This kind of "personality" is only a "pathology" when mobilized in a pathological system (society), but we all have elements of what is described here. I have been thinking about this a lot because I've been encountering a lot of people in whom authoritarianism is near to, or at pathological levels.
The other thing that sparked this post was that I was listening to an interview by Amy Goodman of nobel peace prize winning dissident Shirin Ebadi, and Amy asked her a question that got me thinking. When Amy asked her about Torture, she linked the origins of torture and oppression to two things; one was Prejudice, which she linked to Ignorance. The other was Injustice, which is usually tied to self interest. The remedy for prejudice, she said, was enhanced education. She didn't have a remedy for injustice. I'd say the remedy for injustice is a vigilent and enfranchised public with the power to vote periodic changes.
At one time I thought I could dialogue with such people, but I found I can't. Dialogue with authoritarian persons inevitably turns into a Round Robin of debate, one sided abuse, and eventually suppression of debate as the authoritarian side of the person being debated with eventually emerges and they start suppressing information or finding ways to end equal participation in the debate. One can't proceed on a level playing ground for long with Authoritarian persons -- because:
In the usual course of an attempt to dialogue with authoritarian personalities the arguments will start getting personal, abusive, and eventually it will become obvious that the person one is discussing things with is more interested in defending myths, conventional wisdom, or attacking an "enemy" than in discussing facts.
So how does that square with Shirin Ebad's comments? Well the answer is that there are different levels of people's relation to authoritarianism. At the lowest level, of those who accept, defend, fight for, and love a tribal, ideological, or ethnic identification, one is dealing with people who really haven't been exposed to alternatives and don't understand the reality they are dealing with. Often they are young, "dumb" and full of ambition.
But there is another level to prejudice and ignorance. At some point one has encountered "willful ignorance" which is either a stubborn indifference to facts, or a stubborn hardening of the "heart" or ability to feel empathy, sympathy, or have genuine feelings for the ethics and consequences of ones actions. At this level, one is dealing with generals of ignorance. These are people who want to clothe their own actions in authority; be that authority "God", "Buddhism", "xxx-ism", or simply claimed knowledge of a subject. The beliefs are simply an excuse for ethnic organization. The "movement" is the real thing.
In either case, the person is unwilling to face the consequences of thinking outside a box. For example, a hard core communist who sees no contradiction between defending the "rights" of workers, and suppressing trade unions and free speach for workers. Or a hard right "libertarian" who sees "Gubbornment" as the enemy in abstract; but doesn't see how corporations, landlords, and other business nobility are basically "Government" every bit as much as the formal elected governments they rail against. Any facts that contradict the prejudice are rejected in advance. The person is attached to prejudice and prejudiced views. In the case of the leader, this is to keep control over the group. In the case of the follower the fuel is usually displaced or misplaced anger.
And the really odd thing is that one will hear such people, often the same people, talk about 'metawaves' or 'love' in an equally abstract manner. Like my relatives (third reason this topic came up) who are born again Christians, convinced at one and the same time that Jews are all the things they are criticized for in the "New" Testament, and at the same time supporting Israel with the hope that Iran will blow it up so they can have their second coming of Jesus, who after all was a Jewish Prince who was murdered by the Romans because he threatened the legitimacy of their rule in Judea and Samaria. An ideal end state justifies all the less than ideal activities in reaching it. The leaders lead out of "love" for their followers and an abstract future. The followers out of "love" for the same abstract future, and often in response to the beauty of the picture painted by the leader of an idealized future.
However, the logic used is always circular, abstract, and abusive. Circular because hypothesii are used as premises, and then the hypothesis is proved by the argument based on those premises; which are usually false or distorted. Abstract, because such people always reduce reality to sound bites, to oversimplified arguments, or to caracatures. And ultimately the logic is abusive, because lies are advanced, and any evidence that the premises are based on lies is discounted, distorted, or simply stepped on. Often the authoritarian person can at one and the same time abuse someone for using ad-hominem attacks to show that an authority is not telling the truth or doesn't have integrity -- while using ad-hominems on his/her live opponant. Abusive behavior is a political party that demands its opponants compromise with it when they are on top, and with a single goosestepping about face turn and demand compromise when they are out of party. Authoritarian is not left or right, it is prejudiced, abstract, circular and abusive. We don't have a problem with left wing authoritarians in the United States. We do have a problem with right wing ones.
The abuse comes from the top. There is money, security, wealth and respect to be gained by being at the top of a hierarchy led by a single charismatic person. Those in the middle are driven as much by self-interest and fear of loss as by ideology. There are real punishments for bucking authoritarian groups or people. They will retaliate. Sticking to the party line is a matter of suvival. Authoritarianism is older than modernity. Japan was an authoritarian system long before Nichiren was born. That is what makes him so remarkable. He was standing up against authoritarian thinking every bit as much as he was standing up for the Lotus Sutra.
Circular logic is worse than no logic, and getting logic out of the circle will give one a headache, but it prevents worse things. Fighting authoritarianism takes a democratic spirit. And that takes sharing the information that "all men are equal", 'endowed by their creator with the rights of life, liberty and the right to pursue happiness.' This is also a statement that all sentient beings have the seed of Buddhahood in them. That is why the Lotus Sutra contains revolutionary sentiment. Ultimately, Ebadi is right. The only way to defeat prejudice is to work outside the box. But that requires defeating political authoritarianism as well as individual prejudice.
I also am thinking about the comments of a man, at a recent conference on the subject, who said that it was a waste of time to argue with holocaust deniers. Why I asked? And he said that arguing with them, only validates that there is an argument. When people are attached to dogmatic ideas, they are really expressing an attachment to human authority over facts, to myth over reality, and to humans who claim to speak for God. In the case of holocaust deniers, dig a little and one soon finds that they not only know the facts they argue against, but often applaud those facts. They argue against the Holocaust for the sake of enabling prejudice, developing a flock of angry people to follow them, and sometimes in order to finish the job started by Hitler. They have developed "willful ignorance" out of a combination of anger, circular thinking, and usually ambition. Justifying and Burying the deeds is what such denial is about. Folks like Mr. Dinner Jacket in Iran, aren't just ignorant and prejudiced, they are so hardened of heart and mind, that they aren't interested in facts so much as projecting their power and keeping their authority, and using scapegoating to keep people's anger projected in the wrong directions.
The final reason this topic came up, is that battling authoritarianism in Buddhism isn't a matter of battling authoritarian organizations, but authoritarian people. If we are dumb enough not to recognize a "fearless leader" for what he is, that is our own fault. Sick and perverse organizations arise when the masses of people fall for sick and perverse ideas. This is prejudice at work. There is a great tempation to follow persons, to form groups, to identify as organizations, to label oneself as "kempon Hokke" or "Honmon Hokke" or "Nichiren Shoshu" and then start unlearning the truths of Buddhism.
The subject of Buddhism is enlightenment. The target there has been shifting since the beginning of time. What does it mean to be enlightened? When is it accomplished? How? Are there surefire methods? Does one need a master? Can one do it through reading books? Can one write a book which captures the methodologies, wisdom and realizations of enlightenment?
Buddhism has always been as diverse as the answers to those questions, and the religious beliefs of the host populations. There have been many answers, but at the core of all these answers is one inexcapable truth: The four sufferings. These don't go away no matter how enlightened a person is. Buddhism is essentially about one core question "how does one confront and surmount the four sufferings." Whether that means extinguishment, a lotus paradise, a sky mountain reunion, or some other ultimate goal; the real object of practicing Buddhism is sufficient enlightenment so that one can deal with these four questions and be comfortable with them.
To me there is no reason that someone can't be an atheist, a Buddhist, a Jew, A Christian, or even a Moslem and confront the four sufferings and seek enlightenment. The other stuff, the practices, the Gods and demons, the nice little statues of foxes and Gods, all that is artwork. The real object of Buddhism is was and always will be enlightenment and dealing with the four sufferings. To me Buddhism is an approach to religion that seeks to put reality in the center.
The real question is what is reality?
Chris
Our classification system is currently somewhat perverse. One reason the so-called "Gang of Four" of democrats could not publicly denounce torture while it was going on is that they were bound by the US Classification system. This could be easily remedied.
There should be four new clauses in there:
1. The classification system shall not be used for the sake of covering up a criminal act such as murder, violence, torture, assassination, fraud, or financial misbehavior. Such acts must be reported to the Attorney General, to a qualified Inspector General, and to the Intelligence Committee.
2. All Federal Judges shall have an automatic presumption of Top Secret Access and shall have need to know access to information requested per the discovery process, criminal or civil procedure.
3. Misuse of the classification system under 1. shall be classified as a crime whose commission shall result in loss of access to classified documents, fines, disbarrment from Federal Service, or criminal prosecution. However, the term of incarceration may not be more than 1 year for each offense.
4. Information in the public domain cannot be classified. Classified information shall be released to the public five years after the reason for classification is over, or 50 years after the event occured, with the exception of information necessary to make a weapon of mass destruction. Information shall be stored in archives to document classified activities.
1. It is illegal and has been since Washington forbade his troops from engaging in it.
2. It is not what we are about.
3. It doesn't work.
Additional supplemental truths:
100 people died by 2006, 10 directly from torture.
There is no statute of limitations for murder, attempted murder, or conspiracy to commit a felony.
http://www.aclu.org/safefree/general/olc_memos.html
http://www.aclu.org/safefree/torture/torturefoia.html
Further reading:
http://crooksandliars.com/2006/07/11/john-dean-on-countdown-conservatives-without-conscience/
Some well connected people are still asserting that Abu Gharaib was an isolated incident.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abu_Ghraib_torture_and_prisoner_abuse
These people are either dishonest or naive [or in the case of at least one; both]. Prisoner of war abuse had been only found in isolated incidents until 2001, but since then the frequency and severity of such incidents has exploded, and the reasons are only now coming to light. What happened at Abu Gharaib was identified as not isolated incidents from the beginning:
http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2004/05/10/040510fa_fact. I've been talking about this nearly as long. Which is why I'm surprised that anyone who has been listening to me has the chutzpah to still deny the facts. But they do.
It wasn't even a "failure" of US policy, it was an expression of an expressly developed, policy, based on the so-called "torture memos" of using torture and "torture lite" to extract information. You can read them for yourself.
On the other hand the above quote may be a self serving lie. Michael Hogan of Vanity Fair reports that Jane Harmon may have been blackmailed. In his Vanity Fair Article he writes: "To be perfectly honest, most of what Harman did sounds harmless enough, given the carpet-sucking ethical standards of Washington, D.C. She reportedly told a “suspected Israeli agent”—or, if the blogosphere’s best guess is to be believed, some rich Egyptian-Israeli-American who made a killing on the Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers craze—that she’d talk to someone at the Justice Department about possibly reducing the “espionage-related charges” facing two former members of the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee." And this was recorded by our super radio/internet/telephone receivers that belong to the CIA. Supposedly legally (after all the person she was talking to is a suspected Mossad Agent, and we should spy on guys like him, just as we should spy on English, Australian or French Agents). He continues:
"In exchange, the “suspected Israeli agent” allegedly offered to talk to Nancy Pelosi, then the House minority leader, about making Harman the head of the Intelligence Committee, assuming the Democrats won the upcoming 2006 midterm elections. Harman is said to have been sufficiently spooked by all this talk to declare, “This conversation doesn’t exist” before hanging up. What she presumably did not know was that the whole thing had been picked up by an N.S.A. wiretap. (We are led to believe that it was one of the legal ones, aimed at capturing the conversations of fishy foreigners.)"
And of course it turns out it doesn't matter. They electronically spy on all of us anyway. Hi guys, I'm public, no need to worry about your bosses disapproving. I'm on your side, really. "I see noth-think! Nothink!" But anyway they are quoting Jeff Stein, who did the research and is making the claim that:
The sources, who discussed the matter only on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of domestic NSA eavesdropping, said Justice Department officials decided there was sufficient evidence to initiate an FBI investigation of Harman. But at the last minute, Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales aborted the plan, saying that he needed Harman’s help defending the administration’s warrantless wiretap program.
http://www.cqpolitics.com/wmspage.cfm?docID=hsnews-000003098436&cpage=1
If this is true, then what Gonzales did fits the very definition of blackmail. And that would explain a few things. She went suddenly from a darling of civil liberties into a "I see Nothink!" mode that would make Sergeant Shultz happy. Nobody could understand it. Stein's sources are unreliable (they are anonymous, and this is pure sleaze) but this is typical of State Terrorism so with Gonzales and Bush I put nothing past them. According to Stein She also called up the New York Times and asked them to sit on some stories on these subjects, which they did (and later admitted) until after the 2004 election. This doesn't make sense unless she was being blackmailed, or simply thought Torture was a good idea.
Anyway Pelosi answered questions on whether she was ever briefed about the warrantless wiretaps and torture. She says they flat out never told her and only fully briefed the senior members of her committee from their own party. You can listen to that on CSPAN right after a paeon to little children.
I think this might have been it:
http://www.c-span.org/Watch/watch.aspx?MediaId=HP-A-1439Thomas Paine saw corporations as evil. He included most charters in his analysis on the grounds that by defining rights they take away rights. He also explains why. He could be talking of our own day.
It is a perversion of terms to say that a charter gives rights. It operates by a contrary effect — that of taking rights away. Rights are inherently in all the inhabitants; but charters, by annulling those rights, in the majority, leave the right, by exclusion, in the hands of a few. If charters were constructed so as to express in direct terms, "that every inhabitant, who is not a member of a corporation, shall not exercise the right of voting," such charters would, in the face, be charters not of rights, but of exclusion. The effect is the same under the form they now stand; and the only persons on whom they operate are the persons whom they exclude. Those whose rights are guaranteed, by not being taken away, exercise no other rights than as members of the community they are entitled to without a charter; and, therefore, all charters have no other than an indirect negative operation. They do not give rights to A, but they make a difference in favour of A by taking away the right of B, and consequently are instruments of injustice.
At one time we could claim that the US constitution was imune to this observation, but the way that courts have redefined rights granted by the Bill of Rights to virtually parse them out of existence, and have basically applied the false rule that "if its not written down its not a right" to treat the US Constitution as a "negative charter" has pretty much proved his point. Our Constitution is better than no constitution, but not up to protecting all the positive and negative rights of the inhabitants of our country -- and watch out! if you are a foreign national.
But charters and corporations have a more extensive evil effect than what relates merely to elections. They are sources of endless contentions in the places where they exist, and they lessen the common rights of national society. A native of England, under the operation of these charters and corporations, cannot be said to be an Englishman in the full sense of the word. He is not free of the nation, in the same manner that a Frenchman is free of France, and an American of America. His rights are circumscribed to the town, and, in some cases, to the parish of his birth; and all other parts, though in his native land, are to him as a foreign country. To acquire a residence in these, he must undergo a local naturalisation by purchase, or he is forbidden or expelled the place. This species of feudality is kept up to aggrandise the corporations at the ruin of towns; and the effect is visible.
Because charters and constitutions that should apply to everyone in a jurisdiction often apply (or are applied) to only a majority or minority tribe, ethnic group, culture or faction, the result is that nationalism is associated, almost everywhere it is practiced with one form of tyranny or another. Paine not only points to the symptom but to the cause. This is to the "aggrandizement" of the people who are the officers or primary stakeholders of that charter. It is to their short term advantage to prevent the naturalization of immigrants, or to disenfranchise those whose rights are infringed by the charters. Corporations are small governments created to partition a property that otherwise fits the definition of a commons. For example, medical services is a service that most people are in vital need of, and that we can only afford for everyone if everyone chips in. By creating for profit charters, the corporations charged with paying for this service, effectively disenfranchise people who buy into these insurances as if they were foreign nationals in a xenophobic company. Although stakeholders, they are no shareholders. Although the business mission may be providing medical payment, the business plan is to shake down the insured. This they proceed to do. Thus when, for example, a Medical Insuror pays a CEO a salary of a billion dollars, there are sure to be thousands or even millions of people disenfranchized from their property (promised medical services) as a result.
The result is that, as with the East India Company, these kinds of charters become effective vehicles for transferring wealth from their ostensible beneficiaries to the officers and primary owners of the Company -- usually by corrupt and political means.
The generality of corporation towns are in a state of solitary decay, and prevented from further ruin only by some circumstance in their situation, such as a navigable river, or a plentiful surrounding country. As population is one of the chief sources of wealth (for without it land itself has no value), everything which operates to prevent it must lessen the value of property; and as corporations have not only this tendency, but directly this effect, they cannot but be injurious. If any policy were to be followed, instead of that of general freedom, to every person to settle where he chose (as in France or America) it would be more consistent to give encouragement to new comers than to preclude their admission by exacting premiums from them. [NOTE]
Of course the opposite trend is now occuring. People are listening to Burke not Paine.
The persons most immediately interested in the abolition of corporations are the inhabitants of the towns where corporations are established. The instances of Manchester, Birmingham, and Sheffield show, by contrast, the injuries which those Gothic institutions are to property and commerce. A few examples may be found, such as that of London, whose natural and commercial advantage, owing to its situation on the Thames, is capable of bearing up against the political evils of a corporation; but in almost all other cases the fatality is too visible to be doubted or denied.
Likewise, most of us who watch the operation of giant corporations, would like to see them reformed or done away with.
Though the whole nation is not so directly affected by the depression of property in corporation towns as the inhabitants themselves, it partakes of the consequence. By lessening the value of property, the quantity of national commerce is curtailed. Every man is a customer in proportion to his ability; and as all parts of a nation trade with each other, whatever affects any of the parts must necessarily communicate to the whole.
This has been verified in studies around the world. In places where property is available to all, people prosper. Where it is horded or held by a tiny percent of the population (as in the United States Present Day) people suffer.
As one of the Houses of the English Parliament is, in a great measure, made up of elections from these corporations; and as it is unnatural that a pure stream should flow from a foul fountain, its vices are but a continuation of the vices of its origin. A man of moral honour and good political principles cannot submit to the mean drudgery and disgraceful arts, by which such elections are carried. To be a successful candidate, he must be destitute of the qualities that constitute a just legislator; and being thus disciplined to corruption by the mode of entering into Parliament, it is not to be expected that the representative should be better than the man.
Sound familiar?
Mr. Burke, in speaking of the English representation, has advanced as bold a challenge as ever was given in the days of chivalry. "Our representation," says he, "has been found perfectly adequate to all the purposes for which a representation of the people can be desired or devised." "I defy," continues he, "the enemies of our constitution to show the contrary." — This declaration from a man who has been in constant opposition to all the measures of parliament the whole of his political life, a year or two excepted, is most extraordinary; and, comparing him with himself, admits of no other alternative, than that he acted against his judgment as a member, or has declared contrary to it as an author.
Sounds so familiar
If crimes have been committed, following orders is not a defense.
http://www.memeorandum.com/090421/p113#a090421p113
Seeking to uphold the constitution, restore the Bill of rights, and enforce laws broken from the highest level of the USA Government, is not a "left wing witch hunt." It is something required to restore rule of law and beat back the tide of corruption and impunity that have washed over the Country. The funny thing is that this is a conservative position I learned from Richard Nixon (before he went down for breaking the law himself). And arguing that what was done wasn't torture because it didn't inflict death, but was torture but was effective, is as Sullivan notes in the article I cited: "self refuting."
Nevertheless, with a Goebbels style lack of respect for honesty and integrity we have the senior leaders of the former Bush Administration and their thuggish admirers who prefer twisting the evidence, and using fear, to try to claim that this effort is somehow a witch hunt, that somehow torture was effective, even though it demonstrably is not, that it resulted in good results, and that somehow it wasn't even torture despite the strong evidence and legal history that it is. I can't give them kudos for honesty or integrity, or even intelligence, because this stuff is nuts.
Nevertheless they prefer the court of public opinion and censored yahoo discussion groups to actually defending their opinions in a court of law or an honest debate. You can read what Thiessen writes in the Washington Post:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/04/20/AR2009042002818.html
As the Andrew Sullivan notes:
"Thiessen's core defense - that the techniques worked" - is at severe odds with his contention that it was not torture:
"[T]he memos note that, "as Abu Zubaydah himself explained with respect to enhanced techniques, 'brothers who are captured and interrogated are permitted by Allah to provide information when they believe they have reached the limit of their ability to withhold it in the face of psychological and physical hardship." In other words, the terrorists are called by their faith to resist as far as they can -- and once they have done so, they are free to tell everything they know. This is because of their belief that "Islam will ultimately dominate the world and that this victory is inevitable." The job of the interrogator is to safely help the terrorist do his duty to Allah, so he then feels liberated to speak freely.
Sullivan continues; "What defines torture is not this or that specific technique. We could spend hours poring through the countless ways in which human beings have devised to torture defenseless captives over the centuries. What defines torture is applying sufficiently severe mental or physical pain or suffering to force a victim to say anything to make it stop. In terms of time, you can go from the 15 seconds of waterboarding or electrocution to the days, weeks and months of Chinese water-torture, or days and weeks of sleep deprivation. The point is to break people." Or as an Abu Ghraib interrogator conveyed the message from the commander-in-chief in an August 2003 e-mail:
"The gloves are coming off gentlemen regarding these detainees, Col. Boltz has made it clear that we want these individuals broken."
Sullivan dryly notes: "This is what Thiessen is bragging about here."
"It is to subject captives to such levels of physical or mental pain or suffering that they "have reached the limit of their ability to withhold [information] in the face of psychological and physical hardship." This is, in fact, as close to a definition of torture as you are likely to find. Zubaydah understood that torture is the imposition of sufficient physical or psychological pain or suffering to cause even religious fanatics, who believe their very souls are at stake, to have no choice but to submit. And so Western torture returns to its early modern roots: as a tool to prove that the power of government is greater even than the power of religious fanaticism, if you are prepared to treat the human body and soul as objects for total coercion and control. Begin with the inquisition and end with it; only now it is designed against Islamists, not heretical Christians.
Memo to Thiessen: you cannot both argue that the pain and suffering was severe enough to force captives to have no choice but to confess and also argue that it wasn't torture. This is what you call a self-refutation.
Thiessen may not have intended it, but he just wrote an op-ed proving that his former boss, Dick Cheney, is a war criminal.
http://www.memeorandum.com/090421/p113#a090421p113
Read Thiessens sick defense:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/04/20/AR2009042002818.html
And as the commentators note, those who justify torturing prisoners just reveal themselves to be liars and cowards. That is why they go after the first amendment (the right of free speech) first.
One problem that some people have, is an inability (or unwillingness) to distinguish between principles and the men who uphold them (or don't uphold them).
Many people judge their principles by authority; by whether or not they like the person who talks about those principles. You find this in religion, and you find it in politics. How many times has a chagrined and humiliated ex officer of a cult or a political party used as his defense "but he liked little children and animals" or "he was a genuinely nice man?" Worse how many times has an unprincipled man justified his degrading or even evil deeds by the justification "they do it so I can do it too?"
Genuinely nice scoundrels are almost as common as nasty scoundrels. Given that there is a truth that an unprincipled scoundrel uses and dumps principles at will, it is also a principle that principles endure and are valid regardless of whether upheld. Nothing validates the importance of rights like tyranny. Nothing validates the importance of rule of law like its absence. What distinguishes a scoundrel (or a hypocrit) from the general mass of men and women is whether or not they hold, uphold, live by and develop valid principles.
Thom Paine talked about this in his debate with "Mr Burke"....
Thom Paine writes about Burke:
http://www.ushistory.org/paine/rights/c1-011.htm
"We have seen," says Mr. Burke, "the French rebel against a mild and lawful monarch, with more fury, outrage, and insult, than any people has been known to rise against the most illegal usurper, or the most sanguinary tyrant." This is one among a thousand other instances, in which Mr. Burke shows that he is ignorant of the springs and principles of the French Revolution.
Too often a mild mannered and pleasant tyrant is preferred over an actual fix of the democratic system. Somehow people think that electing a new officer of more amenable disposition is preferrable to actually fixing the system. We see this with the election of our current administration. We all thought that genuine policy changes would follow. But because the system is so deeply corrupted, the real problems continue unabatted. It will take legislative and policy changes at a more authoritative and popular level to undue the drifts we are experiencing.
Thom Paine explains
It was not against Louis XVI. but against the despotic principles of the Government, that the nation revolted. These principles had not their origin in him, but in the original establishment, many centuries back: and they were become too deeply rooted to be removed, and the Augean stables of parasites and plunderers too abominably filthy to be cleansed by anything short of a complete and universal Revolution.
This wasn't the fault of the King, it was the cumulative fault of years of abusive accumulated decisions and a history of warfare and conflict, oppression and tyranny only partially remedied in past ages.
When it becomes necessary to do anything, the whole heart and soul should go into the measure, or not attempt it. That crisis was then arrived, and there remained no choice but to act with determined vigor, or not to act at all. The king was known to be the friend of the nation, and this circumstance was favorable to the enterprise. Perhaps no man bred up in the style of an absolute king, ever possessed a heart so little disposed to the exercise of that species of power as the present King of France.
The men of good will like the Marquis De lafayette and Paine himself desired nothing but that King louis should keep his head. When the revolution later spiraled out of control, it was not a fault of the person, but of the depth of corruption of the principles being overthrown, and the huge backlash of anger and hatred that was required to change those principles.
But the principles of the Government itself still remained the same. The Monarch and the Monarchy were distinct and separate things; and it was against the established despotism of the latter, and not against the person or principles of the former, that the revolt commenced, and the Revolution has been carried.
And indeed, I'm sure that Paine was pained by the degree to which the various factions of the French Revolution violated those principles themselves in their quest for dominance and power among themselves. But that doesn't change the fact that:
Mr. Burke does not attend to the distinction between men and principles, and, therefore, he does not see that a revolt may take place against the despotism of the latter, while there lies no charge of despotism against the former.
unfortunately....
The natural moderation of Louis XVI. contributed nothing to alter the hereditary despotism of the monarchy. All the tyrannies of former reigns, acted under that hereditary despotism, were still liable to be revived in the hands of a successor. It was not the respite of a reign that would satisfy France, enlightened as she was then become. A casual discontinuance of the practice of despotism, is not a discontinuance of its principles: the former depends on the virtue of the individual who is in immediate possession of the power; the latter, on the virtue and fortitude of the nation. In the case of Charles I. and James II. of England, the revolt was against the personal despotism of the men; whereas in France, it was against the hereditary despotism of the established Government. But men who can consign over the rights of posterity for ever on the authority of a mouldy parchment, like Mr. Burke, are not qualified to judge of this Revolution. It takes in a field too vast for their views to explore, and proceeds with a mightiness of reason they cannot keep pace with.
And of course it is never so easy as to merely overthrow the head of state:
But there are many points of view in which this Revolution may be considered. When despotism has established itself for ages in a country, as in France, it is not in the person of the king only that it resides. It has the appearance of being so in show, and in nominal authority; but it is not so in practice and in fact. It has its standard everywhere. Every office and department has its despotism, founded upon custom and usage. Every place has its Bastille, and every Bastille its despot. The original hereditary despotism resident in the person of the king, divides and sub-divides itself into a thousand shapes and forms, till at last the whole of it is acted by deputation. This was the case in France; and against this species of despotism, proceeding on through an endless labyrinth of office till the source of it is scarcely perceptible, there is no mode of redress. It strengthens itself by assuming the appearance of duty, and tyrannies under the pretence of obeying.
As France found out. Thom Paine's words could even apply to the revolutionaries themselves:
When a man reflects on the condition which France was in from the nature of her government, he will see other causes for revolt than those which immediately connect themselves with the person or character of Louis XVI. There were, if I may so express it, a thousand despotisms to be reformed in France, which had grown up under the hereditary despotism of the monarchy, and became so rooted as to be in a great measure independent of it. Between the Monarchy, the Parliament, and the Church there was a rivalship of despotism; besides the feudal despotism operating locally, and the ministerial despotism operating everywhere. But Mr. Burke, by considering the king as the only possible object of a revolt, speaks as if France was a village, in which everything that passed must be known to its commanding officer, and no oppression could be acted but what he could immediately control. Mr. Burke might have been in the Bastille his whole life, as well under Louis XVI. as Louis XIV., and neither the one nor the other have known that such a man as Burke existed. The despotic principles of the government were the same in both reigns, though the dispositions of the men were as remote as tyranny and benevolence.
And your modern conservatives, like their master Mr. Burke, still don't get the distinction that Paine makes next:
What Mr. Burke considers as a reproach to the French Revolution (that of bringing it forward under a reign more mild than the preceding ones) is one of its highest honors. The Revolutions that have taken place in other European countries, have been excited by personal hatred. The rage was against the man, and he became the victim. But, in the instance of France we see a Revolution generated in the rational contemplation of the Rights of Man, and distinguishing from the beginning between persons and principles.
Of course Idealism has its drawbacks too. It turns out that when rage is directed against an idea, and then is personified in man, that rage can be all the more violent for being abstract. Idealists can kill millions while flying at 70,000 feet. The rights of man are important, but those rights have to be adjudicated by men and women.
But Mr. Burke appears to have no idea of principles when he is contemplating Governments. "Ten years ago," says he, "I could have felicitated France on her having a Government, without inquiring what the nature of that Government was, or how it was administered." Is this the language of a rational man? Is it the language of a heart feeling as it ought to feel for the rights and happiness of the human race? On this ground, Mr. Burke must compliment all the Governments in the world, while the victims who suffer under them, whether sold into slavery, or tortured out of existence, are wholly forgotten. It is power, and not principles, that Mr. Burke venerates; and under this abominable depravity he is disqualified to judge between them. Thus much for his opinion as to the occasions of the French Revolution. I now proceed to other considerations.
We've seen the consequences of Burke's ideas in massive corruption, war, injury and democracies that closed their eyes while people suffered, only to wonder later "why do they hate us so?"
http://www.ushistory.org/paine/rights/c1-011.htm
One of the "conservative instincts" that always must be resisted is the twin efforts to bind posterity with chains forged in the present day, and to use the dead hand of the past to bind the present age. There is a value to listening to past counsel. But the conservative often prefers to bind him or herself to past commandments regardless of whether they are wise, in fact factual, in context, or even applicable to the present age. A conservative Moslem or Christian reads passages in the Koran or Bible that talk about how a woman should "obey" her husband and uses that as a justification for authoritarianism or even (as is currently happening in Afghanistan) for Rape.
Conservative people, whether they are arguing for the orthodoxy of a limited and anachronistic interpretation of an ancient doctrine, for the authority of a high priest, or a self selected President, for a "dead constitution" as opposed to a living one, or arguing that the bible gives them the right to kill and maime at will, usually start their arguments with appeals to authority very similar to those that Burke used in his arguments against the French, English and American Revolutions. And these same arguments are used to upend the Constitution and other American principles so that instead of being the instruments of liberty they were intended to be they are used as instruments to "bind the living" with the "dead hand of the dead."
Paine's principles are still alive. Principles live. Commandments fail. When Thomas Paine wrote his rightly famous "The rights of man" his opening salvo was justly aimed at this tendancy. It is still important to this day to understand that argument.
http://www.ushistory.org/paine/rights/c1-010.htm
Framing the debate. Burke was writing to attack, not just the French Revolution, but the notion that common folks have rights in England that were won in the revolution in 1688. Paine debated Burke by mail because he was personae non-gratae in England at the time.
Burke had responded to a sermon by Dr. Price:
Dr. Price had preached a sermon on the 4th of November, 1789, being the anniversary of what is called in England the Revolution, which took place 1688. Mr. Burke, speaking of this sermon, says: "The political Divine proceeds dogmatically to assert, that by the principles of the Revolution, the people of England have acquired three fundamental rights:
1. To choose our own governors.
2. To cashier them for misconduct.
3. To frame a government for ourselves."
Dr. Price does not say that the right to do these things exists in this or in that person, or in this or in that description of persons, but that it exists in the whole; that it is a right resident in the nation. Mr. Burke, on the contrary, denies that such a right exists in the nation, either in whole or in part, or that it exists anywhere; and, what is still more strange and marvellous, he says: "that the people of England utterly disclaim such a right, and that they will resist the practical assertion of it with their lives and fortunes." That men should take up arms and spend their lives and fortunes, not to maintain their rights, but to maintain they have not rights, is an entirely new species of discovery, and suited to the paradoxical genius of Mr. Burke.
Dr. Price does not say that the right to do these things exists in this or in that person, or in this or in that description of persons, but that it exists in the whole; that it is a right resident in the nation. Mr. Burke, on the contrary, denies that such a right exists in the nation, either in whole or in part, or that it exists anywhere; and, what is still more strange and marvellous, he says: "that the people of England utterly disclaim such a right, and that they will resist the practical assertion of it with their lives and fortunes." That men should take up arms and spend their lives and fortunes, not to maintain their rights, but to maintain they have not rights, is an entirely new species of discovery, and suited to the paradoxical genius of Mr. Burke.
Paine here uses Irony to note that people should spend their lives and fortunes to deny themselves human rights, to enforce the power of oligarchs and monarchs, or to let long dead people rule them with authoritarian and tyrannical pronouncements. Yet that is precisely what Burke tried to do, and what conservative people since have done; whether one is talking about an Osama Bin Laden or President of Iran quoting the Koran out of context, or a Pat Robinson doing the same thing. The first step to freedom is to let go of the dead hand of arbitrary authority:
The English Parliament of 1688 did a certain thing, which, for themselves and their constituents, they had a right to do, and which it appeared right should be done. But, in addition to this right, which they possessed by delegation, they set up another right by assumption, that of binding and controlling posterity to the end of time. The case, therefore, divides itself into two parts; the right which they possessed by delegation, and the right which they set up by assumption. The first is admitted; but with respect to the second, I reply --
There never did, there never will, and there never can, exist a Parliament, or any description of men, or any generation of men, in any country, possessed of the right or the power of binding and controlling posterity to the "end of time," or of commanding for ever how the world shall be governed, or who shall govern it; and therefore all such clauses, acts or declarations by which the makers of them attempt to do what they have neither the right nor the power to do, nor the power to execute, are in themselves null and void. Every age and generation must be as free to act for itself in all cases as the age and generations which preceded it.
The vanity and presumption of governing beyond the grave is the most ridiculous and insolent of all tyrannies. Man has no property in man; neither has any generation a property in the generations which are to follow. The Parliament or the people of 1688, or of any other period, had no more right to dispose of the people of the present day, or to bind or to control them in any shape whatever, than the parliament or the people of the present day have to dispose of, bind or control those who are to live a hundred or a thousand years hence.
Every generation is, and must be, competent to all the purposes which its occasions require. It is the living, and not the dead, that are to be accommodated. When man ceases to be, his power and his wants cease with him; and having no longer any participation in the concerns of this world, he has no longer any authority in directing who shall be its governors, or how its government shall be organised, or how administered.
I am not contending for nor against any form of government, nor for nor against any party, here or elsewhere. That which a whole nation chooses to do it has a right to do. Mr. Burke says, No. Where, then, does the right exist? I am contending for the rights of the living, and against their being willed away and controlled and contracted for by the manuscript assumed authority of the dead, and Mr. Burke is contending for the authority of the dead over the rights and freedom of the living. There was a time when kings disposed of their crowns by will upon their death-beds, and consigned the people, like beasts of the field, to whatever successor they appointed. This is now so exploded as scarcely to be remembered, and so monstrous as hardly to be believed. But the Parliamentary clauses upon which Mr. Burke builds his political church are of the same nature.
The laws of every country must be analogous to some common principle. In England no parent or master, nor all the authority of Parliament, omnipotent as it has called itself, can bind or control the personal freedom even of an individual beyond the age of twenty-one years. On what ground of right, then, could the Parliament of 1688, or any other Parliament, bind all posterity for ever?
Yet how many attempts are made to bind and remove the personal freedom of persons 21 or older in our country?
Those who have quitted the world, and those who have not yet arrived at it, are as remote from each other as the utmost stretch of mortal imagination can conceive. What possible obligation, then, can exist between them — what rule or principle can be laid down that of two nonentities, the one out of existence and the other not in, and who never can meet in this world, the one should control the other to the end of time?So we should take the counsel of the past, but not even try to bind posterity.
In England it is said that money cannot be taken out of the pockets of the people without their consent. But who authorised, or who could authorise, the Parliament of 1688 to control and take away the freedom of posterity (who were not in existence to give or to withhold their consent) and limit and confine their right of acting in certain cases for ever?Jefferson used this same principle to assert that Constitutions should be revisited approximately once every 20 years.
A greater absurdity cannot present itself to the understanding of man than what Mr. Burke offers to his readers. He tells them, and he tells the world to come, that a certain body of men who existed a hundred years ago made a law, and that there does not exist in the nation, nor ever will, nor ever can, a power to alter it. Under how many subtilties or absurdities has the divine right to govern been imposed on the credulity of mankind? Mr. Burke has discovered a new one, and he has shortened his journey to Rome by appealing to the power of this infallible Parliament of former days, and he produces what it has done as of divine authority, for that power must certainly be more than human which no human power to the end of time can alter.
Some use the Constitution this way.
But Mr. Burke has done some service — not to his cause, but to his country — by bringing those clauses into public view. They serve to demonstrate how necessary it is at all times to watch against the attempted encroachment of power, and to prevent its running to excess. It is somewhat extraordinary that the offence for which James II. was expelled, that of setting up power by assumption, should be re-acted, under another shape and form, by the Parliament that expelled him. It shows that the Rights of Man were but imperfectly understood at the Revolution, for certain it is that the right which that Parliament set up by assumption (for by the delegation it had not, and could not have it, because none could give it) over the persons and freedom of posterity for ever was of the same tyrannical unfounded kind which James attempted to set up over the Parliament and the nation, and for which he was expelled. The only difference is (for in principle they differ not) that the one was an usurper over living, and the other over the unborn; and as the one has no better authority to stand upon than the other, both of them must be equally null and void, and of no effect.
From what, or from whence, does Mr. Burke prove the right of any human power to bind posterity for ever? He has produced his clauses, but he must produce also his proofs that such a right existed, and show how it existed. If it ever existed it must now exist, for whatever appertains to the nature of man cannot be annihilated by man. It is the nature of man to die, and he will continue to die as long as he continues to be born. But Mr. Burke has set up a sort of political Adam, in whom all posterity are bound for ever. He must, therefore, prove that his Adam possessed such a power, or such a right.
Of course the conservative soul doesn't usually even try to lay the right of human power on human power. Instead they generally seek to justify such power in the allmighty God. Paine points out (with humor!)
The weaker any cord is, the less will it bear to be stretched, and the worse is the policy to stretch it, unless it is intended to break it. Had anyone proposed the overthrow of Mr. Burke's positions, he would have proceeded as Mr. Burke has done. He would have magnified the authorities, on purpose to have called the right of them into question; and the instant the question of right was started, the authorities must have been given up.The problem with appeal to authority is that the authority of God is often invisible and the authority of the dead is usually almost nil. The founders live, because the principles they expoused were universal and live on.
It requires but a very small glance of thought to perceive that although laws made in one generation often continue in force through succeeding generations, yet they continue to derive their force from the consent of the living. A law not repealed continues in force, not because it cannot be repealed, but because it is not repealed; and the non-repealing passes for consent.
And the source of conflict is when laws are oppressive. Laws are oppressive when they apply to some of the living but not all, and when they weigh down on those they oppress.
But Mr. Burke's clauses have not even this qualification in their favour. They become null, by attempting to become immortal. The nature of them precludes consent. They destroy the right which they might have, by grounding it on a right which they cannot have. Immortal power is not a human right, and therefore cannot be a right of Parliament. The Parliament of 1688 might as well have passed an act to have authorised themselves to live for ever, as to make their authority live for ever. All, therefore, that can be said of those clauses is that they are a formality of words, of as much import as if those who used them had addressed a congratulation to themselves, and in the oriental style of antiquity had said: O Parliament, live for ever!Or Ocean tide remain at bay.
The circumstances of the world are continually changing, and the opinions of men change also; and as government is for the living, and not for the dead, it is the living only that has any right in it. That which may be thought right and found convenient in one age may be thought wrong and found inconvenient in another. In such cases, who is to decide, the living or the dead?Paine would have argued for a living constitution. That is why conservatives will sometimes quote him out of context, but they will rarely actually read him.
http://www.ushistory.org/paine/rights/c1-010.htm
Chris :-)
The snow falls, the mud cakes,
One struggles to survive and go.
The rain falls, the flowers grow.
The sun returns, and the world seems to glow.
Lies fail, people stay the same.
The horses move up the trail.
Those seeking the mountain top, find their way.
Those playing tricky games, fall and stay.
The rest of us pick up and climb on.
I have no horse.
The Donkey stops and asks "why do you beat me so?"
"Can't you see the angel standing in your way?"
I say; "I see no angel, just a hole of mud."
The Donkey says "that hole was waiting for you."
I see no angel, only a man with shoes caked with mud.
The man speaks to me "You go your way -- I'll go mine."
And we walk together for a time.
He tells me truths, he wears many faces;
Of Marx and Lenin, of Doestoyevsky and Whitman,
Of Snails and sealing wax, and rabbits in holes.
I'm enjoying his company and it is gone.
I turn and I'm walking alone.
The mud is gone, the grass is there,
and the donkey is eating his dinner.
I say to him "I never beat you, donkey"
"Why did you say what you said to me?"
The donkey says nothing the moment is gone.
It's time to climb once more.
I reach the mountain top,
I have to stop.
There are people assembled there.
I pronounce no curses. I shout no prophesies.
Each hears what he wants to hear.
I saw no angel of death,
No donkey talked to me.
I just went too long between meals.
Chris
Thom Hartmann wrote a great and well researched article on the Boston Tea party, that vividly depicts the role that the East India Company paid in that revolt by comparing it to the "Wall Mart" of its day.
Following the story to its source reveals that Benjamin Franklin was in a difficult place in 1773. He was in London. One also finds the parrallels between 1776 and now are even more appropriate than seen at first glance. Not only does the story of the Boston Tea party relate to the concepts of "mercantilism" and "Corporatism" that were at the heart of the second generation Colonialism of the late 1700's and 1800's, but they also relate to the corporatism that has dominated our body politics since the 1900's through now.
Once one understands what the East India Company was, why it was so predatory, and how its history relates to the history of India, China and the USA, the whole story is revealed for what it really is. The boston tea party illustrates the relationship between corporatism and what is now called "neo-colonialism. It also illustrates how to effectively push back against economic royalists such as those represented by the East India Company during the 1760's and early 1770's.
The East India company wasn't just a company; it was a way of governing business, and a way of government royalists getting money from business. The colonies were all organized initially as Royal Corporations. These royal companies had royal charters, were organized for the sake of governing royal property and profiting the executives and warriors of those royal properties. It was essentially a fusion of feudal and capitalist ideas. (See Ney's book http://gangsofamerica.com/3.html Indeed as a result, corporatism in the United States is older than the United States or democracy, and our founding fathers were fighting corporatism and the military industrial power of Britain when they were fighting for independence. The first colonies were each a corporation that claimed its lands based on a grant from the Crown and whose owners were basically the lords and royal retainers of the Crown.
Ted Nace writes:
"As I read books like Ray Raphael’s A People’s History of the American Revolution and Benjamin Woods Labaree’s The Boston Tea Party, I found little evidence that defending corporate prerogatives was anywhere to be found among the values and interests that the American rebels were fighting for.Indeed, when one considers that the companies that founded Plymouth and Virginia all had to be forced to allow private ownership of land in the new world, the notion of America being synonymous with corporatism is ludicrous.
"Quite the contrary. To a surprisingly degree, the American Revolution was directly and explicitly an anti-corporate revolt. Part of the backdrop for that revolt were the long-standing anti-corporate sentiments among lower class people such as indentured servants and conscript sailors. In the eighteenth century, following with the legislative suppression of corporate enterprise in Britain after the Bubble Act of 1719, anti-corporate views also became common among both French and English intellectuals, and some of those thinkers influenced cosmopolitan Americans such as Benjamin Franklin. Among British and French thinkers, corporate enterprise was considered synonymous with monopolya way for privileged elites to profit at the expense of the general public."
Even Adam Smith, who is much cited by corporatists, was not in favor of corporate governance of Business. A free market means a market of free men, not a market of companies, and as Ney Continues:
"This aspect of anti-corporate sentiment was a pervasive theme in Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations. Smith wrote, “People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or some contrivance to raise prices.”"(Chapter 4) http://gangsofamerica.com/4.html
And the East India company wasn't just any old company. It virtually created the colony in India in much the same way the earlier Virginia and New England companies had tried to do in what was to become the United States. A look at their Governors Generals gives an idea of just how explicitly our battle with them is linked to our freedoms as a people.
http://www.honeastindiaco.com/governors.htmlThe East India corporation brought first Bengal, and eventually the whole of the Sub-continent under its rule, and in the process degraded or destroyed much of the culture and wealth of India, transfering the detritus to British and European coffers. It was this company, and its monopoly over Indian Commerce (and eventually Indian rule) that was the subject of USA wrath and legitimate fear in the 1770s. Years later US merchants would make common business with the East India Company in breaking the borders of China and forcing them to accept drug smuggling (opium) but our beginning was opposed to them.
The problem with corporations then, as now, is that there is a separation of executive power from financial control, and the financial, budgetary, executive, (and often judicial and legislative) powers are all arrogated in the hands of people who are not usually held to full account for their behavior in a timely fashio. As Ney continues:
"While traveling in England, Benjamin Franklin became friends with Smith, who read to him drafts of Wealth of Nations. Smith’s objections to corporations also included practical concerns. According to Smith, a core flaw of the corporation as an institutional form was the intrinsic lack of functional accountability caused by separating ownership from management; a problem he famously phrased as that of “other people’s money.” Smith wrote:
“The directors of such companies … being the managers rather of other people’s money than their own, it cannot well be expected that they should watch over it with the same anxious vigilance with which the partners in a private guild frequently watch over their own…. Negligence and profusion, therefore, must always prevail, more or less, in the management of the affairs of such a company."
Being for free enterprise and free markets is not the same thing as being for giant corporations with monopolies that span the world. On the contrary Adam Smith, the founders of our country, and most of the significant leaders of our country have been against such corporatism.
Ney Continues:
In support of his opinion, Smith cited a study by French economist Andre Morellet, who inventoried 55 European corporations that had all failed due to mismanagement.
In France, a group of laissez-faire economic thinkers known as the Physiocrats condemned corporations as manifestations of illegitimate royal privilege. So did the influential French economist Jacques Turgot, on similar grounds. During Benjamin Franklin’s visit to France in the 1760s, Franklin visited with both the Physiocrats and Turgot. Franklin’s 1769 book Positions to be Examined Regarding National Wealth shows these influences.
But while the anti-corporate sentiments of intellectuals and working class people provide a supportive, and perhaps necessary, context for the American Revolution, neither of those groups was in a position to mount a concerted rebellion of the sort that broke out in Boston, New York, and Philadelphia in 1773. That rebellion required a third group to mobilize: the merchant community.
Merchant resentments about British rule centered around concrete economic issues. As formalized in the Navigation Acts, British law aimed at maintaining the American colonies as producers of raw materials for British manufacturing and as captive markets for British goods. The Acts discouraged American manufacturing, prohibiting, for example, the casting of iron pots, as well as the development of infrastructure projects that might enhance any production other than raw materials for export.
Still, despite the unhappiness of the merchants with the subordinate economic role to which they were assigned, it appeared that the British were succeeding at keeping a lid on rebellious spirits. Among historians of the American Revolution, the years 1770 to 1773 are known as the “quiet period.” By rescinding all but the tea tax, the British leadership had shrewdly defused popular anger in the colonies caused by a series of taxes levied in 1770. Even the lingering tea tax was largely symbolic, since most tea consumed in the colonies actually arrived via Holland-based smugglers rather than legitimate British traders. Hard-core agitators such as Samuel Adams found themselves stymied. “Taxation without representation” was too abstract an issue to motivate people to rebel, when the item being taxed was plentifully available, tax-free. The pragmatic Lord Townsend, it appeared, had nixed the possibility of a revolt in the American colonies.
At the crux of these developments was the Boston Tea Party, the event that triggered a severe British crackdown, which in turn precipitated the American move to declare independence. The conventional depiction goes something like this: On a dark winter’s night in 1773, a band of “Mohawks,” decked out in the white man’s notion of Native American attire, mounts a mission of creative vandalism, a symbolic protest to dramatize their objection to “taxation without representation” by a tyrannical king. They board three ships bobbing at anchor in Boston Harbor. From the hold of each ship, they drag chests of tea onto the deck, chop them open, and unceremoniously toss bales of tea into the harbor.
Franklin may well have been involved in all this, he was living in England, talking to both Adam Smith and Parliament -- and trying to take a moderate course. http://portland.indymedia.org/en/2006/01/331629.shtml Franklin was trying to keep peace. He appears to have"B proposed that Parliament exempt the East India Corporation from import duties. But he probably had no idea of what would happen next. We usually are propagandized that the "Boston Tea Party" was a largely symbolic act. But that is not true.
What’s wrong with the conventional story? For starters, there was nothing symbolic about the event. The objective of the “Mohawks” was to destroy tea on a massive scale, and that mission succeeded quite fully. The scope of the destruction far surpassed the level of damage that would have been inflicted if the action had been intended merely to score a political point in theatrical fashion. In a three-hour period, the Bostonians turned approximately 120,000 pounds of dry tea into “harbor tea.” So much was dumped that the tea piled up in the shallow water and threatened to spill back onto the decks. The tea that was destroyed represented about 10 percent of the entire quantity consumed in the tea-happy American colonies per year and as much as 50 percent of the amount normally imported from England rather than smuggled from Holland and elsewhere.
Second, the Boston Tea Party can’t be explained merely as an outburst of nationalism. After all, colonial Americans still identified themselves as British. Nor was it an anti-monarchal uprising like the French Revolution, at least at the outset. Looking closely at the events that led up to that night, we see that it was a highly targeted attempt to block the British East India Company from carrying out a specific plan to monopolize American commodities markets, starting with tea. When respectable American businessmenincluding John Hancock, one of the richest men in Americatook the uncharacteristically radical action of dressing up in disguise and committing wholesale vandalism, the motivating force was not abstract. It was literally to defend their businesses. In other words, it was a highly pragmatic economic rebellion against an overbearing corporation, rather than a political rebellion against an oppressive government. Or more accurately, it was a rebellion against a corporation and a government that were thoroughly intertwined.
To understand why anti-corporate sentiments could run so strong even in the highest stratum of the American business community in 1773, it is important first to note that the corporate form, characterized by a charter and joint-stock ownership, was not the typical way businesses were organized in the colonies. Most businesses were owned by families or partnerships. They had no corporate charters, nor did they need them.
In the late 1760s, the East India Company entered a period of deepening crisis. During that decade, the shareholders twice voted to increase their annual dividend, first from 6 to 10 percent and then from 10 percent to 12.5 percent. Those increases squeezed profits at an inopportune time, because revenues suddenly came under serious pressure. Because of a famine in Bengal in 1769 and 1770, the Company’s tax collectors couldn’t extract as much revenue as usual from the Bengali peasantry. And in the American colonies, smuggled Dutch tea continued to crowd out English imports.
Then as now tyranny and oppression represent the results of misrule and instability and instability the result of war, slavery, and debt; speculation and speculative bubbles. Each bubble driven by debt and sometimes warfare, and followed by depression and then war again.
In 1772 a Europe-wide economic depression caused tea sales on the Continent to plunge. As the Company’s cash reserves dwindled, various suggestions for dealing with the crisis reached its managers. Among them was the proposal by a stockholder named Robert Herries, outlining a way for the Company to solve two problems at once—both the revenue shortfall and a glut of warehoused tea equal to three years of English domestic consumption. In a nutshell, Herries’ idea was that the Company should sell tea at drastically reduced prices on the European continent.
The "largess" of the military industrial complex, always fueled by debt and lavish spending to fund wasteful wars, always leads to economic collapse and/or warfare. The East India company, having misruled India, blown the stockholders' money, now looked for new predations for recovering their coffers:
After considering the proposal, the managers concluded that tea dumped on the Continent would simply be smuggled back into England where it would erode domestic prices. They liked the dumping idea, but they had a different destination in mind: the American colonies, where they could undersell the Dutch smugglers. To assist the East India Company with the plan, Parliament agreed to suspend the duties on tea shipments normally collected at the British end, but Foreign Minister North insisted that the colonists still pay the tax collected on the American side.
When news of the plan reached America, intense agitation broke out in Boston, New York, and Philadelphia. Pamphleteers brought forth the familiar argument that “taxation without representation” was fundamentally unjust. Still, the business community, not normally disposed toward any sort of radical action, would not have become involved except for a second aspect of the policy—the plan by the East India Company to sell its tea exclusively through specially commissioned local consignees.
The British forbade manufacturing of all kinds, and had they won the war, would have stripped our citizens of their rights to own ships and engage in foreign commerce in much the same way they destroyed or degraded Indian commerce after the war -- all for the sake of the profits of a few investors and already rich and powerful people. The coercive acts showed that this effort was not on behalf of all british citizens equally but that some citizens were more equal than others.
Ney quotes a pamphlet:
… Hereafter, if they succeed, they will send their own Factors and Creatures, establish Houses amongst us. Ship us all other East-India goods; and in order to full freight their Ships, take in other kind of Goods at under Freight, or (more probably) ship them on their own Accounts to their own Factors, and undersell our Merchants, till they monopolize the whole Trade. Thus our Merchants are ruined, Ship Building ceases. They will then sell Goods at any exorbitant price. Our Artificers will be unemployed, and every Tradesman will groan under the dire Oppression.,
The East India Company, if once they get Footing in this (once) happy country, will leave no Stone unturned to become your Masters. They are an opulent Body, and Money or Credit is not wanting amongst them They have a designing, depraved, and despotic Ministry to assist and support them. They themselves are well versed In Tyranny, Plunder, Oppression and Bloodshed. Whole Provinces labouring under the Distresses of Oppression, Slavery, Famine, and the Sword, are familiar to them. Thus they have enriched themselves,thus they are become the most powerful Trading Company in the Universe. …
and if we want to protest the current equivalent it would be the power of international companies to take our jobs abroad and make us pay for defending their colonial and neo-colonial interests worldwide.
This was a revolution, driven from below. And it frightened some of our founders.
"Benjamin Franklin, among others, insisted that the tea owners should be compensated for their losses. But the British reaction swept aside those concerns. A series of punitive measures, known as the Coercive Acts, swept through Parliament. One act closed the port of Boston to all commercial activity until the tea losses had been repaid. Colonists were outraged by that heavy-handed lawmaking, and soon enough, colonial leaders were organizing a broad-based, powerful response."
And Franklin soon enough realized that he couldn't compromise with the Corporatists and Monarchists of Europe. He returned to the future United States and became one of our founding fathers.
ChrisThomas Paine was our original revolutionary. He eventually went to France, where the behavior of the French (scandalously bloody) had scared some progressives from their initial positions into the conservative camp. He debated one of them. His side of the debate became known as the "rights of Man." The other side of the Debate is found in the works of Edmund Burke and John Adams.
http://www.ushistory.org/paine/rights/c2-05.htm
Thomas Paine writes:
"In contemplating a subject that embraces with equatorial magnitude the whole region of humanity it is impossible to confine the pursuit in one single direction. It takes ground on every character and condition that appertains to man, and blends the individual, the nation, and the world. From a small spark, kindled in America, a flame has arisen not to be extinguished. Without consuming, like the Ultima Ratio Regum, it winds its progress from nation to nation, and conquers by a silent operation. Man finds himself changed, he scarcely perceives how. He acquires a knowledge of his rights by attending justly to his interest, and discovers in the event that the strength and powers of despotism consist wholly in the fear of resisting it, and that, in order "to be free, it is sufficient that he wills it."
"Having in all the preceding parts of this work endeavoured to establish a system of principles as a basis on which governments ought to be erected, I shall proceed in this, to the ways and means of rendering them into practice. But in order to introduce this part of the subject with more propriety, and stronger effect, some preliminary observations, deducible from, or connected with, those principles, are necessary."
"Whatever the form or constitution of government may be, it ought to have no other object than the general happiness. When, instead of this, it operates to create and increase wretchedness in any of the parts of society, it is on a wrong system, and reformation is necessary. Customary language has classed the condition of man under the two descriptions of civilised and uncivilised life. To the one it has ascribed felicity and affluence; to the other hardship and want. But, however our imagination may be impressed by painting and comparison, it is nevertheless true, that a great portion of mankind, in what are called civilised countries, are in a state of poverty and wretchedness, far below the condition of an Indian. I speak not of one country, but of all. It is so in England, it is so all over Europe. Let us enquire into the cause."
Paine, Jefferson and at least some of our founding fathers did not want a "small government" for its own sake. They wanted a Government devoted to the general happiness and not to the specific happiness of a few wealthy individuals.
Well, sometimes one knows one did the right thing by the way one feels after all the sturm and drang is finished. I am not done with writing about political and economic subjects. But I have learned all I can handle about how some minds think and behave. I've always been naive enough to think that people of good will are willing to change their minds if they encounter a better argument. My time at ARBN should have disabused me of this, but arguing at Buddhist Dialogue Group should have completely dispelled that delusion.
But it hasn't. What it has shown me is that some people really are perverse.
When they encounter a better argument, instead of listening they simply dig in their heels and look for excuses to undermine the person making that argument personally, to discredit, debase, or abuse that person; and thus claim that the person is a bad person and that therefore they don't have to listen to that argument after all.
I did the right thing leaving. And there is no point in buying into the BS that somehow I earned moderation and was kicked off for bad behavior. I managed to survive for years on that board largely because I (for the most part) despite huge amounts of provocation and repeated personal attacks tried to moderate myself. I learned a lot... If the worst excuse Robin could find for moderating me was that I misattributed one of his posts, after all the repeated whole threads calling me an idiot, telling me I'm delusional, taking my words out of context, and worse; etc... I was behaving pretty well. I'll miss the opportunities to talk about stuff with a small select group of people who violently disagreed with me. But there are other places for that.
The last two posts were an exception to my usual behavior, and I promise that I'm going to avoid calling liars liars and sneaks sneaks about people I'm relatively close to in Cyberspace for the near future. As for public figures like the President and our various elected deputies I won't make guarantees, but I don't get personally wronged often, so I don't call people liars and sneaks unless they have abundantly proved it.
And by the way, the thing that is really making me laugh is reading and then deleting his efforts to spam my blog.
Chris
Mark writes:
Dear Chris:
"We all defame one another from time to time. It is our karma for our past and present misdeeds."
True enough, and it is also true that intention makes a difference. Some people defame others on purpose, some do it because they are delusional, and some because they don't know the truth. The first two reasons are tied together. Those who defame others on purpose are delusional. They really think that they are accomplishing something by attacking their "enemies" and waging tit for tat wars.
Mark:
"You don't know, or maybe you do, how hopeful Nichiren's words about 'suffering relatively minor hardships in this life we can avoid the realm of hell in the future', makes me feel."
I know how you feel. I take cold comfort in his words about waking up and comparing it to a son who had gotten drunk and killed his parents. There are two paths of righteousness. I don't know the Hindu words, but I know the hebrew ones and they have a similar enough meaning. The hebrew word for repentance is Teshuvah. It means the kind of righteousness where one is trying to repair past transgressions. Nichiren may have even seen himself as more a Teshuvim than a Tsaddick. I think the stronger Tsaddicks (righteous ones) are all Teshuvim.
"I am mad at Robin right now for slandering me and taking sides with the SGI even though he has the same viewpoint as I about them but he thinks his subtle refutation of them is light years beyond my blunt and harsh condemnation."
I am not angry at Robin or you. I am angry at Robin's behavior because he is a liar and a sneak. His attack on you is entirely religious politics. He is about as consistant as a marshmellow on core principles. The problem with your "blunt and harsh condemnations" is that they are misdirected. You need to learn to use the knife wisdom and the shield of truthfulness.
When you go off on the Gakkai most Gakkai members have no idea what you are talking about. More importantly what they are doing wrong is more subtle than you think because it is widely shared behavior. Wanting to make a living from religion and create a movement isn't necessarly bad. It's that "my way or the highway", anything goes, and dishonest attitude that I don't like and that is totally unnecessary. You have that attitude too. Michael Ryuei shares many of your feelings, and yet he's learned to moderate his approach and keep it real.
"You too are sometimes like this. I stay out of both your ways on politics as I am basically apolitical."
I am not by nature very good at politics. But I am intensely political because I believe the world we live in is our arena, that we only have one real shot at improving things, and that if we blow it, we blow it. I really believe that we are so tied together that our individual egos may die, but we'll be reborn suffering more if we don't try to improve things. My faith is that one can't achieve complete and final enlightenment unless one follows the path of Bodhisattva and seeks to make this world a better place. Part of that is sharing true religion, true ideology and more creative ways to use reality.
"I don't see animosity as a bad thing, however but you do"
I see animosity as one of the lower ten worlds. Anger can be transformative, and dwell in the world of Enlightenment, or it can be a world of its own. It is all in how it is used. Anger is simply another name for powerful passion. If one isn't passionate about helping people, one isn't passionate about achieving enlightenment.
"and Robin really does, bathed in the provisional teachings as he is {had to get my dig]."
Robin is following an obvious agenda. But I'm not sure what it is. His Republicanism and authoritarianism are things I can understand but I can no longer tolerate dealing with. The man defended Bush's lies about invading Iraq. He also has with increasing ruthlessness and dishonesty been moderating the Buddhist Dialogue Group, to the point where I just left it. He makes arguments he doesn't like disappears, spins things, and leaves in place those things that support his agenda. And these were all small and unnecessary things. A man who will lie about small things will stop at nothing.
Nichiren states:
"The nature of killing varies, however. The offense of the person killed is either heavy or light. If one kills the person who has murdered one’s father, mother, sovereign, or teacher, although the offense remains the same, what would have been a grave offense probably becomes a light one instead. This is something our contemporary scholars are acquainted with. But even bodhisattvas with their great compassion, if they make offerings to the enemies of the Lotus
Sutra, are certain to fall into the hell of incessant suffering. On the other hand, even those who commit the five cardinal sins, if they show animosity toward those enemies, will definitely be reborn in the human or heavenly world. King Sen’yo and King Possessor of Virtue, who had destroyed, respectively, five hundred and countless enemies of the Lotus Sutra, became Shakyamuni Buddha in this world. His disciples such as Mahakashyapa, Ananda, Shariputra, Maudgalyayana, and other countless followers were people who, at that time, were in the vanguard, defeating the enemy, or killing them, injuring them, or rejoicing in the fight. The monk Realization of Virtue became Kashyapa Buddha. He was a votary of the Lotus Sutra of great compassion who, at that time, urged King Possessor of Virtue to attack the enemies of the sutra as if they were the ones who had betrayed his father and mother in a previous lifetime." (On Recommending This Teaching to Your Lord and Avoiding the Offense of Complicity in Slander)"
Some of this is a matter of translation. Some of this is a heritage from a time of conflict. These are stories that justify a robust approach to Buddhism. To take them literally is to start to look like a Jihadi Arab. The Nirvana and Lotus both reflect the Mahayanist movement, which appeared long after Shakyamuni had passed. The fact remains that Shakyamuni said "work out your own salvation" and that militant buddhism involves the pot calling the kettle black when it starts talking about authenticity.
It is better to apply the meat of the argument that is not anachronistic and can stand the test of time. That meat is the notion that true religion rests on true. Shingon, Zen, Nembutsu commit untruths and fantasies that take them into a realm that is not focused on the central truths of Buddhism, which are the immediacy of enlightenment, the universal potential for enlightenment, and the necessary that enlightenment be in the context of the real world and aimed at saving all suffering human beings. The rest of Nichiren's arguments achieve a more achievable context when they are scoped that way.
"The same thing goes for defamation and slander. Slandering a good person, one who upholds the Lotus Sutra in body and mind is a very bad thing while slandering or demeaning slanderers, is a relatively minor offense. "
Slandering anyone degrades the slanderor. There is a difference between publishing a denunciation of a liar for lying, and publishing accusations of lying for stating something true but with a mistake in a caption or an unverified source. Slandering bad people undermines the ability to tell good from bad. It just makes it easier for a bad person to continue doing bad things. Moreover bad things are ultimately delusory things. A cathedral built on a pack of lies will eventually collapse because of those lies. Reaganomics is bad, not because Reagan and his followers were bad, but because the economics involved is unsound, the examples and arguments used to advance that economics were faulty and even deceitful, and because the materials are mostly warmed over ideologies that had been tried and failed before. Some elements of libertarian and even conservative ideology are even true. Bad people are bad people because they believe in lies, advancing their own purposes through lies, and have a weak link to truth telling.
"What is important is that we solidify our faith so even being slandered is a cause for joy."
I can never feel joy at being slandered until I've examined the accusations and determined which of them were true or false.
"Since I have never killed anyone intentionally or unintentionlly and neither did Nichiren Daishonin [and probably neither did you], we can put this passage into perspective as "killing" the slanderers of the Lotus Sutra through the break and subdue or aggressive practice of the Lotus Sutra."
I read an excellent argument that Shakubuku means "untwisting" more than merely breaking and subduing. Straitening out the spin, lies and confusions is shakubuku. Someone who likes to spin like Taz (Robin) is inclined to slander because they can't see that distinction.
"Utilizing harsh words such as, "Your father has died" I have awakened dozens of SGI members in which the poison has penetrated so deeply that their minds were completely closed to the truth."
I don't see that effect in anything you've done. I have seen a lot of folks get confused and lost with no alternative path.
"If this is the reason you were banished, for utilizing the aggressive practice of the Lotus Sutra in order to awaken another to their glorious potential as a Bodhisattva of the Earth, anyone who slanders you will be punished and you will lessen your karmic retribution."
I wish you'd provide citations. This doesn't strike me as a translation so much as a kind of rewriting.
"On the other hand, regardless of whether you use the gentle or aggressive approach, if it was merely to win a political argument, little benefit will be forthcoming from another's slander of you. Once again, what is important is to continuously develop our faith and determination to help others."
All arguments are political.
Chris
And PS Robin's comments are gone.
It is difficult to judge one's own behavior, but it is obvious when someone goes across the line from moderation to actual political censorship.
I was going to keep this low key. But Robin responded on Buddhist Dialogue, and will probably prevent the replies from showing up on the group. But I no longer care to dance his dance. I just left that group.
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/buddhist_dialogue_group/message/49600
He writes;
"Your post there showed why I deleted it. It is really
pathetic to go to your blog and cry; and in the process,
show exactly why you were moderated. It would be funny,
but is is sad."
Well, no problem. I'm not crying, I'm protesting unfair treatment. The man has been selectively editing posts to make his POV look better than it would otherwise, to hide where he lies, and to remove posts that provide counter arguments or balance.
I can understand him wanting to keep the website peaceful. Sometimes my critiques have been hard on both friend and foe. I've strived to moderate myself, because I try to be honest. What Robin is doing is dishonest and abusive. It goes beyond fair moderation and into selective moderation, propaganda and political repression. And he can keep on doing it, but I will no longer go along with it.
It started a number of years ago when he started selectively deleting posts. It has continued since then, worsening over time as he's become emboldened by the inability of anyone to stop him. At first some of the removals made sense. People would go over the line and start insulting each other. But then things started disappearing simply because he disagreed with him. He didn't like being called "Taz" for the way he likes to defend the indefensible, or spin things to the point of them being lies. So I stopped teasing him, and not only my teases, but the content of proof of his lying disappeared. I went along, and learned the lesson that I should have kept copies of the posts.
A year ago he started kicking off the other moderators and did a coup d'etat of the leadership. Then he started moderating people for protesting his moderation. And now he simply moderates posts and doesn't let those he doesn't like even appear on the group.
Chris
I just changed my mind. Robin's posts on this post have just been deleted. He's right about one thing. I don't want to argue with him anymore.
Example of post defaming me (in title): http://groups.yahoo.com/group/buddhist_dialogue_group/message/49482 and 49465
Like this - Holte wrote:
<< Yes, these folks put themselves in the same class with Richard Nixon, Pol
Pot, Mao, Lenin, Pinochet and other thugs. Some folks have put out evidence that
we had a dictatorship for 8 years -- until the 'decider' decided to go home. >>As awful a President as Nixon was, to put him into a category with those
monsters is, to put it mildly, absurd. Anyone who thinks that is a legitimate
comparison deserves scorn and contempt and ridicule. He certainly cannot
command any respect for intellectual acumen or honesty.And then to carry on about a dictatorship, when the "dictator" went quietly home
after serving the legal limit in office, is just plain stupid. But I repeat
myself. LOL! Whatamoron.
This post defamed me, both in the title and in the text. Yet it was based on inaccurate information. I was linking Nixon with Pol Pot because both were law-breakers, not necessarly because of human rights abuses (though he did commit quite a few).
This is still there, while my replies have been deleted.
Even the following post was rejected in advance by Robin. It is one of many that have been getting restrained in advance, while he continues to let Andy and others defame me, or make his own partisan points.
Rejected post:
> LOL... Carter wasn't our best President, but he wasn't our worst. The guy who followed him managed to make him look good in retrospect.
>
> If we'd listened to Carter we wouldn't care much who rules Iran.
>
> "Robin Beck"
> >
> > We just don't get it. The Left in America is screaming to high
> > heaven that the mess we are in in Iraq and the war on terrorism
> > has been caused by the right-wing and that George W. Bush, the
> > so-called "dim-witted cowboy," has created the entire mess.
>
> >
> > he truth is the entire nightmare can be traced back to the liberal democratic policies of the leftist Jimmy Carter, who created a firestorm that destabilized our greatest ally in the Muslim world, the shah of Iran, in favor of a religious fanatic, the ayatollah Khomeini.
> >
> > Carter viewed Khomeini as more of a religious holy man in a grassroots revolution than a founding father of modern terrorism. Carter's ambassador to the UN, Andrew Young, said "Khomeini will eventually be hailed as a saint." Carter's Iranian ambassador, William Sullivan, said, "Khomeini is a Gandhi-like figure." Carter adviser James Bill proclaimed in a Newsweek interview on February 12, 1979 that Khomeini was not a mad mujahid, but a man of "impeccable integrity and honesty."
> >
> > The shah was terrified of Carter. He told his personal confidant, "Who knows what sort of calamity he [Carter] may unleash on the world?"
> >
> > ...
> >
> >
> >
> > JPost.com » Opinion » Op-Ed Contributors » Article
> > Jun 20, 2007 0:14 | Updated Jun 20, 2007 14:35
> > Father of the Iranian revolution
> > By MICHAEL D. EVANS
> > Print Subscribe Listen to this article. Powered by Odiogo.com
> > E-mail Toolbar
> >
> > + Recommend:
> > facebook del.icio.us reddit newsvine fark
> > What's this?
> >
> >
> > Decrease text size Decrease text size
> > Increase text size Increase text size
> > Talkbacks for this article: 0
> > Be the first to rate this | Top Rated Articles [?]
> >
> > We just don't get it. The Left in America is screaming to high heaven that the mess we are in in Iraq and the war on terrorism has been caused by the right-wing and that George W. Bush, the so-called "dim-witted cowboy," has created the entire mess.
> > Former President Jimmy Carter...
> >
> > Former President Jimmy Carter addresses an audience at Brandeis University.
> > Photo: AP [file]
> >
> > The truth is the entire nightmare can be traced back to the liberal democratic policies of the leftist Jimmy Carter, who created a firestorm that destabilized our greatest ally in the Muslim world, the shah of Iran, in favor of a religious fanatic, the ayatollah Khomeini.
> >
> > Carter viewed Khomeini as more of a religious holy man in a grassroots revolution than a founding father of modern terrorism. Carter's ambassador to the UN, Andrew Young, said "Khomeini will eventually be hailed as a saint." Carter's Iranian ambassador, William Sullivan, said, "Khomeini is a Gandhi-like figure." Carter adviser James Bill proclaimed in a Newsweek interview on February 12, 1979 that Khomeini was not a mad mujahid, but a man of "impeccable integrity and honesty."
> >
> > The shah was terrified of Carter. He told his personal confidant, "Who knows what sort of calamity he [Carter] may unleash on the world?"
> >
> > # JPost BlogCentral: A personal note from Carter
> >
> > Let's look at the results of Carter's misguided liberal policies: the Islamic Revolution in Iran; the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan (Carter's response was to boycott the 1980 Moscow Olympics); the birth of Osama bin Laden's terrorist organization; the Iran-Iraq War, which cost the lives of millions dead and wounded; and yes, the present war on terrorism and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
> >
> > WHEN CARTER entered the political fray in 1976, America was still riding the liberal wave of anti-Vietnam War emotion. Carter asked for an in-depth report on Iran even before he assumed the reins of government and was persuaded that the shah was not fit to rule Iran. 1976 was a banner year for pacifism: Carter was elected president, Bill Clinton became attorney-general of Arkansas, and Albert Gore won a place in the Tennessee House of Representatives.
> >
> > In his anti-war pacifism, Carter never got it that Khomeini, a cleric exiled to Najaf in Iraq from 1965-1978, was preparing Iran for revolution. Proclaiming "the West killed God and wants us to bury him," Khomeini's weapon of choice was not the sword but the media. Using tape cassettes smuggled by Iranian pilgrims returning from the holy city of Najaf, he fueled disdain for what he called gharbzadegi ("the plague of Western culture").
> >
> > Carter pressured the shah to make what he termed human rights concessions by releasing political prisoners and relaxing press censorship. Khomeini could never have succeeded without Carter. The Islamic Revolution would have been stillborn.
> >
> > Gen. Robert Huyser, Carter's military liaison to Iran, once told me in tears: "The president could have publicly condemned Khomeini and even kidnapped him and then bartered for an exchange with the [American Embassy] hostages, but the president was indignant. 'One cannot do that to a holy man,' he said."
> >
> > Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has donned the mantle of Ayatollah Khomeini, taken up bin Laden's call, and is fostering an Islamic apocalyptic revolution in Iraq with the intent of taking over the Middle East and the world.
> >
> > Jimmy Carter became the poster boy for the ideological revolution of the 1960s in the West, hell bent on killing the soul of America. The bottom line: Carter believed then and still does now is that evil really does not exist; people are basically good; America should embrace the perpetrators and castigate the victims.
> >
> > IN THE '60S it was mass rebellion after the assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King. When humanity confronts eternity, the response is always rebellion or repentance. The same ideologues who fought to destroy the soul of America with the "God is dead" movement in the 1960s are now running the arts, the universities, the media, the State Department, Congress, and Senate, determined more then ever to kill the soul of America while the East attempts to kill the body. Carter's world view defines the core ideology of the Democratic Party.
> >
> > What is going on in Iraq is no mystery to those of us who have had our fingers on the pulse of both Iran and Iraq for decades. The Iran-Iraq war was a war of ideologies. Saddam Hussein saw himself as an Arab leader who would defeat the non-Arab Persians. Khomeini saw it as an opportunity to export his Islamic Revolution across the borders to the Shi'ites in Iraq and then beyond to the Arab countries.
> >
> > Throughout the war both leaders did everything possible to incite the inhabitants of each country to rebel - precisely what Iran is doing in Iraq today. Khomeini encouraged the Shi'ites across the border to remove Saddam from power and establish an Islamic republic like in Iran.
> >
> > Carter's belief that every crisis can be resolved with diplomacy - and nothing but diplomacy - now permeates the Democratic Party. Unfortunately, Carter is wrong.
> >
> > There are times when evil must be openly confronted and defeated.
> >
> > KHOMEINI HAD the help of the PLO in Iran. They supplied weapons and terrorists to murder Iranians and incite mobs in the streets. No wonder Yasser Arafat was hailed as a friend of Khomeini after he seized control of Iran and was given the Israeli Embassy in Teheran with the PLO flag flying overhead.
> >
> > The Carter administration scrambled to assure the new regime that the United States would maintain diplomatic ties with Iran. But on April 1, 1979 the greatest April Fools' joke of all time was played, as Khomeini proclaimed it the first day of the government of God.
> >
> > In February 1979 Khomeini had boarded an Air France flight to return to Teheran with the blessing of Jimmy Carter. The moment he arrived, he proclaimed: "I will kick his teeth in" - referring to then prime minister Shapour Bakhtiar, who was left in power with a US pledge of support. He was assassinated in Paris by Iranian agents in 1991.
> >
> > ...
> >
> > http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1181813077590&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull
> >
The first observation I have when I read Jonah Goldberg's writings about Fascism; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberal_Fascism is that he's got some of the details right. The second one is that he, Amity Shlaes, and other authors use those in such a way as to completely distort the subject. But that should not be surprising. I always experience cognative dissonance when I hear those two speak.
True: Fascism shared some characteristics with progressivism. The founders of Fascism, led by Mussolini as spokesman, synthesizer and central figure, developed a number of ideas they considered progressive. These were anti-socialist, anti-democratic, and looked for inspiration to the past. At the core of these ideas were the notions of syndicalism, which came from the labor movement but were re-written to favor corporations, and corporatism which borrowed from US Corporatism ideas. So yes, Fascism did embrace elements of progressive ideology but as it always was more an anti-liberal/socialist movement than a fixed economic ideology. Mussolini would probably laugh approvingly at the way that those two use his ideas; by borrowing his methods and goals.
Fascism was a movement based less around ideology than nationalism and less around a particular ideology than on opposition to international socialism. In the 20's and thirties it came to be identified with corporatism and syndicalism, but to understand it one has to understand that at its basis it was, is and always has been about nationalism first and an attack on socialism. That is why both Amity and Jonah are engaging in extremely deceptive distortion when they wage their attack on progressivism by selectively presenting the history of Fascism as if it were simply another form of internationalist socialism. It wasn't. It did adopt elements of the Progressive agenda however.
Mussolini, the founder of Italian nationalism described fascism more as a "fist" than a particular ideology. He aimed that fist at the International Socialists, at "liberals" (meaning both liberals as we understand them and libertarians), and at democracy. To him democracy was an ornament a "toy".
I've been reading around the reactions to this attack. The attack has been successful to the extent it has largely because the depth of ignorance about fascism is so deep that those who debate those two seem to be only able to sputter. http://bloggingheads.tv/diavlogs/13625?in=50:49&out=64:50
The reason is that Fascism was spectacularly successful for a time; in mobilizing large portions of Europe, in getting "the trains running on time", and in mobilizing otherwise intelligent people into the delusion that the Fascists were going to improve the lives of the people in the places where they ruled. However, that was a distortion. Mussolini first organized his movement with veterans from World War I (especially the Arditi, equivalent of the Green Beret) "Futurists," "Syndicalists" and powerful industrialists and others opposed to International Socialism.
The reasons for this are manifold, but in essence, they lie more in the nature and organization of fascism than its ideology. Its ideology was based more around creating an authoritarian (and sometimes totalitarian) organization. The word Fascists came from the "Fascii" or faces, which were Italian organizations, also known as "blackshirts" who formed a quasi military organization that could use violence and direct political action to accomplish the goals of the Central Organization. This organization was what gave Mussolini his "fist."
Fascism does have its roots in the Socialist movement. However, Mussolini broke with the Socialists prior to founding Socialism. He went from being a violent and incendiary leader in that movement and publishing the Socialist Organ "Avanti!" to being an even more violent and incendiary leader attacking socialism, and the first target of his new group was the publishing house for Avanti! which his blackshirts physically attacked and burned. Mussolini believed in using propaganda; in using propaganda and agitation, deception, distortion, any means possible, to achieve the ends of his movement. Avanti! was attacked because the socialists opposed Italy's entry to and continuence in World War I. Mussolini's first plank was nationalistic. He dreamed of an organization to carry on the traditions of the Roman Empire. Mussolini attacked, betrayed and destroyed his former friends in the Socialist movement.
Fascism practiced organization from top down. For that reason it supported both Syndicalism and Corporatism. The syndicalism labor movement it inherited was bottom up, Fascists managed to turn that into a top down organization. By organizing the labor organizers they could control the Unions. It is syndicalist style labor movements dominated by labor bosses that you hear our US labor movement linked to, even though our labor movement mostly preserves the bottom up democratic organization originally imaged by union organizers. Simply by organizing Unions as top down the Syndicalists were able to thoroughly control and corrupt the Labor movement and turn it into a means to control the workers.
Fascism inherited Corporatism and National Industrial policy notions from the Germans and the United States. As Hitler would say later; "I don't need to nationalize Industry, I need only nationalize the industrialists." By involving corporations in the Government, explicitly, and also by syndicalizing them, Mussolini was able to ensure that they were involved in politics, took their cues from the party and were (at least verbally) vocal supporters of the movement.
Corporatism and syndicalism was how the Fascii (or Blackshirts) got control of the country. Initially Fascism was a marginal movement. But when Socialists started mobilizing workers to strike for worker rights in the Countryside, the fascists got money and economic support from the planters in the countryside. The Fascii were supported as a means to put down workers seeking rights in the countryside. They started getting support in the cities when the Socialists waged a Nationwide strikes for rights in the cities. Again the Blackshirts helped the Industrialists to break up and end strikes in the city and thus got funding from the Industrialists.
It took only 5 years from the time when Mussolini founded the movement (1919) to when he took power. When he finally marched on Rome he got additional support from Conservatives and from Monarchists. He also got, initially grudging support from the Catholic Church. Right Wing Catholics supported his movement from the beginning. But they had to get him to back away from his personal anti-clericism to do so. Every Fascist movement in Catholic Countries has had either an alliance between Catholic Action types and more atheistic elements, or an overt "Clerico Fascist" orientation (as for example with Salazar in Portugal). Since world War II the Catholic elements have been even more overt.
Anyway that is a summary of the history of the movements primary ideas.
Further reading: http://www.tnr.com/booksarts/story.html?id=82c53220-7594-4ece-a136-a3b2f54243ec
Chris
I've been researching corporate law in my spare time. It might have been a boring subject if it didn't impace all our lives. The history of Corporate law is that in the 19th century, soon after the Civil War, a number of ex generals, lawyers, entrepeneurs, and other connected people started forming corporations. What they created was to become the "Delaware model" for corporate Governance, and is old enough now so that those who "believe" in it call themselves "traditionalists." This model has sometimes brought progress, has been a vehicle for enriching a few people, but has not been very good for stockholders unless they had deep pockets for risk taking. Indeed the Delaware model stripped away previous requirements for unanimity, weakened the power of stockholders, and gave corporate nearly unlimited executive powers in return for little in exchange:
The Wiki article states:
"In the 19th century, state corporation laws enhanced the rights of corporate boards to govern without unanimous consent of shareholders in exchange for statutory benefits like appraisal rights, to make corporate governance more efficient."
These laws began to be challenged in the 1880's as corporations like Standard Oil, Railroads, and other utilities began charging high rates and putting competitors out of business. So Corporations began looking to the USA supreme Court and to small investor friendly states for refuge against increasingly law enforcement directed State actions:
"Since that time, and because most large publicly traded corporations in the US are incorporated under corporate administration friendly Delaware law, and because the US's wealth has been increasingly securitized into various corporate entities and institutions, the rights of individual owners and shareholders have become increasingly derivative and dissipated. The concerns of shareholders over administration pay and stock losses periodically has led to more frequent calls for corporate governance reforms."
They have been aided in blocking efforts by the Chambers of Commerce (which have armies of lobbyists and deep pockets) and the Supreme Court:
http://www.socialfunds.com/news/article.cgi/1044.html
"SocialFunds.com -- In the Kasky v. Nike case that the U.S. Supreme Court will hear this April, Nike (ticker: NKE) is claiming First Amendment free speech rights, which prohibit only libel and slander. Social advocate Marc Kasky's lawyers counter that all corporate communications are bound by more restrictive commercial speech laws, which prohibit the kinds of deceit free speech allows. Nike's claim to free speech rights is predicated on an 1886 Supreme Court case that established "corporate personhood" and extended citizens' rights to corporations."
...and that was cited in later precedents by Supreme Court justices, who often were not exactly uninterested in the decisions they presided over.
However, the Supreme Court justices' 1886 decision did not, in fact, establish corporate personhood, according to author Thom Hartmann. In his recent book, Unequal Protection: The Rise of Corporate Dominance and the Theft of Human Rights, Mr. Hartmann documents how corporations claimed the Constitutional rights of personhood under the Fourteenth Amendment almost immediately after the amendment was passed. The Fourteenth Amendment extended Constitutional rights to slaves freed after the U.S. Civil War.
Buy:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1579549551/thomhartmann/ref=nosim/
The first Supreme Court justice to write an opinion on a case where a corporation claimed personhood under the Fourteenth Amendment "minced no words in chastising corporations for trying to claim the rights of human beings," writes Mr. Hartmann.
Attorneys learn in law school that the 1886 Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Company case established corporate personhood. However, when Mr. Hartmann read the actual decision, he found that the justices had ruled on specific tax laws and explicitly excluded the issue of corporate personhood. Baffled by this apparent contradiction, Mr. Hartmann looked up the case in Volume 118 of United States Reports: Cases Adjudged in The Supreme Court at October Term 1885 and October Term 1886 at the Vermont Supreme Court law library.
Mr. Hartmann discovered that the headnotes, which are the court reporter's summary of the case, asserted that "corporations are persons within the intent . . . of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution ...," an opinion the justices did not state in the ruling.
Mr. Hartmann consulted Vermont Secretary of State and attorney Deb Markowitz, who said, "Headnotes are not precedential." In speaking with SocialFunds.com, Ms. Markowitz confirmed this statement and added that corporate personhood became legal precedent when subsequent Supreme Court cases cited the 1886 case, regardless of the fact that the opinion appeared in the headnotes and not in the ruling. However, she said, the fact that the original headnotes lack legal authority leaves corporate personhood open to challenge and potential reversal.
"The Supreme Court has reversed late nineteenth century decisions in the twentieth century in two huge cases: Roe v. Wade in 1973, which established women's right to privacy by overturning the 1873 Bradwell v. State of Illinois case, and Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, which established equal rights for African Americans by overturning the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson case," Mr. Hartmann told SocialFunds.com.
"I'm hopeful that a third reversal will happen with corporate personhood," he continued. "I'm frankly doubtful that it'll be the Kasky case that brings about the reversal."
Both Larry Tribe, Nike's counsel, and Alan Caplan, Mark Kasky's counsel, concurred, telling SocialFunds.com that the Kasky v. Nike case does not present the issue of corporate personhood for the Supreme Court justices' consideration.
"However, it may be the Kasky case that helps set up the reversal," Mr. Hartmann added. "My hope is that somehow the personhood issue can get slipped into the proceedings, primarily to educate Chief Justice Rehnquist and some of the other justices that the court never ruled that corporations are persons in 1886."
"In the 1978 First National Bank of Boston v. Bellotti case, the case that gave corporations the unlimited right to give money to political causes, Justice Rehnquist wrote the dissent in the 5-4 ruling," Mr. Hartmann said.
Justice Rehnquist opened the dissent by citing the 1886 Santa Clara County case.
"This Court decided at an early date, with neither argument nor discussion, that a business corporation is a 'person' entitled to the protection of the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment," Justice Rehnquist wrote.
"Rehnquist then goes on to say he thinks it's wrong that the court ruled that way," Mr. Hartmann said. "I think it might be very useful for him to discover that the court did not in fact rule that way."
Of course, there is fat chance that he'd bother. The fact is that the corporatists in our country are moving to internationalize this sort of government, and make it universal, dictatorial, and hegemonic. My hypothesis is that part of that involves stripping the US Federal Government of power in the same way they stripped the states of power in the 19th century.
http://www.socialfunds.com/news/article.cgi/1044.html
For more on this visit:
And for the reality of where the major corporations and right wing have us and are heading us and the rest of the world read:
Chris ;-)
I don't like defending Richard Scrushy, much of what he has done is indefensible. On the one hand, he created Health South, was CEO when Health South engaged in financial hijinks, and was the first CEO to be tried under Sarbanes Oxley. He was involved in politics, charity, and corruption all through the South but specifically in Alabama. He was the symbol of a number of trends I find distasteful even nasty. I believe that hospitals and health systems should be run like businesses in the sense of accounting and concern for the bottom line. His was the opposite of that kind of business. On the other hand I believe they should be run like non-profit businesses and focus on their mission -- providing health service. His was the opposite of that too.
But on the other hand he didn't go to jail for all that stuff. When he finally went to jail it was for making a political contribution to Don Siegelman's charity, supposedly in order to keep his seat on a hospital regulatory board after having contributed to Don Siegelman's opponent in the election. That prosecution was political. Scrushy deserved to do some time, just not for that.
The business of running hospitals as a business is legitimate (they have to at least break even and they should have a business model). Moreover, he went to jail after a corrupt prosecution driven by an even more corrupt administration aimed at getting at the Governor of Alabama through him (Don Siegelman).
And on the other hand I can relate to him. He's one of those fellows who one day realized that the path to get ahead is to buckle down and get involved in the system. At one time he was a blue collar worker stuck in a dead end job. Then he decided to get along to go along. I can almost imagine him cutting his hair, dumping any liberal ideas and moving up the corporate ladder:
"According to Scrushy, he became dissatisfied with his job and one day just walked off the site. He walked all the way to his parents' house, where he told his mother he wanted to earn his high school diploma and go to college. His mother, a nurse, encouraged him to pursue a career as a respiratory technician. He studied for a year at Jefferson Community College in Birmingham while working nights at a local hospital's respiratory therapy program to support his family. After completing his clinical training at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, Scrushy got a job there teaching respiratory therapy."
http://www.referenceforbusiness.com/biography/S-Z/Scrushy-Richard-M-1952.html
He started Health South:
"When Lifemark was acquired in 1983, Scrushy had to find a new opportunity. While he was still at Lifemark, he had framed an idea for a company that would offer outpatient rehabilitation services, helping patients return to work more quickly, and for less expense, than a traditional inpatient hospital. With an investment of $50,000 and the help of four friends, Scrushy formed HealthSouth. Starting as a single out-patient clinic in Little Rock, Arkansas, the company soon grew into a small chain of clinics. Scrushy had bigger plans, however. He wanted his company to be the first to provide widespread rehabilitation services outside the hospital setting. As he told a friend, "I'm either going to make it big or go flat broke" (Fortune, July 7, 2003)."
He did make it big. And that is probably what laid him open to trouble. While he was growing his business he maintained tight control. But once he got to the top it appears he let go a bit, got involved in mergers and acquisitions, and went along with or committed most of the minor frauds and financial tricks that have recently brought down the entire Financial System. He invested in a company named Medpartners, over-extended, and saw his whole house of cards fall. Eventually he had to step down from running his company. He had been guilty of engaging in massive fraud and accounting hijinks with the connivance of insurance and accounting firms. In 2003 he pleads guilty to bank fraud:
Scrushy wasn't alone:
"Reports indicate that the FBI is currently overwhelmed by vast numbers of fraud investigations. It looks very much as if the sort of things which have been detected across the health care marketplace over the last 12 years were a pointer to what was happening in the wider US marketplace, and also perhaps in Australia."
Health care, real estate, the Bush administration. The question becomes where wasn't there fraud going on?
Meanwhile one of Scrushies sideshows tangled Governor Siegleman:
http://www.uow.edu.au/arts/sts/bmartin/dissent/documents/health/healthsouth_bribery.html
http://www.uow.edu.au/arts/sts/bmartin/dissent/documents/health/healthsouth_flowch.html
Here is where it gets interesting.
Sources and further reading:
http://www.newsmeat.com/ceo_political_donations/Richard_Scrushy.php