Obamination in Syria

        

It is difficult to believe that anyone would fall for the razzle dazzle that the Obama Administration is serving up in support of its desired intervention in Syria.

The Government's case that "Assad" used chemical weapons against civilians does not amount to anything more than alleging he had the capacity and opportunity to do so.   That is certainly the case, but any moron ought to understand that opportunity does not equate with commission.  The Administration has proffered no evidence (far less proof) that Syrian forces deployed the weapons on the dates in question.

That some kind of chemical attack took place appears to be undeniable.  The question of who mounted it depends on an antecedent issue; namely, the capacity and opportunity of the rebels to deploy such an attack themselves.  Curiously enough, the Administration did not argue that the rebels were incapable of mounting such an attack, although the British Prime Minister, David Cameron, did.  Still, as Cameron stated to the House of Commons, the evidence that the Syrian Government deployed chemical weapons was a "judgement."

In the absence of objective factual evidence going beyond circumstances of opportunity, one is left with arguments over motives.  On this plane, it is clear that the argument tips in favour of the Syrian Government, which could have had no reasonable motive for triggering international outrage by mounting a chemical attack.  That the rebels would wish to mount a false flag operation is equally obvious on the other side.

At best, there is simply no reliable evidence or credible argument that the Syrian Government is responsible for the attack.    But the issue of who smoked out whom is a red-herring in any event.

Assuming for the sake of argument that there was a government use of chemical weapons, the question becomes whether there is any legal basis for doing anything about it.  Given this assumption (that the Syrian Government is guilty as charged), there are three modes of reaction: political, economic and military. 

There is no question but that any and all nations have a right to shun Syria on whatever grounds and to the extent they deem expedient.  They may refuse to trade with Syria, they may exclude it from reciprocal treaties and engagements.  They need not even proffer a reason for doing so, but if they wish to assert  a  moral aversion to the use of gas, that would provide ample justification for responsive conduct which is in all events within national prerogative.

However, once a state proposes invasive measures, the question passes as to its legal authority under conventional international law to proceed in a violent manner.   Here, the premise for all further discussion is that no state has the right to intervene in the internal affairs of another.  The entire structure of international law is built on the premise of sovereign autonomy which accords to each and every nation a right not to be attacked by any other state.   This axiom ought not to be discarded with jejune cynicism because the alternative is simply ongoing chaos and war.

Clearly, all states reserve the right of self-defence and this includes retaliation after an attack.   The right arguably includes pre-emptive self-defence at least in cases where there is clear and convincing intelligence of an imminent attack.  To this extent the allowed conduct of states is analogous to the law of self-defence among individuals.

However, the extension of pre-emptive defence to include attacks aimed at degrading or destroying a potential enemy's capacity to attack is nothing but a polemical perversion put forward by those whose secret aim is to undermine the entire structure of international law.

It is important to penetrate the sophistries underlying this perversion.  An adversary is a state which has opposed interests of one sort or another and which may harbour hostile designs.  An enemy is an actor who has declared or embarked on acts of war.  The competitive and adversarial nature of international relations is both undeniable and contemplated.  But the entire point of international law is to keep the competition pacific and on this side of aggressive acts.  A potential enemy is merely an adversary  -- a state which is not subservient to, or aligned with the interests of the potential aggressor.  To argue for preemptive defence against "potential enemies" or mere adversaries is none other than to assert a "right" to make war at will.

Equally vague is the asserted right to defend against a "capacity" to attack.  International lawyers are currently quibbling over the distinction between "capacity" and "capability."  The quibble is beside the point.  All states have some capacity to make some kind of war, even if only with bows and arrows.  Most states have varying degrees of capability to make effective modern war.  Any state with a modern industrial base has a significant capability to make effective war.   Defence against a capacity or capability is another word for destroying an adversary's civil, economic and military infrastructure.   This was why, in the run-up to the U.S. invasion of Iraq, fertiliser factories  were alleged to be weapons sites. 

When a U.S. administration speaks of deterring "potential threats" (that is, a  potential, possible harm) it is not referring to any imminent aggression or actual harm but rather to using "forward presence operations" to "preclude the development of any potentially hostile entity" and for the sake of "deterring potential competitors from even aspiring to a larger regional or global role," as Dick Cheney's  Defense Planning Guide put it. (Ibid,  Cover Letter, 18 Feb. 1992, I 91/28291, pp. 2, 26   [1].)

This double conditional phraseology has become entrenched in Washington's strategic lingo which routinely casts geopolitical issues in terms of "maintaining U.S. preeminence" by means of "power projection operations" aimed at "precluding" and "deterring" "potential rivals" or "potential enemies" or "potentially powerful states" which might seek to "expand their own  influence" or "that may threaten America's ability to exercise its dominant military power." (See e.g., P.N.A.C's  September 2000 White Paper, entitled Rebuilding America's Defenses [2] ).

While the public's general indifference to English grammar might make it tone deaf to what is being said, Government statements and memoranda invariably conceive national defence in terms of ongoing "power projection" or, in plain Anglo-Saxon, bullying.

With this summary in mind, it can be seen that the neocon doctrine of preemptive defence against the capacity of potential enemies to present a threat (i.e. a possible harm) to the United States in unspecified ways is nothing less than advocacy of ongoing chaos and destruction.   To label such policy, "satanic" is hardly an exaggeration, for that is what Satan is about.

There is, in the present situation, no assertion, yet, that the use of gas in Syria constituted an attack or presented a true and imminent threat to the United States.  In the world of phantasmagorical (or pathological) abstractions, Syria might possibly attempt a gas attack on some United States installation or craft.  The likelihood of her doing so, without provocation is, zero.   There is simply no basis for asserting national self-defence on the assumed basis that the Syrian Government deployed chemical weapons against its own domestic insurgents.

President Obama might intone that Syria's use of chemical weapons implicates "core national security interests" but he does not even attempt to explain how other than to fall back on the neocon doctrine that the potential of any state to possibly present a threat qualifies as a "clear and present danger" which justifies a pre-emptive attack.   Within a more rational construct of reality, it suffices to say that a U.S. attack on Syria simply cannot be justified as self-defence.

Nevertheless,  the use of chemical weapons against domestic insurgents or a civil population does give rise to a conundrum in international law.  For, while the resort to such weapons, as a substantive fact, may be universally condemned, there is no universally agreed upon or satisfactory procedure for responding to their use.

After the Great War, virtually all nations signed a convention against the use of chemical weapons during war.  The idea was that, by whatever means nations might obliterate their young men, the use of gas was not one of them.  Since no attack at all against civilian populations is permitted, it went without saying that the use of gas against an enemy's non-combatants was also prohibited. 

If such an attack takes place, during war, the aggrieved belligerent party is entitled to take such proportionate retaliatory measures it deems fit.  In this context, "proportionate" typically means a tooth for a tooth, and maybe one more for good measure.

What happens, however, when a country uses chemical weapons against its own population, or "gasses" them in large numbers by other means?   This was the conundrum which presented itself at the Nuremberg Trials after the World War.  Germany and Germans could be tried and convicted for war-crimes against nations with whom it had been at war and against civilian populations under occupation.  But there was no basis for prosecuting anyone for crimes Germany committed against its own citizens, in particular against German Jews.  Horrendous as it might have been, it was not a war crime but rather a moral outrage which had occurred within the temporal framework of a war.

It was the Victors' determination to punish such conduct which gave rise to the newly-minted doctrine of "Crimes against Humanity." Accordingly, the Nuremberg Tribunal did the legal equivalent of a skip-and-shuffle, ruling that "insofar as the inhumane acts charged in the Indictment, and committed after the beginning of the war, did not constitute war crimes, they were all committed in execution of, or in connection with, the aggressive war, and therefore constituted crimes against humanity." [3]   In other words, non-prosecutable crimes against a belligerent's own citizens were piggy-backed onto the war-in-general.

As it evolved after Nuremberg, the doctrine of "Crimes Against Humanity" applies without more to any country's own civilian population, but the conduct in question must be  part either of a government policy or of a wide practice of atrocities tolerated or condoned by a government or a de facto authority.  Isolated or sporadic events simply do not qualify. (Article 7, Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, (2002).) [4]   Sporadic events may be violative (and prosecutable) as violations of the traditional laws of war but absent systematic practice they do not constitute crimes against humanity.  

Historically speaking, the requirement of  a "widespread or systematic"  practice had its genesis in the fact that the concept of  "crimes against humanity"  arose in reaction to ongoing practices such as the slave-trade, the reduction of entire populations to slavery and genocide.   The practical purpose of the systemic requirement, was to set a fairly high threshold for responsive action.  

The limitations of the concept are implicit from the circumstances out of which it evolved.  They presuppose an ongoing practice of multiple, successive horrors and they envision after the fact prosecution by some victorious agency.  In other words, the deterrence lies principally in the fact that if the perpetrator(s) loose the conflict they will be punished.

Recognising the weakness of the beer, the United Nations Charter did provide a mechanism for intervention against presently ongoing atrocities, provided the intervention was authorised by the international community as  represented by the Security Council.  The obvious and practical purpose of this requirement was to preclude the chaos which would ensue from individual states unilaterally assuming the prerogatives of Lord Protector of the World. 

The problem with this mechanism was that the Security Council itself was merely the formalisation of rival world hegemonies.  Unanimity among the major powers in the Council was unattainable with respect to any country in which a major power had a protective interest.  

This deadlock is a reflection of the actual scepticism countries harbour with respect to humanitarian crimes.  The deadlock not only reflects one major power's venal desire to shield crimes by its own, it also reflects the rival power's equally venal desire to promote its own interests under the pretext of a humanitarian intervention.

The U.S. media is prone to harping on Soviet vetoes of Council resolutions.  But the United States has not been laggard itself.  It has consistently vetoed resolutions adversely impacting on its own interests and in 2011 both the Obama Administration and the House of Representatives signalled a U.S. veto of any resolution condemning Israel for "systematic and deliberate" war crimes against the civilian population of Gaza (including the use of white phosphorous) which were determined to have occurred by  United Nation's independent Goldstone Commission. [5]

Removing the requisite authorisation for intervention from the Security Council to the General Assembly would constitute an obvious and actual democratisation of the ideal of "international consensus."  However, the United States has been the principal opponent of any such improvement.

The ineffectiveness of existing mechanisms to interrupt and put a stop to "crimes against humanity" has recently given rise to the related doctrines of "humanitarian intervention" and "responsibility to protect" aggrieved populations ("R2P").   Generally speaking, these doctrines expand the scope of crimes against humanity so as to include various forms of civil discrimination and, at the same time lower the authorisation required for intervention.  [6]  [7]   [8]

Despite the veneer of politically correct moralising, the purpose of  these doctrines is simply to provide a supposedly "objective" set of standards for unilateral state action.  But legality is always less a matter of substance than a question of procedure.  The issue is not "what" but who determines "when". 

Humanitarian Intervention is simply the canard which accompanies the chaos of unilateralism.  In the 19th century, it was routinely invoked as a cover for  European colonial enterprises launched under the banner of the White Man's Burden to protect the native from his own. 

It is important to grasp that the concept of humanitarian intervention presupposes that national self-defence is not at issue.  There is no threat whatsoever to the intervening nation which supposedly acts solely for the good of others.

With this in mind, it can be seen that the doctrine is far older than modern colonialism.  It has its genesis in the christian doctrine of "just war" which was first explicitly put forth in 851 by St. Cyril of Constantine who argued  that while a Christian was affirmatively forbidden to resort to violence in order to defend himself it was laudable and requisite for him to come to the defence of others.  

This convenient doctrine was enthusiastically taken up by Pope Urban II in defence of the First Crusade, launched he said, to defend the helpless Christians of Jerusalem and to avenge the barbarities and sacrileges committed upon them,

They circumcise the Christians, and the blood of the circumcision they either spread upon the altars or pour into the vases of the baptismal font. When they wish to torture people by a base death, they perforate their navels, and dragging forth the extremity of the intestines, bind it to a stake; then with flogging they lead the victim around until the viscera having gushed forth the victim falls prostrate upon the ground. Others they bind to a post and pierce with arrows. Others they compel to extend their necks and then, attacking them with naked swords, attempt to cut through the neck with a single blow. What shall I say of the abominable rape of the women? To speak of it is worse than to be silent."  (Translations and Reprints from the Original Sources of European History, Vol 1:2, (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 1895), 5-8.)  [9]

The modern, enlightened age has been no less ornate in its rhetoric.  During the Great War, British soldiers were urged to their own slaughter with fabricated stories of the Huns roasting babies on bayonets and of the Kaiser's infernal  Kadaververwertungsanstalten or corpse-rendering factories, where bodies of the battle-slain were allegedly turned into soap.  [10]

The most recent incarnation of the interventionist doctrine was the  Canadian R2P  proposal put forward in 2001 which sought to establish a set of clear guidelines for determining when intervention is appropriate  and how the intervention itself should be carried out.  The proposal recommends a conceptual shift from a "right to intervene" to thinking in terms of "a duty to protect." 

The proposal is correct in its understanding that "a non-defensive right to intervene" is to all intents and purposes a contradiction in terms.  But casting the issue in terms of a duty to protect is simply a modern day resurrection of St. Cyril's doctrine -- although the authors of the report were undoubtedly ignorant of first millennium orthodox moral theology. 

The critical question is not what constitutes a humanitarian violation nor how the intervention is to be carried out.  The only way to provide a truly disinterested procedure for determining when intervention is necessary and appropriate is to put the matter before the international community as a whole.

Unfortunately, any present-day discussion of humanitarian intervention gets burdened with what lawyers call "a parade of horribles" or an invocation of "The Holocaust" which, supposedly, trumps all argument and serves as a trumpet for any  intervention.   Argumentum ab horibilis is a species of rhetoric that passes into dramatic spectacle the purpose of which (as Aristotle pointed out) is to suspend credulity and to equate caution with acquiescence. The spectre conjured up is  that of babies being tossed into the flames or a reburnished  Kadaververwertungsanstalten  in which millions were lined up for gassing, incineration and recycling into soap, slippers and lamp shades.  "How," it is asked, "how can one do nothing in face of such unspeakable horrors?!?!?"

The flaw in the rhetoric is that, by definition, "widespread and systemic" crimes do not take place as they are unitarily depicted after the fact.  There is, as it were, no there, there.  This is illustrated by the  genocide of European Jews itself, which, as the most serious "non-revisionist" historians concede,  was the result of a confluence of often separate and unrelated actions always taken under cover of war or cover of production.  Two impeccable sources provide examples of what was known:  Rafael Lemkin, the Polish Jew, who analysed Nazi Occupation policies and who coined the word "genocide" which until then did not exist ( [11] [12] ) and Pope Pius XII who, in 1942, denounced the "progressive extermination" of the Jews which, he said, was taking place. [13] 

Both men saw the situation up close;  Lemkin from a first row seat and Pius through the thousand eyes of clerical reports.  At the same time, neither man saw the whole phenomenon but rather myriad pieces only some of which involved mass "executions." What both came to understand was that the Nazis had deployed policies the cumulative and ultimate effect of which would be the erasure of Jews from society as an intellectual, social, and physical phenomenon. 

But the fact that distinct and dispersed policies might unite in a common result does unify those policies in their actual execution.  The singularity of the term "holocaust" misleadingly suggests a singularity of event -- that a genocide took place, like a murder.  However, genocides and systematic crimes against humanity do not take place in the unitary singular but through a multiplicity of instances. They may be united conceptually by plan, purpose or confluent effect, but "the crime"  occurs severally and distinctly. 
 
Thus, against what precisely were the Allies supposed to intervene and how were they to do so?  At the time, alleged "gas chambers" were little more than a rumour and even if accepted as true left open the question of where exactly they might be located.  When President Roosevelt stated that the best way to stop the depredations then being committed against Jews and others was to win the war, he was not making excuses but rather an completely correct assessment based on what was reliably known. A pervasive crime could only be stopped by an equally pervasive solution.

This brief digression into a particular historical issue has been necessitated by the polemical arguments of those who advocate "humanitarian intervention" and who cite The Holocaust  as a trump card  to shame and silence any and all opposition.  But when the facts are objectively analysed the argument is void of substance. 

The conceptual defect of "humanitarian intervention" to prevent "crimes against humanity" is that it is not possible to take "tailored"  action against a "system" or to  target something that is widespread. Analyzed with practical logic,  the doctrine of humanitarian intervention is simply a pretext for general war. 

If on the other hand, the crime in question is some isolated non-systemic horror, then there is no legal authority for one state to violate the sovereignty of another in order to act as a prosecutor ad litem for what is, essentially, a discrete criminal act.

The attempt to fashion a doctrine of "responsibility to protect" simply wipes aside the difficulties with a moral bromide that  subjectively gratifies our inner sense of righteousness without providing any check, either substantive or procedural, against the abuse of morality in pursuit of nefarious national interests.

The intervention into Syria contemplated by the United States suffers from all the defects of the R2P protocol.  Even assuming that the Government of Syria is responsible for an incident of gassing its own civilians and assuming further that this incident constitutes a systemic crime against humanity or a violation of accepted humanitarian modes of conduct, there is simply no international consensus warranting an intervention. 

Instead, President Obama falls back entirely and fully on Cheney's neocon doctrine of preventive power projection.  In his request to Congress, Obama scores "Syria's acquisition of weapons of mass destruction" which he declaims, "threatens the security of the Middle East and the national security interests of the United States."   Accordingly he, requests authority "to deter disrupt, prevent and degrade the potential for future uses of chemical weapons or other weapons of mass destruction"  in order " to protect the United States and its allies and partners against the threat posed by such weapons."  [14]

The game is given away by the "or."  Obama does not limit the request to destroying existing arsenals of chemical weapons but wants approval to destroy any weapon of mass destruction on the ground that their mere existence is a "threat" to the United States "or" Israel.  Dick Cheney could not have said it more bluntly.

In his previous statement on 31 August, President Obama sought to sharpen the bluntness by a rhetorical pitch worthy of Urban II, in which he spoke of "young girls and boys gassed to death by their own government" which constituted "an assault on human dignity" and which made "a mockery" of international law.  "What message will we send," he asked, "if a dictator can gas hundreds of children to death in plain sight... What does it say about our resolve to stand up to others who flout fundamental international rules?  To governments who would choose to build nuclear arms? To terrorist who would spread biological weapons? To armies who carry out genocide?"  [15]

The statement bespoke its own hypocrisy.  International norms require international approval for an "intervening" attack on a sovereign nation.  The Administration has presented no pretence of a claim that the Syrian "rebels" constitute anything like a recognisable de facto rival belligerent and government.  The only state in the region who has chosen to build nuclear arms is Israel.  If any party has a record of "spreading" biological weapons in the region it has been the United States which supplied them to Iraq, condoned their use in the 1980's and deployed white phosphorous  in Fallujah in 2004.

The Administration has obliquely referred to the fact that dastardly Syria has refused to sign the protocol against biological weapons.  What the Administration omits to note is that Israel has refused to sign the nuclear non-proliferation treaty.  When the two facts are viewed together what is more than obvious is that Syria's refusal is made to counter-balance the hegemony of the Israeli nuclear threat. 

In 2004, Obama loftily intoned his hope for an emergence from the "long political darkness" into which the Bush Administration had plunged the country.  In 2013, with a "righteous wind" coming from his mouth, Obama  seeks to extend the long night of darkness even further.  

©Barfo, 2013

[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolfowitz_Doctrine

[2]http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Defense_Policy_Guidance_1992-1994

[3] http://avalon.law.yale.edu/imt/judlawre.asp

[4]http://untreaty.un.org/cod/icc/statute/romefra.htm

[5]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_Fact_Finding_Mission_on_the_Gaza_Conflict

[6] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humanitarian_intervention 

[7]http://www.responsibilitytoprotect.org/

[8] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Responsibility_to_protect

[9] http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/source/urban2-5vers.html)

[10]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kadaververwertungsanstalt

[11]http://www.preventgenocide.org/lemkin/americanscholar1946.htm (links to original works)

[12] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raphael_Lemkin

[13]http://www.newoxfordreview.org/reviews.jsp?did=0200-cavalli

[14]http://www.cnn.com/2013/08/31/us/obama-authorization-request-text

[15]http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2013/08/31/statement-president-syria

A Compoundment of Lies

From huckstering and finessing, Obambi has now passed over onto outright lying. 

Speaking (appropriated enough) on a late night comedy talk show, the Chief Lawn Ornament stated “We don’t have a domestic spying program. What we do have are some mechanisms where we can track a phone number or an email address..."

Amazingly enough, Ornament made this "remark" but days after the leaks revealed the Government's SOD programme.

"Leaked documents have revealed the existence of a Special Operations Division (SOD) within the Drug Enforcement Agency that receives and distributes tips gleaned by the NSA to arrange arrests, and then hides where that information came from. ...  SOD was set up in 1994 to deal with drug cartels and organised trafficking of narcotics, and uses information provided by the NSA and other sources to inform agents of possible arrest possibilities. ... Part of the deal for getting this data is that the DEA and others should cover up the information's source by setting up a fake investigation trail – a process known as "parallel construction". For example, the police could say the arrest was made during a routine traffic stop or on the word of an informant."  [ UK Register ]

Parallel Construction ... but another euphemism for lying. What it means is that when the police need to swear out a warrant they string together "hypothetical facts" to support their alleged probable cause.  The police actually have their own word for it: testilying.

Testilying has been going on for decades it is well known to every criminal lawyer that ever set foot in a court room.  It is well known to judges who specialise in swallowing with a straight face. 

Parallel Construction is so well known that it even made it to the United States Supreme Court which upheld the constitutionality of pretextual stops in Whren v. United States (1996), 517 U.S. 806,  ruling that an officer's motive for stopping a vehicle was constitutionally irrelevant so long as he could allege "objective facts" (e.g. a broken tail-light) which would justify the stop.  (Id., at p. 813.)  By "motive" the Court meant "other reasons" and it was not so stupid as to believe that these "other reasons" were restricted to a "subjective" yearning to see the young blonde's boobs up close. 

For decades judges have winked at lying cops and have played credulous and stupid when told that the suspect vehicle was pursued for 10 miles in a high speed chase through residential neighbourhoods in order to effect a stop for expired registration tags. 

In other words, not only could the cops hide the true reasons for their detention, search and arrests, judges indulged them even when they lied about the existence of the alleged "objective" pretext.  As long as the police could come up with something that sounded good, the Constitution was appeased. 

And cometh now the Presidential Lawn Ornament to lie about the lying.  Our government is nothing but a heap of lies compounded on lies. 

©Barfo, 2013

From Boston to Fatah

      

In Zeitgeist for a New Century, we again argued that the war on terror "over there" of necessity entailed a war on terror "in here" and that the images of the war in Baghdad and Guantánamo would become the images of "security" in Boston and San Diego. 

As the fates would have it, once again, the Government confirms what people wish to disbelieve.  Testifying before a Senate Sub-Committee  Assistant Secretary of Defence for Special Operations, Michael Sheehan, told lawmakers that the war on terror would last "at least 10 to years."  The scope of America’s counterterrorism program, Sheehan said, stretches “from Boston to the FATA,” (a part of Pakistan considered to be a hotbed of terrorism.)

From Boston... and if from Boston, then too from Chicago and if from Chicago, then too from San Diego. 

Got it? 

LBJ played Politics, not Golf

A press foto of President Obama chumming it up with GOP Senator Crocker triggered another memory in our mind,

one of several fotos showing LBJ leaning into and squeezing Republican and Dixiecrat opponents of the Civil Rights Act.

Now no one can fault a politician for shmoozing with the opposition.  No one can fault him for making nice and praising a creepture who otherwise makes him vomit.  Politics is the disgusting art of the possible.  

But when all is said and done, people expect those with power to use their power to get their avowed results.   Everything about Obama's shit-eating, I-made-it grin, tell us that he is not putting muscle into being the champion of Seniors, Students, the Sick, the Unemployed, the Homeless, the war-torn, the ecologically devasted.    Why should anyone think otherwise when he has in fact accomplished nothing that is anything  more than public relations chicken feed.

We have previously posted a synopsis of Teddy Roosevelts, Osawatomie Speech.  Likewise the video of Franklin Roosevelt's  Economic Bill of Rights.   We post now an interesting blog link [HERE] with transcripts and audios of Lyndon B. Johnson, squeezing the political flesh where it hurts -- amusing and admirable examples of cajoling Congress instead of doing  nothing and letting  it arrive at a consensus which inevitably subserves corporate interests.  We also post a link to his 1965 Address to Congress on the Civil Rights Act.

Johnson was no silver tongued speaker.  He was leaden and halting.  He could not hold a candle to Obama's silky, pre-vetted,  kneaded clichés.  But  what Johnson said in conclusion  was something Obama might well ask himself.

"What shall a man profit if he gain the whole world and loose his own soul?  .... There is no Negro problem.  There is no Northern problem.  There is no Southern problem. There is only an American problem."

©

America's Image

J.F.Kennedy's Motorcade Entering Zocalo 1962

We thought it would be interesting to contrast Mexico's welcome and the impression the United States makes in two different epochs.   

Obama's Security Limo Traversing Evacuated Zocalo 2013

Zeitgeist for a New Century

One way or another, what goes around comes around and it did not take more than ten years for the securitization inflicted on Baghdad to come back and bite the citizens of Boston. 

[continue reading]

.

Miranda as Prophecy - A Better Subversion

Along with news of the Marathon Bombing, the F.B.I. disclosed that an unknown person had mailed letters containing suspected ricin powder to the president and senator Wicker.  Far more important than the tittle-tattle risk which neither of the "intended victims" came close to incurring was the more ominous inference, which could be deduced from the incident, that the country has been taken into custody.

Within hours, it was reported that the F.B.I. had detained a man "in the area" with a backpack in which sealed envelopes had been found. (BBC) [1] Aha!  Sealed envelopes.  Q.E.D.

What area? we wondered; and how did the agents know that that backpack on thatperson had contained suspicious "sealed envelopes"?  The reports were devoid of such details -- the question of probable cause apparently is of no interest to the Fourth Estate.  Well they must have had something.... Indeed, but what?  Apparently nothing because the man with the suspicious envelopes was released. 

However, the following day it was reported that the F.B.I. had located a suspect on the basis of tell-tale word patterns.  As it turns out, both letters had used the phrase "I am KC and I approve this message."  The suspect, Kevin Curtis,  had also used the identical phrase in an online comment on a blog post in 2007, the only difference being the use of his full name.  (REUTERS) [2]

The speed and efficacy of the F.B.I. was breathtaking.  They had managed to obtain and serve warrants on an untold number of I.S.P's in a plethora of jurisdictions and plow through six years of global chat in order to discover the telltale needle in a heaping haystack of billions upon billions of chitter in the chatter.

Or, had they merely flipped a switch in a massive datamine of internet traffic filtering bytes through algorithms in search of a phrase?  In either case: Chill out dude -- Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law. 

Although the press was content to repeat whatever facts F.B.I. news releases presented to them, they appeared oblivious to the disturbing inferences which might be drawn from the facts the authorities saw fit to disclose.

If the incriminating phrase had been retrieved from a massive datamine of all our on-line (and telephone) communications, then the Government should at least give all of us  the proverbial Miranda warnings.

As a legal matter, Miranda warnings are required only upon being taken into custody. By the same token, the giving of them implicates being in custody.  But equally significant is the fact Miranda states; i.e. that anything said will be used against the declarant.  When anything we say "can and will" be used against us we are no longer free.

It is no doubt true that any statement anywhere can be used to a person's detriment.  But statements made in the open air of freedom get disbursed and lost.  There is a natural haphazardness to their being remembered or, just as likely, forgotten.  In contrast, statements made in custody are recorded. They are taken down as much as the suspect is locked up and this applies equally to statements made during interviews or personal telephones calls.  There is no privacy in custody; and where there is no privacy, there is no freedom.

Most people think of "custody" as a restraint of movement -- of being locked up in a tight space.  But that is only a derivative meaning.  More primarily the word custody means: "A keeping or guarding; care, watch, inspection, for keeping, preservation, or security." (Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary (1913), p. 358.)

It is necessary to distinguish confinement as punishment and custody as a precaution.  Accused miscreants were locked up in earlier times because it was next to impossible to keep watch over them otherwise. But it is not always necessary to lock up in order to watch over. Black slaves in the United States and collared Roman slaves in Rome were allowed to roam with an appearance of freedom because their colour or their collar rendered them under watch and inspection automatically.  No one would argue that these slaves were not in custody.  On the contrary their status was their detention.

Similarly, the fact that our words are being taken down for keeping and inspection means that we ourselves are being watched for security and are therefore ipso facto in custody even if we are allowed every appearance of free roaming.

The elimination of privacy -- that is to say, the taking custody of a nation -- was most irreversibly the creation of the Patriot Act.  But the ideological underpinnings which allowed the Act to be rationalised under an appearance of logic go back to California v. Greenwood (1988) 486 U.S. 35, which held that there is no expectation of privacy in garbage. Having deposited one’s garbage “in an area particularly suited for public inspection and, in a manner of speaking, public consumption,” a person “could have had no reasonable expectation of privacy in the inculpatory items that they discarded.” (Ibid.)

Yes, the High Court, actually said that.  They said it on the precedent of Smith v. Maryland (1979) 442 U.S. 735 which had held that dialled telephone numbers were not private. Entrusting garbage, the Greenwood Court intoned, was no different than dialling telephone numbers and “we doubt that people in general entertain any actual expectation of privacy in the numbers they dial.”   To be sure they did not; for, after all, the most very High Court had told them they did not.

We reported on Greenwood back in 2006 because we felt that it was significant in view of the Security Actions being taken by the Government at the time.  (And the Lord will not hear You on that Day )  But little heed was taken of chips in the wind as the Nation moved with determination to eliminate all potential dangers (as they have been called).

The vice of Greenwood is that it perverts our concept of privacy and, doing so, degrades our understanding of freedom.  The premise of Greenwood was that a person has no privacy in public because in public one is exposed to general view.  But, to say as much is to resort to a tautology masquerading as an argument.

It is true that "in public" a person is "in general view" but these two terms are not interchangeable with "no privacy."  What the tautology overlooks is the equally salient fact that "general view" and "surveillance" are not the same thing.  The former is haphazard and indifferent and it is these qualities which create the  space for freedom.  In public, others may notice what we do but for the most part are indifferent to our doings. Because passers-by are not keeping us under watch we are  able to go about our private business in public being left alone.  In contrast, ongoing, purposeful surveillance is the very core definition of custody because it does not leave one alone but rather follows, tracks, records one's every move with the very opposite of indifference.  What Greenwood allows is for the Commons to be turned into a jail and for freedom to be confined to the privacy of one's closet.

To say as much is not a sophistical switching of terms between "privacy" and "freedom."   It is an interchanging of terms which reflects the true meaning of "custody".  Freedom is not simply a question mobility and action.  It is, most essentially, a question of being not under guard.  We are free in public because we are not being watched and, not being watched, we are about our private business in the open.

The roots of Greenwood's misnformed constitutionalism lie in an 1890 Harvard Law Review article by Samuel D. Warren, Louis D. Brandeis entitled, and inceptionally defining, The Right to Privacy.  Not atypically, Brandeis' quill cut both ways.  While the article is credited with birthing the concept of "the right to be left alone," it used medieval English property law as a paradigm and analogised the right of privacy to the fee simple absolute.  In a much quoted paragraph, Warren and Brandeis wrote,

"The common law secures to each individual the right of determining, ordinarily, to what extent histhoughts, sentiments, and emotions shall be communicated to others.  ... [H]e can never be compelled to express them.  ...  The right is lost only when the author himself communicates his production to the public, -- in other words, publishes it. ... [But]  the common-law right is lost as soon as there is a publication."

In so stating, the authors analogised "privacy" to "curtilage" and "publication" to "conveyance." While the analogy suited the article's overriding purpose of delineating the contours of intellectual property it did not deal with and thus provided only a defective basis for assessing privacy in a constitutional context.

In that context, the focus must as much be on the limits of governmental power as on the individual's supposed choice to "disclose" himself.  Between the privacy of one's curtilage and ambit of restrained governmental power lies that in-between space known as "public freedom". 

The concept of voluntary "exposure" may be an adequate foundation for assessing the extent of commercial rights granted or retained in remainder.  But it is not adequate for determining the political contours of freedom. The idea that civic privacy is "lost" by a decision to "expose" one's self (or to "publish" one's garbage) tacitly assumes that everywhere else, not hidden, is government's unimpeded domain to do whatever it wants.   Likewise, it  implicitly converts public conduct to  an at-risk activity.

Taken to extremes, as it has been by the Government's asserted "right" to monitor and record e-mail and social chats, the ambit of privacy gets reduced to the curtilege of our skin.  Any contact outside of one's self becomes an "exposure" subject to surveillance, search, seizure.  Society is effectively atomized and the individual is left to what the Germans once called "inner emigration."   Life is turned into loneliness.

From all time, the world has understood how the existence of spies and delatores (professional snoops and denouncers) chills and snuffs out freedom. The Roman historian Tacitus called them  "a class invented to destroy the commonwealth." (Annals of Imperial Rome  Bk IV,  ch. 30)  But the United States Supreme Court has been impervious to the obvious.  While it has prohibited direct and specific infringements on freedom of expression it has consistently bent over acutely to affirm the Government's prerogative to gather intelligence.

Thus, in Laird v. Tatum (1972)  408 U.S. 1 the Supreme Court famously rejected a claim that  First Amendment rights were chilled "by the mere existence, without more, of a governmental investigative and data-gathering activity."  The information gathered, the Court intoned, was "nothing more than a good newspaper reporter would be able to gather by attendance at public meetings and the clipping of articles from publications available on any newsstand."  Previously in Uphaus v. Wyman, (1950) 360 U.S. 72 the high Court upheld a State's prerogative to "gather and publish information on a person's potentially subversive associations."

Laird's reasoning was beyond specious. Reporters do not have the power to prosecute, imprison and execute.  Government does not investigate to inform but to suppress.  State activity can simply never be analogised to private conduct.  In fact, because of what the State is as such, government participation in or open access to data-gathering of itself transforms the nature of the process. A billing error can be corrected, a libel can be sued; but no imprisoned dissident has successfully sued his government for malicious prosecution.

Equally specious is the argument that those who have nothing to hide have nothing to fear. Because all meaning is contextual a speaker who is being recorded is forced to pre-check and reconsider anything he says for possible misinterpretation and use against him in the future.

Specious as it is, the High Court's doctrine could be summarised as, "Far be it from us to second-guess the Government's legislative purposes; if you don't like it, stay at home."  We may now add, "And avoid chat or email."

Historically speaking, the very most High Court is in the highest of company.   Tacitus reports that when the Senate sought to prohibit the use of roving, undercover spies, Tiberius "with a harshness contrary to his manner, spoke openly for the informers, complaining that the laws would be ineffective, and the state brought to the verge of ruin if their use were abolished 'Better,' he said, 'to subvert the constitution than to remove its guardians.'" (Annals   Bk. IV, ch.30.)

Hail Caesar! 

©Barfo, 2013

[1] http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-22190031

[2] http://uk.reuters.com/article/2013/04/18/uk-usa-obama-letter-idUKBRE93G0OW2013041

[3] http://wcg-journal.blogspot.com/2008/12/and-lord-will-not-hear-you-on-that-day.html

.

Die Volk Gefühlschaft

Why, we have wondered, do people from coast to coast emote over the "tragedy" in Boston? Although the press churns out one trivial-detail after another, blaming the emote-fest on the press falls short.  People needed little prompting to fill walls on social networks with poster pictures of the little boy... of the hero who... of flickering candles on the pavement and the full detritus of sentimentality.   We stand by you, Boston! Like. The press simply feeds what it knows the people want.

What then do the people want?  It occurs to us that what people want is a sense of community, of belonging and social empathy which we otherwise lack. But it is the same absence of social empathy, community and belonging which gave rise to the bombing in the first place.  In the end, we are trapped in a circle of anomie which feeds on itself.

There is no doubt that those who were directly impacted by the explosion suffered true and grievous losses which will stay with them for a long time.  There is nothing false or superficial about loosing one's child or an arm or a leg.

Those who were present at the event but who were not injured will suffer a psychological impact which arises from a consciousness of uncertainty and vulnerability.  Most humans live within a hermetic bubble of confidence, acquired from the time we take our third, fourth and fifth baby steps.  We could not live otherwise if we were paralysed by intimations of danger and misfortune lurking at every pass.  From time to time,  however, some event brings upon us an awareness  of our mortality and this fills us with hesitancy until we regain our forgetfulness.

But as for the vast rest of us -- are we affected?  No.  We have not lost a leg or a loved one and any danger of a like bombing on our own morning jog is far more remote than that of being struck by an impatient and inattentive motorist.

We are not affected but we want to be. Or, more precisely, we want to feel as if we are because that feeling is the type of feeling we would feel if we were family, neighbours and friends with those who did suffer.

True community arises out of shared experience in work, success, suffering and defeat.  We feel as one because we have felt together in living our common experience.  Even enemies in battle have a sense of community because they have both felt the common experience of war, as the meeting between Priam and Achilles so exquisitely symbolised.  The aged father and the young warrior were able to weep together and share their sorrows because they had each suffered grief at the hand of the other.  

"So the two men there both remembered warriors who’d been slaughtered. Priam, lying at Achilles’ feet, wept aloud  for man-killing Hector, and Achilles also wept  for his own father and once more for Patroclus. The sound of their lamenting filled the house."  (Iliad, Bk 24.)

This was not forgiveness but it was compassion.  The two men shared meat and drink.  They shared rest.  And Achilles gave Priam 12 days to fittingly bury Hector before resuming the war. 

There are happier communions but, howsoever they are, they all arise from real work and proximate living together.  In contrast, the shared experience and interests San Francisco has with Boston are remote and abstract.  The two cities are united by a vast economic engine and a shared deluge of consumer brands, styles and motifs.  But if either were to disappear from the map, the other would not be affected any more than the rest of the country was affected by the swamping of New Orleans.  The connections are real but they are not essential.

The same communal disconnect between Boston and San Francisco exist even between the denizens of Boston itself.  It is, after all, hardly a secret that mass industrial societies suffer from anomie; and it is the individual's estrangement from a society which denies him a connection that nurses and ultimately triggers the despaired reactions of suicide or homicide.

It is thus that the marathon bomber's act serves to remind us that we are estranged from ourselves.  If we were not, then such alienated crimes would not arise, as they do, among us.  To repeat: the bomber's destructive act reminds us that it is we who are alienated - not just him.  This is why in ancient Rome, for example, when a murder occurred within the walls, the entire city had to be evacuated and purified before being reoccupied.

The ancients acknowledged, in this manner, that there is in truth no such thing as an "individual crime."  The alienation that manifests itself in crime is a hole in our social fabric and it is the fabric which requires mending.  In contrast, the intense atomisation of American society (going under the brand of "individualism") masks the alienation which it itself produces so that we do not see the we in the matter.

But we do feel its absence -- that is, we sense our own lacking -- which is why the alienated action of the bomber(s) triggers an immediate and equally alienated reaction: the junk compassion of feeling as if we were affected.

Since the symptom was diagnosed by Durkheim, Western societies have struggled to deal with the problem of anomie.  For the most part, they have relied of "symptom relievers."  The most direct and candid attempt to deal with societal anomie was mounted by Germany's National Socialists whose Volk Gemeinschaft sought to create a palpable and real sense of "national community" without abolishing the industrialised, mechanised, regimented means of production which engendered the feeling of metropolitan isolation in the first place.

The United States has not been lacking in the attempt. The difference is in the style of the kitsch.  And although we do crowd masses onto the Mall on Independence Day where they can sit, eat and listen to insipid speeches and equally bad music, the Miracle of Television has allowed us to create all manner and layers of false community without having to jam people onto a field. 

But the fact remains: we are an alienated non-community and all the sympathetic emoting from coast to coast only serves to underscore that fact.  

©

The Germ of Tyranny

On the tenth "anniversary" of the Invasion of Iraq, the media is aslosh with the usual postgnostications about the mistakes made and the lessons learned from the disaster the United States inflicted on Iraq. 

Meanwhile, the detainees in "Camp Delta" at Guantánamo continue to starve themselves to death in protest against their continued and indefinite confinement.  Needless to say, those that have lost too much weight for official comfort are on "internal feeds," as camp spokesmen refer to force-feeding. As everyone outside of official Washington knows, solitary confinement and force-feeding are both forms of torture so that, in a brutal parody of Wall Street practices, torture is compounded on torture.  

Equally needless to say, the kindergarden that passes for an American press is incapable of seeing the lesson  to be learned from the very fundamentals of the so-called War on Terrorism.  Simple questions are beneath its sophistications.

Why are these people being held?  Virtually none of them have had a trial much less been convicted of anything. One would think that 12 years' detention without trial was something minimally civilised governments did not do.

The official answer to the simple question is that the detainees are enemy combatants.  With an air of insulted, incredulity, proponents of the detentions rhetorically ask whether anyone in their right mind would demand trials for prisoners of war. 

If one counters that the detainees are not enemy soldiers, the rejoinder is that "terrorism" is a different kind of war in which the "enemy" is unseen, amorphous and chameleon.  Not wanting anyone to pause and ponder the implications in the concept of an "unseen enemy," the official apology rushes on to assure us that, in compliance with Supreme Court decisions, the detainees are afforded a"minimal due process" hearing at which a determination is made by the detaining authority  that the detainee is in fact a de facto enemy combatant.  What more could one ask for?

One might ask for some minimum due process which is grounded in the ancient maxim of Roman law: nemo iudex in causam suam.  

The reason uniformed enemy combatants can be detained without trial is that a determination has been made by the enemy government itself that people wearing its uniforms are doing its belligerent bidding.  It is as simple as that. No hearing is required because the enemy himself has declared himself to be an enemy. The determination of enemy status is valid because it is not made by the authority making the detention.  The act of detention and its justification are, in this sense, independent of one another.  

The case is totally different when there is no enemy government or country which has declared war and with whom we are thereby engaged in hostilities.  In that case, the identification and determination as to who is an enemy is an entirely unilateral act by the capturing party. There is absolutely no independent check or verification or determination on the issue.  One and the same party has effected the capture and has asserted the justification for the capture.  And, of course, since the assertion is that the person so detained is "an enemy combatant" there is no need for trial. This is the very element essence of tyranny.

What other image is there of a tyrant than the ruler whose ipse dixit declares someone to be an enemy and throws him into black hole to rot without more?  When asked why prisoner X languishes in an iron mask the self-serving answer is that "it has been determined" he is an enemy. 

But it has not been "determined" in any independent way either by an independent judiciary or by any other government. The detention is arbitrary precisely because its validates itself. Under the rule of law, the measure of law determines justification. In tyranny, the act is the justification.  

The heap of legal cotton-picking that has attended the Guantánamo detentions has obscured the true seed of tyranny under the fluff.  International law has long drawn a distinction between "lawful and unlawful" combatants. (Ex Parte Quirin (1942) 317 U.S. 1) The former are member of "opposing military forces" -- i.e., they wear uniforms.  The latter are those "who without uniform comes secretly through the lines for the purpose of waging war by destruction of life or property." (Ibid) Lawful combatants are "entitled" to the status of "prisoners of war" whereas illegal combatants are "subject to trial and punishment by military tribunals." (Ibid.)

Prisoners of war are combatants who have simply been temporarily removed from the chessboard of war.  As such, they are "entitled" to a long list of amenities and to military respect.  Illegal combatants may be locked up and punished, provided they have been tried and convicted.  What has occurred at Guantanamo is a monstrous perversion of law whereby alleged "prisoners of war" are incarcerated as criminals without trial.  

But this perversion, as bad as it is, hides the deeper more fundamental germ of tyranny.  Once it is accepted that the act of designating and detaining a person as an enemy is its own justification, there is no reason to exempt citizens. Why not?  Because by "becoming" enemies they "forfeit" the rights of citizenship.  The logic is impeccable once the false premise of auto-justification is granted. It is in this way that tyrannies always end up consuming the people who beget and tolerate them.

What is occurring in Guantanamo is a brutal, barbaric monstrosity hiding under the sophisms of tyranny.  Americans will pay the price... and sooner rather than later.  "My dear Caligula, Rome deserves you!!!"

  

.

March 15th -- A Date to Remember

    

15 March 2013 will go down in history as the date the Nation State ceased to exist; for it was on that date that the IMF (International Monetary Fund) and the Eurozone finance ministers imposed a direct capitation on ordinary saving accounts in Cypriot Banks. 

The story is simple.  The Government of Cyprus applied for a € 10 billion bailout loan from Eurozone banks.  As with any loan, the banks wanted collateral.  Large reserves of natural gas have been found in Cypriot territorial waters and the Government of Cyprus pledged one third of the income-stream from gas to secure the loans.  The banks were not interested.  They insisted on an immediate and direct one-time "tax" on all deposits held in Cypriot banks.  The Government caved. Under the plan, savings accounts under  € 100,000 are to be debited three percent and savings over that amount will be debited 12.5 percent.  The seizure went into effect overnight with accounts and withdrawals being frozen in the required amounts.

Reaction around the world was swift, stunned and critical.  Conservative comment decried the blow to investor confidence. Left-liberal comment lamented the blow to pensioners and working class depositors.  All agreed that what had taken place was state-sanctioned robbery.

State-sanctioned?  Barely.  The Government of Cyprus has ceased to exist except as an enforcer for the shadowy godfathers of international finance.  Tony-the-Greek would be a better name for the erstwhile sovereign state.

In truth, the loss of sovereign control is nothing very new.  As far back as 1994, Le Monde Diplomatique warned that nation states were loosing control over their economies and were being reduced to mere agencies which could do little more than react to international corporate behemoths. (See Une Capitalisme Hors de Control -Les Chantiers de la Démolition Sociale par Serge Halimi Le Monde Diplomatique (July 1994).)  But there is always a point at which a change in degree results in a change of kind.  That point was reached last Friday.

Under the nation-state system, the collective assets, energies and enterprise of a people are represented by a government which is the official embodiment of national sovereignty.   Of course, there has never been any question that foreign banks and foreign governments could exercise indirect control over a nation's domestic policies.  The entire premise of the IMF is that it can make loans on such terms and conditions which will indirectly require the government to adjust its monetary, economic and social policies  -- usually to the detriment of ordinary people.  But even when governments were "doing the IMF's bidding," they retained sovereign control. 

An example of retained control was Argentina's 2005 repudiation of its international debt.  Argentina was being rolled (literally) by the IMF and the U.S. Treasury which had got the country into a cycle of debt refinance at higher and higher interest rates with each come-around of the carousel.  Finally, President Kirchner blew the whistle on the scam and offered the banks their choice between two high-and-tight haircuts.  (Amusing Account of the Incident)  [1]

In actual fact, Argentina did not "repudiate" its debt so much as it renegotiated its loans on terms which allowed it to implement domestic economic policies which stimulated growth and were more favourable to the country's overall welfare.  It had acted in parens patriae  -- as parent for the nation, doing its best vis a vis outsiders for its own people.

In short, there is a formalistic but nonetheless important difference between a government which raises taxes, diminishes benefits or otherwise adjusts policies in order to obtain and/or repay a loan and a government which becomes a mere transparency for takings by foreign entities who, under but the thinnest of tissues, reach directly into citizens' pockets to rifle change.  In the former case, a government itself is the borrower and its treasury is the collateral. It  still retains ultimate control over its own house, even if that control is influenced from outside.  In the latter case, the nation no longer  controls natural or corporate persons within its operating system,  rather global corporations use subsidiary states as mere user-interfaces for their direct plunder and control of citizens.  That is why the German newspaper, Handelsblatt, wrote that "Cyprus sets a precedent."  The precedent is that national governments no longer count. 

The year 2013 will be as significant as 476 A.D. when the last western Roman Emperor was replaced by the Goth chieftain, Odoacer.  For 100 years, the western half of the Roman Empire had been ruled, in actual fact, by various Barbarian chieftains, acting in the name of the Roman Emperor. The "abdication" of Romulus Augustulus, did not substantially change anything.  But the cat was out of the bag and it could no longer be said that the empire called "Rome" existed.  Consciousness had been forever altered.

Day by day, governments around the world are increasingly like the later Roman emperors, tending chickens in their palace gardens and stupidly putting their ring to whatever is placed before their noses by the real rulers of the world. Last week, even the pretence of sovereignty was dispensed with.  It is a matter of short time before national sovereignty becomes a distant memory at which point it will be impossible to commit treason.

=======

[1] http://noelmaurer.typepad.com/aab/2008/05/the-barber-of-b.html


©Barfo

Spitting on an Outstretched Hand

It is amusing -- in a spitting sort of way -- to watch the media and bloggerati speculate whether Pope Francis will alter the Church's stance on homosexuality.  That some should even ask reflects a childish incomprehension as to what the Church is and how it operates.  That others should caution not to expect an "overnight" change leaves one wondering what happened to their voice of moderation during Benedict's tenure.

We have written at length, before and elsewhere, on how Benedict was laying the groundwork for a radical repositioning of the Church's teaching on sexuality.  To summarise very briefly,

Benedict's first encyclical, Deus Caritas Est, was on love. Within the first few paragraphs he managed to quote Nietszche and allude to Aristophanes.  To anyone familiar with what Aristophanes had had to say about love -- and about the three sexes --  it was the hint of a clanging gong.

But Benedict did not leave it at  hints.  In the ensuing paragraphs he espoused the doctrine of "ascending love" which naturally begins in eros and matures into mutual caring. "The essential nature of love," he wrote, is "a journey, an ongoing exodus out of the closed inward-looking self towards its liberation through self-giving, and thus towards authentic self-discovery" (Deus Caritas Est., § 6.) If eros is merely the enticement that pulls us out of ourselves, what possible difference does it make if a person is led to care for one of the same or the opposite sex? None. In the Christian lexicon, caritas, agape, "love," is absolutely not gender-conditioned.

It is within this context, that what Benedict omitted to say was as significant as what he did  say.  Nowhere did he quote from Humanae Vitae, the previously enunciated doctrine that the redeeming purpose of sex is to transmit life.  While Benedict did acknowledge that matrimony between man and woman "tends" toward the transmission of life, in the next breath he went on to caution that  love should not be "relegated to the purely biological sphere." (Deus Caritas Est, § 5.)

At least as critical was Benedict's volte face on relevant Scriptural passages.  Anyone knows that the Christian condemnation of homosexual acts is based on Corinthians 6:9, Romans 1:18-32 and  Leviticus 18:22 and 20:13.  Ghost writing for John Paul II,  then cardinal Ratzinger certainly knew the drill. But as pope, Benedict interpreted these passages as condemnations against ecstatic fertility cults in which humans were "exploited" as mere "means of arousing divine madness."  That was a very different (and essentially liberal) reading of the passages.

But it is on the reading of Scripture generally that Benedict showed his true colours. In the Introduction to his book “Jesus of Nazareth” (Ignatius Press, 2007), Benedict took as his premise that historical criticism was “indispensible” to Biblical exegesis. (Op. Cit., p. xv.) "A voice greater than man’s echoes in Scripture’s human words; the individual writings [Schrifte] of the Bible point somehow to the living process that shapes the one Scripture [Schrift].” (Op. Cit., p. xviii.) Thus, he continues, the Bible “does not speak as a self-contained subject” but “in a living community... in a living historical movement."  The writings in the Bible "become Scripture by being read anew, evolving in continuity with their original sense, tacitly corrected and given added depth and breadth of meaning."

In so saying Benedict was not so much being a "radical" as a tradtionalist in the true sense of espousing change within continuity.  The Church is not guided by a merely present consensus on things, like a political party.  It is a trans-generational community of "saints" whose experiences and inspirations are all alive in the present which shapes the past as it is shaped by it.

A cycnic may be excused a smile at the notion of "tacit corrections" by "deeper understandings."  But the process is not one of rhetorical exploitation for present purposes.  Traditionalism has to be practiced in good faith with circumspection and constraint; but it does seek to evolve, permute and change.

I cannot but view these writings of Benedict's as other than an invitation to participate in a movement toward a deeper understanding of human love -- one that transcended (without denying) the biological and aimed at loss of ego in caring for another.  But the liberal Catholics and the majoritairan gay community spat in his hand.

Not only that, but in its incessant drumbeat the media fabricated out of whole cloth "condemnations" which Benedict never uttered.  Of course, Benedict publicly urged support for the heterosexual family.  Why wouldn't he?  Most of the world is heterosexual and the Church must speak for them.  But he was very cautious not cast that support in dichotomous terms.

In January 2012, Benedict spoke of social settings necessary for personal and social development. Of these, he said, "pride of place goes to the family, based on the marriage of a man and a woman."   The phrase "pride of place" necessarily implied other places.  How this got translated into the screeching headling "Pope says Homosexuality Imperils Civilization"  is any monkey's guess.

Alas, three months later, "pride of place"  gave way to language cribbed directly from Humanae Vitae.  Matrimony, the pope said was  "essentially rooted in the complementarity of the sexes and oriented to procreation." 

People we talked to, who are more in tune with subterranean currents at the Vatican, were convinced that Benedict had been ambushed by conservatives on his speech writing staff.  But ambushed or not, the media turned it into a kill.  The pope delivers scores of homilies, addresses and greetings in any given week -- all chock full of pre-approved phrases and researched references. While they are not "meaningless" they do not involve the careful word-weighing process that goes into an encyclical and for that reason do not carry much doctrinal weight.  But the Hate Benedict Crowd -- as if needing a bugbear for their own self-definition -- treated it as the bull of the century and drove the nail into the very change they avowedly sought.

Nine months later, an exhausted Benedict resigned.    He has been replaced by a "humble" pope who in all humility has said that gay matrimony is an affront to God.  That's the kind of  crime against nature language that reverts back to the 19th century.   Tacit corrections?  Not likely.

.©Barfo, 2013

Obama's Poisoned Condolence

      

On the occasion of Hugo Chavez's death, President Obama's condolences are a stunning example of his country's imperialist hypocrisy and arrogance. "At this challenging time of President Hugo Chávez's passing,"  Obama said, "the United States reaffirms its support for the Venezuelan people and its interest in developing a constructive relationship with the Venezuelan government. As Venezuela begins a new chapter in its history, the US remains committed to policies that promote democratic principles, the rule of law and respect for human rights."

Most stunning in this poisoned condolence is the absence of any recognition of Chavez's role in bringing a measure of structural relief to the masses of Venezuela's poor. If the streets of Caracas are filled with mourners it is only because Chavez brought them the food, the housing, the medical care, the educational opportunities and the employment denied to them since the country's founding. 

Chavez's socialistic reforms were far from perfect or complete but they were leaps forward from what had been.  But not a word of this in Obama's condolence.  Why not?  Because Obama and the regime he leads couldn't give a shit.  People talk about what is important to them and if they don't talk about something it is because it is either shameful or not important.

We say "regime" because, in truth, Obama is not the head of a country but of a global apparatus that uses countries for its own selfish and destructive ends.  He is simply the Chief Toady of a gaggle of official toadies who scurry, palaver and machinate on behalf of hedge funds, banks and global corporations.  Their vision for the world is a two-tier society comprised of Owners and their retainers of managers, technocrats and thugs, insulated from and lording over masses of desperate worker-drones and still greater masses of people left to be starved and stepped over.

To put it simply, Obama's vision of America in the future is of what Venezuela used to be.  Of course, neither he nor the corporate mudia want to acknowledge that Chavez put the lie to their regime. And of course, the rest of what Obama says is a stinking lie. 

For those who might not see it, let us provide a translation.

"The United States reaffirms its support for the Venezuelan people..."  Translation:  "We don't recognise the political legitimacy of the government in power." Normally, nation states deal government to government.  By drawing a distinction between the government and the people it represents, Obama sought to by-pass and marginalise the former.

"... and its interest in developing a constructive relationship with the Venezuelan government."  Translation: "The United States is ready to re-model Venezuela's government." Obama's self-evident platitude has to be read in light of what preceded and what follows.  All governments seek to develop "constructive" relationships with others. The fact that Obama restated the obvious was an implicit assertion that such a relationship does not exist at present, which is why Obama avowed support for the people of Venezuela and stands ready to bring about change in  "As Venezuela begins a new chapter in its history...." 

And what kind of change might that be?  

"The US remains committed to policies that promote democratic principles, the rule of law and respect for human rights."  Translation: the United States remains committed to free-trade on terms beneficial to  the U.S. corporatocracy and to laws which protect their property rights and economic privileges.

When a creature like Obama or Clinton use the word "democracy" they are referring to the America's long standing policy of creating "zones of democratic freedom" -- a diplomatic term of art meaning a country or region subserviently coupled to American economic interests and adhering to such political and juridical norms as will protect and promote those interests.  Simply put, "zones of democratic freedom" are to the United States what "client states" and "colonnae" were to Rome.

Of course the pax americana is drecked out in the happy-talk of Jeffersonian Liberalism.  "Respect for human rights" means "respect for free speech" which in turns effectively means "respect for the power of corporate media to flood the airwaves with its mono-culture of thought."  Oh yes, and being very liberal,  every poor, hungry, descalzado, on the street has just as much right as anyone else to speak his mind; but in a liberal democratic society it is not for government to insure that everyone's voice gets an equal airing; that would be interference.  

Chavez saw through this despicable charade and how U.S. dominated corporate media were pursuing a regime of infotainment aimed at turning Venezuelans (as they have turned Americans) into self-alienated, acquiescent morons.  The historical narrative these media pursue is, of course, the one that most justifies their past and benefits their future.  The cultural ideal held up by this media, of course, promotes their economic interests and political entrenchment. 

Ten years ago, while in Oaxaca, Mexico, we saw a stunning example of how this  propaganda works.  Oaxaca is a state with a high concentration of Mixtec and Zapotec indians who, as a rule, have copper coloured skin and vaguely oriental features. But hanging in the clothing sections of Walmarts, Sears and other outposts of American consumer goods and junk, were big posters of skinny, white, pouting, Calvin Klein French boys and girls to match.  What kind of message does this convey to a young Mixtec, other than: you should aspire to what you can never be?

This is what I mean by "self-alienation" and what Chavez and Che and others on the Ibero-American left refer to as U.S. cultural imperialism.   Global capitalism carries with it a global culture that serves its interests and ipso facto represses the true popular interests of others.  It has already destroyed Mexico.  Why not Venezuela.

Obama has made clear the extent to which the United States is prepared to "constructively" go.  It was obvious as of last year that Chavez was not long for this world, and that an "opportunity for change" would soon open up in Venezuela.  So what did Obama say?  He "warned" that the United States would not tolerate Iranian interference in South America.

Seriously, Iran needed to be reminded of the Monroe Doctrine?  Struggling as it is under a U.S. and Israeli engineered economic blockade, Iran is hardly in a position to invade the Americas.  But as a member of the oil producing block with some independent technological expertise of her own, Iran is in a position to help form and to strengthen regional retaining walls against U.S. and  Western European domination.  Obama's warning was a signal to Iran, to back off from  America's upcoming opportunity to develop a "(re)constructed relationship" with Venezuela. 

While the Venezuelan people mourn, the drones in Albrecht's Cave are hammering overtime.  Ahh, the allure of the ring!

©

The 1% and the 25%

A report over the weekend in the New York Times, described how pay-day lenders were circumventing New York's "strict" usury laws by charging up to 800% interest and, with bank connivance, repeatedly debiting a borrower's overdrawn checking account thereby running up over-draft fees in hundreds and even thousands of dollars to the banks' delight.

New York's "strict" anti-usury laws limited interest to 25%. 

TWENTY FIVE PERCENT???

There was a time when most states in the Union limited interest to 6 or 7 percent.  The California Constitution limited it to 10 percent per annum; ancient Roman law to 12 percent yearly.

There was a time when virtually every religion considered the charging of any interest to be morally wrong.  Jews were forbidden to charge interest among themselves.  Christianity denied the Sacraments to anyone who charged interest to anyone.  Most people regarded usury as repugnant.  Said Cato

"And what do you think of usury?" — "What do you think of murder?"

And it is a form of murder, as much as it was murder to force concentration camp inmates to work for under 1000 calories a day.    Usury is the equivalent of a starvation wage.

It is the generally accepted view that government borrowing at rates in excess of 7 percent is unsustainable in the long run.  In other words, when a government is forced to pay more than 7 percent interest will be unable to to meet its domestic obligations and the country will go into starvation mode or, as it is called these days, "austerity".

If 7 percent interest is unsustainable for a sovereign state, how in the world is 20 percent sustainable by a working stiff?  It isn't.  It is a prescription for homelessness and starvation.  Cato was right: usury is murder.

The point here is not to provide a comprehensive analysis of interest, opportunity costs, usury and the various calculations of debt to income or gross domestic product. The basic fact is that credit has become an essential lubricant to world economies and charging for the borrowed use of money is regarded as an equally necessary aspect of credit.  In a complex global finance-economy, the types of interest, their modes of calculation and their short or long term sustainability are subject to hundreds of permutations.

But the fact also remains, that over the historical long term, interest rates in excess of 7 to 12 percent have been regarded as usurious because they are not sustainable, even when regarded in isolation and without regard to a borrower's other costs of living and obligations. 

New York's "strict" usury law of 25% already allows for the progressive extermination of the working class. Charges of 800% and overdraft penalties at equivalent rates are murder. This is the blood that feeds the 1%

A Revolutionary Resignation

Pope Benedict's announced resignation has triggered a lot of political speculation and some theological consternation.

From a theological perspective, the question of whether a pope can resign depends on whether he is viewed as the vicar or the image of Christ.  If he is only a vicarious agent of Christ then his position is fundamentally a question of management which can be handed over at any time.  If, however, he is the representational image of Christ, then following in his footsteps, a pope cannot resign from the Cross.

Pope Benedict's concise statement of resignation explicitly recognised the distinction.  He began by stating that the papacy "due to its essential[ly] spiritual nature, must be carried out not only with words and deeds, but no less with prayer and suffering."  This was an express acknowledgement that the cardinal office of the Pope is to suffer representationally of Christ as Jesus suffered representantionally for Mankind.  In short, the papacy is a spiritual sacrifice.  And yet, in his next breath and repeatedly throughout the statement, Benedict referred to the papacy as a "ministry" a word laden with more Protestant notions of trusteeship and stewardship.

Pope Benedict's resignation manifested the latter perspective and was therefore fraught with revolutionary doctrinal implications. 

The idea that a priest is the representational image of Christ is the springboard for both celibacy and the exclusion of women from the priesthood.  As cardinal, Benedict  himself put it succinctly: women could not be ordained as priests "because Jesus was a man."  Jesus was also celibate, according to tradition. 

There is an arguable distinction between the priesthood as such and the office of pope.  One must be a priest to become a pope, so that the representational imagery of the priesthood is something that pre-exists pope-hood.  It follows that the office of pope is not that which brings or bears the element of representational imagery to a person. It already inheres in the priestly office and is nothing brought by the papacy as such.  On this basis, it could be argued that whereas a person, as pope, is not the image of Christ, a priest as such is.  But this argument, aside from being overly clever, runs into a host of  problems, not the least of which is the retirement and/or defrocking of priests. 

The plain fact is that by resigning, Benedict has consigned to history the notion that a pope cannot resign because he is the image of Christ, who did not "retire" from the Cross.  Once this decoupling is accepted there becomes ever less reason to insist on celibacy or to deny women the priesthood.

We, ourselves, are not convinced this was a well-advised move but we are certain Benedict was well aware of its implications.

As usual, Benedict is subtle and perhaps too subtle for a world (and Church) filled with braying dolts.  Noisiest among the dolts are the liberal Catholics and secular non-Catholics (which are much the same thing) prattling about the "scandals" that beset Benedict's papacy, his undeviating attempts to turn the clock back on Vatican Two, his relentless opposition to women and homosexuals, his botched outreach to Muslims and (despite his Rottweilerian instincts) his enfeebled incapacity to control the Curia and, at last, the opportunity which his courageous (or at least welcome) resignation presents for cleansing, reform and change ---  all of which simply reflects the discontent and panting of their own desires.

One wonders if anyone in this crowd ever read anything Benedict wrote and if they read it whether they had the erudition and capacity for reflection to understand it.

It has been our view, that Benedict was a tempered reformer.  He was, in his professional youth, part of the so-called "liberal" wing  of the Church.  But within the first decade after Vatican II, Benedict saw that the process had unmoored the Church, casting it afloat on the choppy waters of personal opinion, situational relevance and, worst of all, liturgical kitsch. 

But it is equally the case, that Benedict rejected the dead-end fetishism of the SSPX and those "traditionalists" who insisted on remaining precisely adherent to tried and inherited norms. He struggled to make room for their practices without surrendering to their insistences.

Benedict came to see the true nature of tradition as comprising of change within continuity and involving "tacit corrections" (his phrase) of unerring doctrine.  That is not the language of what people nowadays call a "conservative."

But the idea that we each see "the right, as God gives us to see the right" is fundamentally a Protestant error which leads to alienation and disoriented extremes.  "Room for all under the tent" misconceives who the all of us is.   

Faith, Benedict has said on more than one occasion, is not personal and subjective but communal and performative.   But this community -- the whole  Body of Christ --  includes the seen and the unseen, vivos et mortuous -- now. The Church lives within an eternal present which is not eternally static but eternally ever growing larger as more and more faithful are born and added to the host of Heaven.

We cannot ignore what those who got here before us had to say.  Nor can we (like modern day lawyers) mine what they said for nuggets of "precedent" and "dicta" favourable to our own aims and desires.  Even less in an effort to be innovative or Reformist can we "go back" to some fantasised original state of early Christianhood because such a return can only result in a grotesque (and ultimately pathological) parody.  As an astonished Mussolini once told Hitler, "(mio caro Adolfo) you can be like a pagan but it is impossible for you to be a pagan."

In practicing doctrine, we must not only "consider" by-gone theologians and philosophers as if they were the subjects of a doctrinal anthropology.  We must walk and talk with them by means of imaginary dialogues in which we play both parts of the conversation.  And to keep our own selves in check we must do this together with others in the here and now. This is not done by "bringing the Church up to date" or by abrupt, habit-breaking corrections under the banners of necessity and relevance and inclusion.  It is a a slow, evolutionary and organic process which equally honours continuity-community-change in the ever present.

It is our belief that Benedict viewed the matter thus and was accordingly laying the patient groundwork for organic but solid and lasting change.  It is a shame that he his great gifts were ignorned by hot-heads and fusspots each operating from their respective repressions, guilts and self-love.   It  is equally a shame that the Church's exit from her present deadlock is left to the  expedient calculations, ambitious machinations and bald hypocricies of fattened eunuchs who could stand some hungering and humiliation.

We are not sanguine about it, but perhaps Benedict will be more widely appreciated once he is out of office. Perhaps too, his resignation was simply a matter of exhaustion.  But even if it was, we cannot believe he was impervious to its far-reaching implications on which he managed not to shut the door.

©

When being Black fails, go Gay; go Girl, Go!

It is hardly a secret that Obama had little affinity for gay causes.  What he said in '08 was at best an obligato mumbled quickly and then forgotten.  Certainly his first term saw no initiatives on the gay front until late in the game.

In October 2010, Obama announced that his attitudes on gays were "evolving" but he stopped short of reversing his opposition to gay unions.  A little under a year later, Obama's attitude had evolved sufficiently for him to sign off on abolishing restrictions on overt homosexuals in the military.  But the initiative for the change had come from the military itself and from Congress.  Obama's evolution was merely acquiesence.

At last in June 2012, the full chickadee was finally hatched. Obama called on Americans to celebrate evolving attitudes toward the homosexual community as he proclaimed June as Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Pride Month.

My, my! But is their a missing link?  You bet.  What had changed between October 2010 and June 2012 is that Team Obama had discovered that being Black no longer worked to sucker libruls and progressives.  Not only was Obama the Oreo whose cream overflowed, his policies on all fronts had been aggressively hostile not only to gay unions but to workingmen's unions, to the sick, the old, the unemployed, the dispossessed and, last but not least, to bees and frogs around the world.

Huddle time at Camp Obambi.  Yes, the president needed some new pixie dust to toss into liberal eyes.  The "improbable story" of the Black ghetto boy acquired an unintended meaning on someone who golfed in white tassle shoes with Boehner. 

Women's issues weren't "safe" in that they were still mostly moss on the rock of reproductive rights.  And those women's issues which were not dovetailed too inconveniently with labor union rights.

Tutti Frutti Time!  And suddenly the chameleon started to talk about our gay and lesbian brothers and sisters.  In his inaugural, he endorsed (albeit obliquely) gay marriage. "Our journey is not complete until our gay brothers and sisters are treated like anyone else..."

Once again, in his State of the Union Address, Obama raised the LGBT banner saying that equal rights applied "no matter who you love" and he would ensure all service members, "gay or straight," received equal benefits.

Tears of joy from the left.  Obama, the New Lincoln!  And speaking of Lincoln, doing Gay, Obama refurbishes his being Black.  Two for one!  And once again the "left" is suckered.

But Obama's real agenda remains as hostile as ever to peace, to the environment, to non-poisoned food, to civil privacy, to due process, to security in retirement, to guaranteed employment, and to affordable education and medical care.

It is truly amazing what slop a pig will eat.

©