Maxims of Peace and War

"The thing we ask ourselves these days is, 'What will the Americans do next?'" This was said in 2004 by a London editor of wide experience; how strange for an American to hear! For, though gently spoken, the words suggested the horror of a Colossus; a feeling evidently shared by allies who knew the United States as a friend in friendlier days.

The Americans. As one might have said, "The Romans," "The Germans." The sentence also served as an unpleasant reminder that the people in a democracy are felt to bear some responsibility for acts their leaders perform in their name.

Kant, in his essay "Perpetual Peace," lays out the maxims of cynical despotism and misjudged realism by which the leaders of great powers and colossi have generally accommodated their hunger for power to the need for an explanation. The maxims are: (1) Fac et excusa. (2) Si fecisti, nega. (3) Divide et impera. Roughly translated: (1) Act now, justify later. (2) If you committed the crime, deny it. (3) Divide and conquer.

Of how many acts of the present administration can it be said that they were guided by one or another of these bad maxims? The invasion of Iraq; the policies of domestic surveillance of millions of citizens, and the torture of unnamed prisoners; the subdivision of Iraq itself into containable warring units based on ethnic and religious loyalty. "They gave us a constitution that set us at each other's throats" -- this sentiment, among Iraqis, has been widely reported by foreign journalists like Patrick Cockburn, and by some Americans; yet it has scarcely penetrated the public understanding of what we are doing in Iraq.

The imperial gamble of Cheney and Bush is that the jolts and shocks of domestic attack, foreign wars, and anti-constitutional government founded on perpetual emergency, will "change the DNA of the American people." (The revealing phrase is General Michael V. Hayden's; he said that he prayed against its happening -- but, oddly, the thought had entered his mind.)

As we enter the final year of the first government of what is intended to be a new regime for America, let us hope this will be the last such year of the last such government. Opposition to the permanent war, on behalf of republican ideals and constitutional principle, has come from certain court decisions, from parts of the intelligence community, and from the large remnant of empirical prudence that still pervades the armed forces. Resistance from the political opposition, and from the press and the mass media, has been less consistent, less coherent, less articulate, less audible. Nobody could have predicted any of this; and in the surprise is encouragement as well as a warning.

If America is to rejoin the world of nations, the help will have to come from institutions outside the executive. From our representatives, but, when they falter, from ordinary people doing the work of conscience against the continued assaults of arbitrary power. That work has barely begun:

Oh the lines are long
And the fighting is strong
And they're breaking down the distance
Between right and wrong.

Comments

[January]

Thank you for the Kant reference. I would have guessed that Machiavelli's "Prince" could have provided the advice. I assume it is the bible of the Mafia, and the GOP has operated as a gang in recent decades. Yes, it works, as its enduring testifies. But at what cost!

I am hopeful, too, for an opportunity to change direction back to a US that warranted being home to the UN. It remains a difficult prospect. Maybe we can reverse the pattern of one step forward, two steps back. That would be good enough.

[llozano]

When you keep a people in fear and in ignorance you can convince them to do anything even against their own best interests or those of their family and community. We have seen this demonstrated over and over in our own history. Why are we surprized to see it happening now?

[Sundialsvc4]

Let us begin by toppling one keystone: the thought that "we must wait until November of this year, and at that time we must choose from hand-picked candidates of the status quo's own choosing."

Wrong, and wrong. That's a vote for eight more years of hell, and we all know it.

Let us instead re-introduce one cornerstone: The Law, and the oath that all public officials must swear to uphold and to protect it. That oath is legally binding; to violate it is a felony. Period.

Let us then lay beside it a new stone: the principle that Congress has no power to put impeachment "off the table." That this is a solemn law enforcement duty that cannot be set aside, nor unduly delayed, neither for political nor for any other motivations.

For six long years and more, "civil officers" in all three Branches of this Government have run roughshod over the Supreme Law of the Land, and have committed the same crimes that left several Nazis hanging at the end of a rope in Nuremberg. If necessary, and if duly convicted (after the "due process of law" that they steadfastly denied to their enemies), another rope waits for them. Yes, it is THAT serious.

There are about 320 million "plaintiffs" in this case: "We, the People." And only a few hundred people who have so willfully inflicted so much harm to us all, to our young people, and to the world. We have lived under the scourge of laws that were not duly enforced. Let's make a New Year's resolution that 2008 shall be different. And let's introduce the first of many Articles of Impeachment this month.

"It's not just a good idea. It's the Law."

[AtomicSplash]

Mourn not the dead that in the cool earth lie,
but rather mourn the apathetic throng,
the coward and the meek
who see the world's great anguish and its wrong, and dare not speak.

Ralph Chaplin