil rights violating methods, then why not the rest of the military? Or the Police? Or the local police? Or Republican Operatives seeking to avoid prosecution for bribery? It is a slippery slope, and eternal warfare is what is making that slope so slippery.
"Chief Warrant Officer Lewis Welshofer, an Army interrogator, exploited the ambiguous language of the "harsh" interrogation approach to wrap an Iraqi general in a sleeping bag, tie electrical cords around the bag and sit on the man's chest in an attempt to scare him with suffocation. The general died. (This was not at Abu Ghraib.) Welshofer was convicted by the military of negligent homicide. But given the language of the new law, it is unclear whether a civilian interrogator performing the same actions would be prosecuted, since it would be impossible to prove that the interrogator "specifically intended" to torture or inflict 'severe or serious physical or mental pain.'"
I don't see how not. But military tribunals have a special way sometimes of interpreting the law. It is rare that someone actually says; "You want the truth, you can't handle the truth." Jack Nicholson was acting.
"The new law grants too much latitude in an area where precision and oversight are critical. If confusion reigned in Washington during the past several weeks over whether waterboarding or other, "harsher" techniques would be permissible under the legislation, imagine the results when our agents and service members are faced with the same question halfway around the world and years removed from this debate -- especially if the threat of criminal responsibility is gone."
Again, the key here is that the law had nothing to do with precision or oversight. It was Congress trying to legitimize illegitimate methods of getting information from victims. The whole idea was to legitimize further rounds of harsh interrogations, "disapearings" and perhaps set the groundwork for a future in which other "enemy combattants" can be designated and disapeared. For instance, should there be election fraud in Ohio again and people "take to the streets." Why not designate them "enemy combattants?"
He writes:
"The better route would have been to authorize mirror-image interrogation techniques for both the CIA and the military and to maintain the possibility of criminal prosecution if an interrogator exceeds these authorized approaches. All interrogators would have more than enough flexibility to obtain necessary information simply by using the approaches recently rewritten into the new Army field manual that governs interrogation."
Science? Integrity? From this administration?
"Now we must wait to see what interrogation rules the president will promulgate for the CIA. Given the administration's rhetoric, there seems little hope for a cure for the systemic problems exposed at Abu Ghraib."
We may not get to see what those rules are.
"The writer, who served as an active-duty Army JAG officer for more than seven years, participated in the prosecution of 10 soldiers for detainee abuse at Abu Ghraib prison."
The US has been calling its efforts to legalize "torture lite" legalizing "aggressive interrogation" or "enhanced interrogation." This is the use of camouflage language. This is done when people who are ideologues, and who believe in ruthless ends justify means behavior that they know is immoral and illegal, want to disguise their intentions. The folks in this administration want this sort of thing to continue. They also know that if they use the cruder and more explicit language both their minions and the general public will balk at their designs. (see this article(http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/10/16/AR2006101601023.html) for a discussion of this) And I wrote about this more than a year ago:
This article notes: "You can't blame the CIA for demanding clear authorization. It reportedly was using waterboarding (a terrifying mock execution in which a prisoner is strapped to a board and convinced he is being drowned), dousing naked prisoners with water in 50-degree cold and forcing shackled prisoners to stand for 40 straight hours." These are all explicitly under the definition of torture as defined in the Geneva Conventions, and also as defined under US law. However, by parsing the language and keeping it opaque enough, the lawyers of the administration could maintain that they could argue in court that it wasn't actually torture. For example the pain of standing in one position for a long time was "self-inflicted," the sensation of drowning wasn't actually drowning, etceteras...
But as I noted (quoting others) in long ago posts this is a pack of lies:
Torture I
Torture II
As long as these interrogations are not subject to judicial review, are kept secret, and the people so tortured have no legal recourse, it didn't matter that they were illegal methodologies. That is the real crime of this congress in going along with the Administrations plans. They used "deliberately opaque" language to try to keep those secrets making them complicit in the behavior. Even, to his shame John McCain, who voted for it after a "compromise" that wasn't a real compromise. In this they were following the pattern of many other large inhuman projects. Such as that of the Wannsee Conference, where the author Lawrence Rees writes:
"The minutes of the Wannsee conference are deliberately opaque. Eichmann's draft of them was worked on several times by Heydrich and Heinrich Muller, the head of the Gestapo, to create that exact effect. Since they were intended for wider distribution, it was necessary for them to be written in camouflage language: those who understood the context would realize exactly what was intended, whilst the lack of crude terminology would mean they would not shock the uninitiated should they catch sight of them. Nonetheless they remain the clearest evidence of the planning process behind the Nazis' "Final Solution" and the strongest evidence of widespread state complicity in the murders that were to follow. [page 95]" (for more see BBC interview)
The point is that the very use of such language is usually visible evidence that someone is engaging in a criminal enterprise. When I hear such language used I don't think "Oh its not so bad" I think, oh my God, these are criminals.
I only pray that the democrats will start investigations in December.
Chris
Bush thinks that history will be kind to him. It won't be.
"Here's a statement from the ACLU : "The president can now - with the approval of Congress - indefinitely hold people without charge, take away protections against horrific abuse, put people on trial based on hearsay evidence, authorize trials that can sentence people to death based on testimony literally beaten out of witnesses, and slam shut the courthouse door for habeas petitions. Nothing could be further from the American values we all hold in our hearts than the Military Commissions Act."
But the President doesn't care. The purpose of the bill wasn't to protect underlings, it was to protect him, his cronies, and the top level people who work for him. You see for these folks, the Country has to be run by our "betters". And if we think we are equal to them and they are operating out of patriotism, well encouraging that illusion is what propaganda is for. That is what conservativism is about. Only so many people can join the country club or it will get too crowded.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/linkset/2005/04/11/LI2005041100879.html
The value of democracy is demonstrated, even in the animal world:
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn3248
"Implementing an efficient democracy can be a complex task, as the last US presidential election demonstrated. But Roper is adamant that collective decisions do not necessarily require polling cards or even a sophisticated brain."
Why would animals use "democracy" to make decisions? They do so partly because there is safety in numbers. But they also do this because good decisions based on good information, and one way to get the best information possible involves sifting a lot of views of the same subject. Each individual animal may not have the best information, but together the group may see a threat better than any individual might. Like a set of compound eyes, each individual "eye" may be limited, but together they can describe the reality the group is experiencing together. That is the role of democracy in nature, and among humans.
For that reason:
"In the case of real red deer, the animals do indeed vote with their feet by standing up. Likewise, in groups of African buffalo, individuals decide where to go by pointing in their preferred direction. The group takes the average and heads that way."
Fifty animals in a heard of one hundred, when the numbers hit fifty one that is the direction they go.
"Anna Dornhaus, who researches ant behaviour at Bristol University, UK, notes that research on the collective decisions of social insects is much more advanced. "But researchers have not assumed that a huge cognitive ability is necessary," she says."
When insects, or birds, move in tandem, it's not some tough "leader" that drives the motions, but the power of the majority. This power, produces a kind of unity that is often breathtakingly powerful. Bees, birds, humans, all can show more power when they combine than when they operate on their own.
"She does not think the model will tell us much about the merits of democracy in human society, but she says it challenges the popular perception that the natural world is run by dominance and violence. "Democracy is not something that humanity invented," she adds."
This would have been comforting to Darwin, who was the first one to note that humans have hierarchy and "alpha males" similar to wild animals. It turns out that the role of the "alpha" male is probably valid, but leadership doesn't always come from him.
Chris
The election is coming up, and I've been pondering a question for a while. Why support democratic government when democracy is so easily corrupted and politicians so unreliable? Why not just support the ever more predictable choice of authoritarianism? After all these experts are experts, experienced in the law and social sciences, and surely they are right and the rest of us can have a peaceful life if we only support their decisions and go with them. After all, they have access to information the rest of us don't have and know best. Following this reasoning. I should bow to the President's "Will" and support the re-election of the Republican Party. That is the premise of authoritarianism after all, and a lot of people seem to believe them.
It's hard not to break out laughing at this point. But I'm trying to be serious.
Aside from the fact that I know enough about the reality to know that the above paragraph is balderdash on its face. Even if presented with officials who made such claims and trotted out power point presentations, charts, graphs and studies "proving" that they are right (and those of us who doubt them are wrong), I still could not support this authoritarian approach. Democracy is still necessary, even if there are an entire class of "experts" who claim to have our best interest at heart and want to rule us.
Do I feel this way merely because I am an ideologue when it comes to democracy? No. I have strong logical reasons. And I will try to outline them.
First I will lay out what I mean democracy. Democracy means "rule by the demos" or the people. Ultimately people rule even when tyrants rule. Until we get "Makinocracy" or some such thing, it is the people of one form or another who will rule. "Meritocracy" is a notion that requires a God to decide who actually has the merit to rule. Democracy is appropriate in the form we've found for it. The People should decided who sits at the top of all command chains, of all the groups that rule our lives. They should have the right to make that decision, because of the principle of "consent of governed" and because it is ultimately our common earth and not something that belongs to a few people. Why this should be so requires some argument, but there are cogent reasons.
Merit:
Experts can tell us that they know better, but reality shows us time and time again, that they may know more about a subject, but they don't always know better. I am knowledgeable about many things, but I am expert only on some of those things. It is the same with everyone. A person with the potential for Buddha can be a figurative wheel turning king or a literal, but he can't be both at the same time. A political leader can be an author, a poet, a soldier, and a businessman, but at any one moment he/she has to play only the role he/she is currently assigned.
Human beings are capable of many things, but we all are limited. Albert Einstein was a genius about Physics, but if I want advice about cooking dinner I will go to a different Einstein. The biggest problem with this world is that nobody can see everything with perfect clarity that is broad and deep, except a few perfect (and mostly legendary or mythic) individuals. Most of the people who claim perfection are suffering from hubris and lying. And we all know what Universe does to those of us who suffer from hubris. There are many people with phenomenal knowledge, smarts and wisdom, and even they have limitations. At least I haven't found anybody who doesn't up until now.
The best systems are those where criticism is accepted, different points of views aired, and mistakes caught before they create so much trauma that the system dies a miserable death. The story of the boy with his finger in the dyke is an allegory about systems. There are times when all of us see a critical thing that nobody else has noticed. And the role of democracy is to see that those critical things can be pushed "up to the top of the chain of command" so that the chain of command of militaries, police, justice systems, or repair crews, can react in time. The guys at the top may be expecting a storm, when it is just a tiney finger-hole.
When the staff officers of the French were building a maginot line and training horses to draw gun carriages, a little known Colonel DeGaul was trying to develop a real armored unit. When the US was insisting on building more battleships while the Japanese were preparing to attack Pearl Harbor little known Officers such as Doolittle was preparing for an Air Based Navy.
The best ideas don't usually appear at the top of the chain of command, not in the military and not in other chains of power either, and they often get stiffled unless there is openness and open debate. That doesn't mean that a military should be run like a democracy. It simply means that civilian control and a free society are the best means to support the military, and that a military ultimately must be accountable to civilian masters. There are other reasons for this too.
Meritocracy:
The trouble with meritocracy is that it begins deserved and soon devolves. It is said that when extraordinary gene combinations occur, within 3 generations those extraordinary genes have normalized. That is the Grandfather may be a genius, but his great grandchildren will certainly not be statistically different from the run of the mill. Unfortunately meritocracies soon devolve into aristocracies. And aristocracies are often de-meritocracies. When people are born to wealth and power they have no appreciation of the life of common folks. It was funny when Bush Senior didn't know how to buy groceries. It is not funny when his son pretends to be a man of the people except when he is raising funds. Now I'm not saying that everyone with wealth is a craven idiot. Far from it. It is just that with wealth comes a certain blindness about common folks. Like with Edmund Burke there tends to be a loathing for the very notion that a hair-dresser may make decisions about whether to elect him as a member of Parliament -- or a member of Congress. There is a tendancy to loathe ideas as well. Burke and John Paine had a famous tiff, which started largely because John Locke was a self-made man and Burke believed in aristocracy. But Paine was right when he said (from Wikipedia):
“Notwithstanding the nonsense, for it deserves no better name, that Mr. Burke has asserted about hereditary rights, and hereditary succession, and that a Nation has not a right to form a Government of itself; it happened to fall in his way to give some account of what Government is. "Government," says he, "is a contrivance of human wisdom. . . Admitting that government is a contrivance of human wisdom, it must necessarily follow, that hereditary succession, and hereditary rights (as they are called), can make no part of it, because it is impossible to make wisdom hereditary.”
The goal of all of us, is to get power, wealth and wisdom. And then we dream of passing it on to the next generation. However, since wisdom is not hereditary, even if we established a perfect meritocracy, that dream never passes as more than an echo in the wind to the next generation. Instead what starts as meritorious becomes meretricious, as the next generation tries to live off the good name of the previous one.
The Republicans (or at least key ones) would make a Burkian style Republic possible. In the process they have created a meretricious society where hypocrisy and corruption rule instead. Oh well. They call inheritance taxes "death taxes" and are doing their best to create a permanent wealthy class of people. Unfortunately, as Paine noted, wisdom is not inheritable, and therefore aristocracy destroys meritocracy. The best proof of this is Bush. His father at least deserved some merit for wisdom. The son?
Chris
I was listening to a very wise acquaintance last night talking about
the various pathologies of post-modern life. He was talking about the
distinction between "mind" (what I usually refer to as spiritual truth) and material truth, and what he said just made sense. The material world consists of "things" that can be measured, felt, sensed, verified, and that are "true" whether or not we perceive them or not. Science, logic, all the outputs of human society are products of the "mind." They are based on the minds ability to analyze and represent information. They are not the actual reality material reality itself.
This is because we don't really perceive that reality directly. What goes on
inside our heads may or may not be "real" but it is all "designed" to
enable us to deal with that "real reality" and navigate it
successfully. "Successfully" being defined mostly in terms of passing
on progeny and getting through the material world with a minimum of
suffering.
We have all sorts of tools that we use to image that reality, but
none of them are real in the sense of being actual physical things. What we see, hear, smell and conceive are representations filtered by our brains and our eyes for our brain's benefit. All our senses are there so that the system that inhabits our bodies can deal with the outside world, and yet everything in
that system is not real in the same sense as that system.
What is called "spiritual" is that inward reality. That reality seems
more real than the real reality. For a man who is color blind the
real world is perceived different from a person who sees colors
normally. A person who could see infrared or ultraviolet also
perceives the world differently. Our brains abstract various images
and these are the kernels of ideas and thoughts. Our thoughts are
what make our world far richer than the "real world." Where-else but
in the mind can people communicate across time and space by keyboard?
Ideas are important, the will, the saying "what a person can conceive
he can make reality" is true when all causes and conditions are
considered and the idea can be turned into performance objectives and
quantified. But there are limits to ideas. They guide reality but
they don't exist outside reality.
The problem we have as Buddhists and human beings is to distinguish
between the "real world" and the ideas and images we have inside our
heads. What makes an ideologue is a person who makes an assertion and
then argues it in the face of contrary facts. Such people are like
spiritual amoebas who are unable to distinguish between the "sugar"
of their minds vision of a thing and the poison that that sugar is
acting out in their bodies. When we have such people, things
like "trust", "it is written","master/disciple", "the power of 'Will'
and the 'People'" come to trumph other considerations. For the
ideologue anything his heart can will to become true can become true.
Thus Hitler talked about the "Triumph of the Will" and we find
current similar Ideologues believing that if they only believe strong
enough they can "win" a "victory of the will" in Iraq.
When we image something that thing that we create to hold the image
is not the reality itself but a representation of it. The Gohonzon,
concepts like God or Buddha, are images we create to hold the ideas
behind those images and to guide us into making them real. The only
Buddha who really matters is the one we can come to see staring back
at us in the mirror of our lives. Those others are not real, they are
representations of what is real.
Even concepts like Freedom, liberty, equality, don't exist in a
vacume. The ideas themselves are concepts that represent a living
breathing and constantly changing reality. If we want them to breathe
and have life, then we need to follow these ideas and make these
ideas even more perfect and practical by using them to guide our
pragmatic and real life actions.
That is, if a person believes in the power of the Gohonzon, for
instance. That power does not exist outside himself in the physical
object. That is a delusory attitude. He owes that object of respect
his devotion not because that object is objectively alive, but
because subjectively that object is tied to the powers and ideas in
his own mind. Like the symbolism of making offerings to the Buddha,
it doesn't eat the fruit or gaze at the green plants, we do. We
smell the candles. Those who would struggle and fight and have
conflicts over who is right or wrong or which group should stake out
this or that hill have a wrong concept of life and Buddhism. They are
living in their heads and not living in reality.
That is another dimension to the metaphor of the blind men and the
elephant. Even we human beings with wonderful eyes don't really "see"
the elephant as it actually is. What we "see" is a representation of
the elephant in our minds. The act of seeing is an act of processing
information. Because our brains are so wonderful we have an entire
universe of meaning inside our heads. All there so we can navigate
reality without getting squashed under the elephants foot.
Chris, with thanks to a very wise old Doctor :-)
In my previous message (1213) a Guy named Charles writes:
"What difference does it make with my vote when both of the major party candidates are dolts and the libertarian (or other indepedent) don't stand a choice?"
Can you offer any insight that I can share with my frustrated listeners?
How is it, in such a great country as ours, that we have so few "leaders" and so many politicians that promise the world to voters and when they get elected, represent their own (as well as family/cronies) interests, rather than the public good?
Any insight would be appreciated. Remember, I'm from Chicago, where the motto has always been, "vote early - and vote often!" AND the biggest voting block is the cemetary.
Good questions. I'll take a crack at it.
Democracy is as old as human society. We common folks have always selected their leaders - at least initially. Even people who don't like Democracy and have fought against it give lip service to its value. Churchill said: "Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time." The author who quotes this also supplies this quote "The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter." Democracy is a fragile form of Government, it is subject to demagoguery, fraud, mass marketing and self-destruction.
http://www.enterstageright.com/archive/articles/0105/0105churchilldem.htm
Nevertheless, Representative Democracy is the only form of Government that has any chance of achieving the common human goals of "liberty, equality and happiness." This is because only genuine multi-party divided and Representative Government regulates human ambition and formalizes the "consent of the Governed." It provides a means for the legitimacy of rules and regulations, forms and commerce to be established and consensus to be gained.
But for Democracy to work it has to be a "living system" in which all the elements within are aware and participating. If any one group achieves monopoly of power, it's not democracy anymore. If the majority crushes the minority, one may still have a Republic, but the spirit of a functional Democracy will be gone. Democracy legislates itself out of existence when it ceases to respect minority views or develops a monopoly, even a monopoly of power belonging to a majority. This is because Democracy functions within time, and what seems a "true view" now may prove a chimera later. And what is a "majority view" under one regime or one set of circumstances may become a minority view as circumstances change.
It is to the credit of our founding fathers and that they avoided a single undivided chamber of legislation in their constitution. It is also to their credit that they divided the Judiciary, Executive, and Legislative processes so that super-majorities and genuine consensus was needed in order to generate lasting laws and change. This can be frustrating at times, but for those who really understand it, one gets a feeling of genuine appreciation to them and a certain amount of patience.
This is frustrating to the average voter, because it basically set up a Government where we only have two parties available to us. The founders didn't even want to have one party. They wanted an ideal government governed by high minded representatives. But the first result of that was to try to create an elite one party state, and Jefferson effectively opposed that by creating the Democratic Party. Patience is a virtue here. Jefferson achieved his goal by running against Adams. He didn't do it by revolution.
The current system is stacked against third parties. They can develop, but their initial function can only be to wreck existing majorities and elect minority parties. Still if people are so frustrated with the Democratic party first created by Jefferson, that is an option. We could create a "Liberal Party" and wreck it. That is how the Republican party was formed. The Federalists formed a party, which was so awful that it could only attract rich folks from New England. So they eventually tried to create a "Whig Party" that would include new elements. That didn't work either. So eventually they made an alliance of religiously conservative folks and business interests and called that alliance the Republicans. Their first big party issue was slavery, and "free soil" on land formerly belonging to Indians. To get the former required the Civil War, to get the later required exterminating the indigenous. But it "worked" for them.
A better strategy for transforming a political party is to get involved in it and reform it. The Democratic Party has looked very different at different points in its history. And with a little effort it could look still differently in the future. But for that to happen people have to be involved to the extent they can. In the past it was very difficult for outsiders to do this.
The purpose of democracy is to avoid oligarchy, autocracy, and monopoly. The only force that can remotely have a chance of checking executive power in the long run is that of democracy. The powers that be have always sought to control information to use against others and to limit people's options in opposing their more corrupt activities. Once Democracy is gone the check on that is gone as well. If we don't elect better leaders they eventually will be appointed for us. That is what happened to the Roman Republic. It could happen to US too.
Democracy depends on a "free press" and that is more than paid professional reporters, it is participation and dissemination of information by the citizenry. In Russia they used to read the papers between the lines. When real information was found it was printed and passed around. This was called "Samizdat." They could tell what was "really happening" by who was no longer in the pictures and by what was not being said. We are already near that point here with our "news". The formal press can be manipulated because it relies on advertising and readership and can be owned by perverse powers. Even so, if we let advertisements and propaganda sway us in our voting then we are the dolts. The antidote to a controlled press is our participation.
Participation is the only option for avoiding the spread of tyranny, monopoly, authoritarianism, patriarchy, and oligarchy. But in this day of Internet and Blackberries, it should be possible for any of us "Yeomen" and "commoners" to do so. We can participate directly in our local elections and determine who gets elected by doing so. That doesn't mean we won't elect "dolts". In Democracy the majority may think our candidates are the dolts and not support us. The candidates may think we are dolts and try to use us. We have to be savvy enough to use our own persuasive power to convince people that we are the better alternative. That gives the 'better alternative' a better chance to come to fruition. That is how direct democracy is supposed to work, and at the local level our efforts should be to enforce direct democracy and make sure that we are honored in the vote.
Heck, if people think all the leaders are "dolts" they can run themselves. Someone I know helped defeat a really bad and corrupt local politician with State ambitions by running against him in his local Republican primary. It worked. He won the primary and then lost the general election. He was quite happy with the outcome because he didn't really want the job anyway. In the US, the primaries are the field for nearly direct democracy. If we don't get involved in them, then we are the dolts.
If money controls the process, and it does, then participation is still the answer. They may have "money," but money can only buy so much deception and dishonesty. Our own money can buy information and truth. Eventually people have to see through the lies if they are paying any attention at all and have access to the truth. If "dolts" are being elected, it is because we the people don't participate and are sitting on our fat rear-ends. Meanwhile habeas corpus is being suspended, and genuine figurative and law-enforcement centered "wars" are being turned into perpetual literal "asynchronous wars" in which the power is increasingly being turned over to a monopoly.
All of us want money and power, at least on some level. We need self discipline to check our own ambition at the door of our neighbors. Otherwise, the purpose of ambition becomes to achieve power; monopoly, oligarchy and that usually entails ruling by autocracy. The tools for achieving this at the National level are old; incessant warfare, dogma, propaganda, and fear. These people know that fear can be used to manipulate minds; either by paralysis or by accession (they amount to the same thing). Terrorism was first identified as an "ism" used by States. Only later did private groups try to use it. Osama Bin Laden is not as good at scaring people as this administration is. The only thing we need to fear is fear itself. The only thing we need to fear is fear itself. A "pearl harbor" type event, as William Krystol noted in a book he wrote on transforming the DoD in the 90's, can allow the executive to do almost anything it wants. Just not forever.
We need to "fight" and vote.
Chris
I am still worried about November. Until the American people speak up, and this corrupt administration is thrown out of office I can't put anything past these people. I was really sure there'd be an "October Surprise" to destroy the Democrats at the Polls. Fortunately there was an October Surprise, but not the one that was planned.
Fortunately, "heaven", [God, Universe, whatever you want to call it], builds self-punishments into the hubris of us human beings. I'm still afraid that the Republicans will pull of a miracle through a combination of sleazy attack advertizements, "Candidate Research", and just plain dishonest advertizing, but instead they seem to have shot themselves in the foot with the Foley Affair, and then instead of putting away the gun, they decided to start shooting at each other. But don't worry, they have a knack for blaming Democrats for everything (example), and this issue does carry a load of poison with it, so I'm not entirely happy at the way things are turning out.
The reason for caution is threefold. One the Press and the Far Right are going to focus on the fact that Mark Foley labels himself as "Gay" rather than his pedophilia. The issue for the Country should be abuse of power, cover-ups, and pedophilia behavior. The issue for the far right is going to be about the cover-up and his "Gayness." The sheer number of closet gays involved in Republicanism should not be a source for joy for liberals, for us strait folks, and expecially for the Gay community. These people, as evidenced by Roy Cohn and others, can be the most repressive members of society. Unfortunately, exposing these people only makes the volume of hatred greater, not less. Folks like Foley reinforce the stereotypes whether they are busy expressing them in their public personae, or are caught for the hypocrits they are. Therefore this publicity, while it will suppress Republican turnout, isn't going to change people's minds about the underlying issues. They think that homosexuality is something contagious, and not understanding what "sin" is, make the mistake of assuming they are doing something right and righteous by persecuting those unfortunate souls who are born that way. Eugene Robinson talks about this in his collumn today: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/10/05/AR2006100501548.html
Second, I don't doubt that the Republicans, by treating each race as a separate race, and by doing "candidate research" and propaganda, won't find a way to dazzle people into voting Republican anyway. Money talks because it can buy advertizing. Unless some long term projects can fund counters to the far right BS machine, there is every chance they can still pull it off. When George Allen runs attack advertizements that savage his opponent he uses that tactic. Every human being has skeletons in his closet. Heck, that is why most of us stay out of politics in the first place. Who of us wants our dirty laundry displayed for all to see. But of course people have trouble wrapping their heads about complex issues like corruption or Iraq until some graphic images focuses their attention. The Foley case and Abu Gharaib spring to mind. The Republicans count on the naivity, ignorance, and refusal to accept any evidence not proven in a court of law to bamboozle us. They think we are stupid. Are we? The last two elections shook my confidence, but not completely.
Third, until the Democrats actually come to power and do something, nothing is going to be set right. If they merely become the majority again and like the "BGP" that Libertarian Anarchists call them start doing business as usual, then nothing good will have come out of this. As I think the Democratic Minority leader has said, the Democrats have to play the role of conservative and liberal and look at things from both views, and reform the process. They need to conduct hearings, issue subpoenas, and repeal laws passed in the name of stepping on liberty, and at the same time do what is needed to protect the homeland, wind up the war in Iraq, and restore sanity to the economy. This is nearly an impossible task, and even if they do their level best they can pretty much expect that the Republicans will block their efforts, propagandize and mischaracterize what happens and then come back in 2008 or 2012 with Allegations that put the blame for all this mess on the Democrats. And they could wind up being partly right if we Democrats dont' work together. David Ignatius writes a good article on this: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/10/05/AR2006100501574.html
I hope that the Republicans don't "throw Hastart off the sledge to slow down the wolves" because I really hope we can stop that sled; In the name of the victims of 9/11. In the name of the US Constitution and the principles of this country, and in the name of all the needless deaths that have occurred due to the incompetant way this struggle with terrorism has been waged and our "coin" has been squandered.
Reference:
Prior post:
Unitary executive theory: http://www.fraughtwithperil.com/blogs/holte/archives/000807.html
Chris
I was listening to a Government spokesman talk about how we had a "determined enemy" in Al Qaeda. This is true. We have any number of determined enemies to democracy, and Al Qaeda, the Taliban, some of the ideas of Wahabiism, some strains of Shiism, Hamas and Hezbollah, all embrace ideological notions that are inimical to Democracy and that target our country.
Unfortunately, they aren't our Country's only enemies. Timothy McVeigh represented another radical stream that was inimical to our country as well. His direction of attack was from the right. Now, mostly sidelined groups like the Weather Underground, represented still another. If we go by how people feel about the United States currently, we will find ourselves pretty alone. If we were really serious about prophylactic invasions and spreading Democracy by force, we don't have the resource and manpower material to accomplish such a Sysiphian task.
But of course the most severe threat to our way of life, right now comes from within. It comes from the far right, the "Timothy McVeigh" wing of the Republican Party, which is seeking to do away with our rights in the name of fighting "terrorism." There is a serious campaign, with serious legwork and preparation having been done long in advance (most of it in the Reagan Administration and before), designed to undermine and undercut the influence of what the Far Right Considers "liberal" forces at work in Society. This is all fact, but the paranoid presentation, spin, and hyperbole, about the subject by some on the left doesn't provide us with tools to fight this movement.
For example, the left, and folks like Rhandi Rhodes are rightly worried about the ideas of thinkers like Leo Strauss, but unless they understand those ideas thoroughly they will never be able to deal with them. Leo Strauss is influential because he followed in the footsteps of and understood the ideas of Georges Sorel, and he is popular with the Right, not because he started some unholy conspiracy, but because those ideas outline how to use religious mythic imagery, propaganda and merchandizing to get power, money and influence.
Some of these people understand this material on a practical level and apply it selfishly. Others understand it on an unconscious level and use it while denying the manipulative elements in their preachings. The ideas are not new, they are the lessons of the PaRDeS I talked about some time ago, applied in what most sages (Buddhists or Judaic) would agree is an evil manner. It is why the subject was on the list of "Forbidden lectures" not to be given until a person was spiritually ready to receive them. Very smart people, penetrating the "emptiness" of most tales, instead of reaching the next level of their personal spiritual development, use their knowledge to manipulate and rule others.
Manipulating language is something most partisans do. For example, I hate to have to fact check people on both sides of the spectrum. But these issues are nuanced and over simplifying them the wrong way does nobody any good. I was listening to Air America and Stephanie Miller made comments about Bill Frists speach on bringing Tribal Leaders into the government in order to undermine their influence yesterday. She was saying that he was advocating the Government cut and run by compromising with the Taliban. What he actually said was more nuanced:
"Giving the native tribes often targeted by Taliban recruitment a voice in the government will promote peace and prosperity in the region. Senator Frist does not believe Taliban fighters – often foreign fighters who come to Afghanistan to further conflict – should be brought into the reconciliation process."
He is perfectly right. We should be putting more effort into "raising up Afghanistan" and "undermining the Taliban" where we had a genuine causus bellus to attack. It was almost even self defense. We should be "fighting the Taliban" figuratively, and with money, education, infrastrcuture, and consciousness raising. But of course folks like the President and Bill Frist see the need as simply to involve them in the government. If women are denied schooling and have to take the vail, why that is just fine, these Dominionist Republicans are jealous and want the same capabilities here. That is why they couldn't see the Taliban for what it was until it's Al Qaeda allies struck at us. The difference between the Taliban and most of these tribal leaders is small. They helped bring the Taliban to power in the first place. The Taliban came to power largely because these ex-Mujaheedin "tribal leaders" had divided the country up into Poppy (Opium) growing warring states.
So Stephanie Miller is half right. Working with these leaders is what got us 9/11 in the first place. The point is, she used "Taliban" imagery to convey a point, which wasn't entirely accurate, but easier than going through the whole confusing history I just laid out. She'd have been accurate if she had said "he justified working with the same people who brought the Taliban to power in the first place."
The other point is, that Frist and company, are finally realizing something students of World History and Political Science have known since at least the days of Rudyard Kipling; "You can bring a horse to water, but you can't make him drink." We can help Afghanistan become a modern country. They will welcome that. Democracy, Freedom, Womens Rights, we can't do that for them. And we certainly cannot create Democracy by invading countries and with the barrel of a Gun. If as the Republicans are saying diplomacy and police work approaches don't work, military solutions to socio-political issues not only don't work but actually cause more trouble than they are worth. As long as no one is actually attacking us (as Al Qaeda did) the best approach is to be neither "friends nor foes" to the Governments, but always friends to the common folks and to business.
the final point is that while manipulating language is something that partisans do, those seeking enlightenment and a better world, would be well advised to understand what they are doing when they use mythic language, similar, metaphor and religious imagery. It is impossible to counter a spin with a spin in the same direction. The only way to counter spin is to let it grind against reality. Friction will eventually stop any spinning ball, if the fires of reality don't melt it.
The friction generated by the far right exist because what they teach is a pack of lies. Every single one of the radical right concepts that are plaguing Moderns represents three overlapping forces; one is religious extremism and literalism (really ignore-ance), and the other deception and manipulation by people who have trained themselves in those techniques. And the third force represents people who understand only partly reality, either because they live in the fantasy world of the religious extremists, or they are burned out on the BS but trapped in their world and profiting from it.
Because they don't know what they are doing, and the people promoting those ideas are sophists -- and usually very powerful or soon to be powerful, the ideas seem plausible and people are deceived by them. Dogmas arise because of such deception and acquire power because the deception is coupled with force and fear. After years of such power, who would challenge the Catholic Church? Only a Martin Luther. Could he challenge the core ideas that were the real roots of his existential problem? No, he was not even aware of them and bought into confusions and deceptions that had been propagated 1200 years before his birth. When Nichiren talked about Kobo Daishi, he was talking about a man who lived almost 400 years before his time.
When we look at religion and politics today we have to be as fearless as Martin Luther, Martin Luther King, Mohandis Gandhi, or Nichiren, because "unspinning" lies is mighty hard once they are turned into Dogmas. Without being aware of the spin, the odds are that we'll have our own heads spinning the wrong way. To turn the "wheel of the law" one has to be aware that in a society such as ours everybody is spinning. It is just as easy to spin right, or to turn upside down and spin left. We get going if we spin from the middle.
Dominionism and the Republican far right, are only the latest manifestation of an ancient phenomena. All that Sorel and Strauss did was to put it in a modern context and reveal secrets that had remained hidden largely because those guarding them knew their danger and their power -- or were using them profitably themselves. The danger is that, just like early Christian Messianism was replaced by a Roman Anti-Messianism (figuratively and literally), so our Democratic nation could be replaced by an "Anti-Democratic" nation preserving the rhetoric while locking us up in authoritarianism. To fight that danger, we need the genuine thing -- religion and politics that are spiritual, truthful, true, and that use myth and imaging wisely.
More on Strauss, Sorel:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leo_Strauss
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georges_Sorel
(and you can find some of this in prior posts)
Chris
To me Buddhism is like the old TV series "Truth or Consequences." Do we go with the frauds or the real thing? Anyone who remembers the series will remember how difficult the choice could be in the days before we had internet and multichannel TV. It is still dificult. Can we see through the acting to the real deal, or in some cases, or in some cases, is the actor preferable to the real person? Truth or consequences. Truth or lies, both have consequences.
I listen to stories about the alleged private shennanigans of a famous person, like our President, or Steven Segal, Whitney Houston, Anna Nichol Smith, or Congressman Foley. The hypocrisy, arrogance, stupidity, cupidity and deviousness of these public figures is more than a deep embarrassment. Truth has consequences. Lies have consequences too.
Will the real Tom Foley stand up? Oh, sorry, he did. And Hastart covered up, the FBI wasn't told until recently, and everyone seems to have known -- and done nothing. Tell the truth? No, make excuses.
Disgusting.
Imagine how Joe Walsh must feel. He's been played by a con man fronting for a con party. We are being asked to give up our rights for and by people like Congressman Foley. Do you think they really have the best interests of children in mind? They've been marching in lockstep, that should have clued you to which drum they are marching. Now we see. Congressman Hastart was warned, he decided to "take care of it." He and the rest of the Republican Congress all wanted to stay on the same page. Literally in the case of Foley, figuratively (for now) in the case of the rest of us, who have just seen the Congress conspire with the Administration to legalize torture and deny the tortured due process. Who is going to stay on the same page now that Foley is gone? If they get away with it we all, figuratively (and sometimes literally) will be in the same boat as those pages.
When the government encourages and covers up for the criminals, then we get a corrupt Congress. When we have a corrupt government we get government sponsored theft, manufactured wars, and the reformers and democrats become the "enemy." Ever since the 1915's, demonstrate again and again with McCarthy, Nixon, we've been warned by actions that those who claim to be all about "strict law enforcement" are usually hypocrites whose strictness is devoted to creating, maintaining and oppressing an underclass. In the teens they/we made drugs illegal -- and went after doctors for prescribing them. In the twenties they/we made alcohol illegal, and made such a corrupt mess of the entire country to the point where they had to withdraw. We seek security at the price of security.
In the process we have destroyed our Constitution. And this week, while Foley resigned for writing Emails apparantly trying to seduce a page, Congress passed laws making our lives less secure and more likely to be disrupted by a Government given license to define who is an "enemy combatant" so loosely it may one day soon come after all of us. So the "Foley" types behind these laws can have their way with us in sound insulated dungeons where nobody can hear our screams. Congress has the power, under the constitution to suspend habeus corpus in time of war. Do you think the Executive won't interpret it that way? Do you think the Supreme Court will or can stand up to them?
Meanwhile the administration is busy lying about everything:
Iraq
Condi about 9/11:
'Former CIA director George Tenet told the 9/11 Commission that he had warned of an imminent threat from al-Qaeda in a July 2001 meeting with Condoleezza Rice, adding that he believed Rice took the warning seriously, according to a transcript of the interview and the recollection of a commissioner who was there."
"It was "incomprehensible" that she would have ignored such explicit intelligence from senior CIA officials and that she received no warning at the meeting of an attack within the United States."
She says "incomprehensible." And the State Department confirmed she is lying (or technically 'parsing' since she claimed no recollection). I was more or less working for the military (as a civilian contractor) up til 2000. I switched jobs from working with a Navy Contract to a civilian contract. We knew we were targetted by Al Qaeda. The barriers constructed around the White House and other streets, the reconstruction of security at the Pentagon, were all meant to stop truck bombs (a la McVeigh). I used to look up in the sky and watch the planes landing at Reagan National and wonder when they'd give it a try. The only thing that suprised me was that our Air Defenses failed to respond -- and that may only be true about New York City. We knew something was coming.
Their not taking action is not incomprehensible. A "Pearl Harbor" type event was just what the Neo-Cons needed to con us into giving up our rights and starting wars all over the earth. And it worked, and now we get to see the results; corruption, arbitrary arrests, fear-mongering, and a war against our rights as citizens. I didn't believe that theory, and even now I wish it were a false theory. But they were waiting and hoping. I don't think they were craven enough to actually manufacture the attack, but I can't think of any other explaination for their behavior other than incompetance. That will do too.
Vote Democratic in November, it's our last chance. These bums have got to go, but then I was saying that before Foley revealed his real face. Now even George Will agrees with me, scary.
Chris