Country Before Party

Prime Minister Arik Sharon, known for his legendary gambles as a general, left his a political party he found, the Likud, to make a new one, Kadima (forward).

But's that not the real news. Former Prime Minister and vice premier Shimon Peres has left the Labor Party, a party he's served as head of and prime minister of at least three times, to join Sharon's party.

This might not necessarily be a good a thing for Israeli politics and the peace process for four reasons.

One, there has been a Washington consensus around the Israeli question since Sharon formed a coalition unity Labor-Likud government. There are generally three splits in the political elite on who to support in Israel. (It is a virtually unanimously held opinion, outside the CIA and State Department, that American support for Israel should go unchallenged.) Hardliners in America prefer Netanyahu, who had a portfolio in the government until trying to challenge Ariel Sharon for power. The hardliners, however, remained appeased due to the formidable Likud presence in the Sharon government. Centrist Republicans and Democrats prefer Peres, the Olso peace process, and the Labor party. As long as they were in the coalition government, there was no reason to criticize the actions of the government. Finally, there were the realists, who supported the Sharon disengagement plan and the Road Map.

UPI offers that the breaking of this consensus will rock Washington.

By abandoning the Likud party that he helped to found 32 years ago and forming a new third party, Kadima, in the center of Israel politics, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon has broken the consensus that held American politicians of both parties, from President George W. Bush to Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y., loyal to the Sharon government. Even if they had qualms about Sharon, Democrats like Clinton were reassured by the presence of veteran Labor Party leader Shimon Peres in the governing coalition alongside Sharon.

But the Israeli coalition has broken, and along with it breaks the American consensus that has dismayed America's Arab friends, given al-Qaida such a strong propaganda weapon, and condemned the Palestinians to irrelevance or to intifada.

With three distinct parties now emerging in Israel, Israel's American friends are torn three ways. The dwindling band of neo-conservatives in and around the Bush administration, some of whom worked for former Israeli premier Binyamin Netanyahu, first came together in 1998 behind a strategy that urged Netanyahu to abandon the Oslo peace process. So long as Netanyahu and Sharon worked together within Likud, even as obvious rivals, America's neo-cons and the Bush administration could back them.

And so long as Peres was prepared to join with Sharon in the governing coalition that achieved the unilateral withdrawal from Gaza, the mainstream Democrats were prepared to go along. Indeed, Clinton made a point of endorsing Sharon's security fence (which the Palestinians many others call "the wall") in her visit to Israel three weeks ago, and repeated Sharon's argument that it was now up to the Palestinians to stop terrorism.

All this is now ended. The Bush administration is itself split over whether it should support Netanyahu, who may not even be able to rule the rump of Likud that remains after Sharon's departure, or to back Sharon's new party. The neo-cons who still dominate Middle East policy inside the National Security Council in the White House retain their devotion to Netanyahu, but the State Department suspects that Netanyahu might be squeezed our as Likud leader by the former Army chief of staff Shaul Mofaz, and Sharon's new party might be the one to back. And the Democrats like Clinton now have a further choice, with Israeli's Labor party under the dynamic new leadership of Amir Peretz.

The point for American Democrats who support Israel, like Clinton, is that they now have political options that allow them to reassure their Jewish voters -- very important for Senator Clinton in New York -- while not necessarily having to support Sharon's hard-line views on the West Bank settlements. This also applies to the Europeans, whose foreign ministers have just been presented with a report from their diplomats in Israel that is highly critical of the Sharon government's barrier and his settlement policies, which the report says is intended to cut off Arab East Jerusalem from any real contact with the Palestinian West Bank.

The EU nations, whose troops are deployed in the region for the first time, monitoring the Gaza-Egypt crossing point, are becoming increasingly important in regional policymaking and in regional economics as Israel's leading trading partner. But concerns about their own Muslims in Europe are pushing the EU countries toward a much more active role in the Middle East and to much closer economic and political ties with the Arab governments around the Mediterranean.

So the era in which the Bush administration and Sharon between them decided the fate of Israel and Palestine is drawing to an end. The Bush administration is already starting to split over which Israeli faction to support, and the Democrats and the Europeans now have room to seize the initiative and promote a very different kind of peace process under very new conditions.

When the Labor party withdrew from the government after Amir Peretz became head of Labor, there was a real potential that the Israeli electorate and American elites would rethink our relationship to the failed pursuit of peace in the Arab-Israeli conflict. The UPI believes that Sharon's move will allow the EU to exercise greater flexibility. Shimon Peres' move to join Kadima and support Sharon changes all that.

Two, Peres' support not only complicates a renewed debate over the peace process within Israeli and American politics, it is also draws the upper middle class (generally Ashkenazim Jews), who would likely support Peres, against the poorer Sephardi Jews who usually vote for Likud but to whom Peretz is appealing for new voters in the Labor party. As the UPI details, Peretz is using his Sephardic credentials to bring those voters to him: "Peretz is a Sephardi Jew from a North African background, and thus able to appeal to that crucial voting block of Sephardi Jews, many of them working class, who have been critical to Likud's support. And by stressing social spending, jobs and wages, Peretz is trying to change the terms of Israel's political discourse away from security (where Sharon is so powerful) to economics (where Sharon and Netanyahu are very vulnerable)." If two problematic cleavages in Israel--the ethnic rivalries of the Ashkenazim, the Sephardi, and the Russian Jews as well as the class rivalries of the semi-socialist Israeli state--codify and crystallize into party affiliation, the Israeli political sphere could become even more fractured than it already is.

Three, Peres' departure takes those upper middle class votes from from the Labor party, which has increasingly started its outreach to Arab-Israelis. The extent to which Labor becomes a repository of rage against an Ashkenazim-dominated state is the extent to which Israeli discourse is going to take a dramatic turn, for the worst.

Four, and finally, Peres and Sharon's decision represent a consensus within the founding generation about their mistrust about the motives and abilities of the younger Israeli leaders.

The two men [Sharon and Peres] are both part of Israel's "founding generation" and they've been good friends for decades. Both Peres, who is 82, and Sharon, who is 77, have little faith in the new generation of Israeli leaders. They believe together they can secure some kind of agreement with Palestinians over the establishment of two states.

QUESTION: But isn't Peres' vision radically different from Sharon's?

RAZ: Yes and no. Peres would prefer that Israel withdrew from all the territory it occupied during the 1967 war. Sharon prefers to hold onto the major Israeli settlement blocs inside the West Bank -- accounting for about 12 percent of the land. Ultimately, both men share the broad goal of securing permanent borders for both Israel and the future Palestinian state.

QUESTION: Does Peres' support help Sharon?

RAZ: Yes. Primarily with upper-middle class voters who may be reluctant to vote for Sharon but trust Peres' judgment. Sharon can expect a boost from Peres' decision to back his continued premiership.

This is all to say: Peres is Sharon's blessing--and problem right now. Even though Peres suggested that he was putting country before party, many, on the left and right, have interpreted this as just another political move to guarantee his continued power.

Posted by John Stevenson at 11:50 PM | |

 
The Holy See takes a New Look

To Gay Catholics:

In case you hadn't noticed, your church just flushed any remaining dignity you had down the toilet. Not only are you sinners--even some Protestant churches, I'm afraid agree with that statement--but you can't even become priests. A life of celibacy isn't enough to prevent you from undermining the "God-given" (read: politically-fabricated) values of the Church in Rome. You are only OK if you "discovers his homosexuality after having been ordained." So it's best, in the eyes of the Holy See, if you save your sexual experimentation until after ordination.


To Bi-curious Catholics:

Your life isn't as worse as the gays; for that rejoice. If your homosexual experience has been "transitory"--all you two beer queers out there--fear not. If you would simply end your curiosity and get back on the straight and narrow path--emphasis I'm presuming on straight because the road to hell is not only wide, it's gay too--you'll be saved again.
"What must I do to be saved?"
"Stop being gay and come to church."

To the American Catholic Church:

Please forget all this pretense about the church being universal and united under Rome. After all, Catholic doesn't mean universal any more; we just another denomination like the Mormons or the Protestants. And the Reformation was so dreadfully long ago; unity was overrated them and is overrated now. It's most important that you just keep coming to church and leave the politics to the bishops.

Given this, I would like to inform you the head bishop of America, William S. Skylstad who is also president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, is as openly supportive of Rome as possible given his disagreement with the Church. His spin on the document? "Gay-inclined are cut some slack."

Skylstad, 71, who has led the Diocese of Spokane since 1990 and has been a bishop since 1977, said the question of whether "homosexually inclined men" can be good priests depends on how they live and what they teach.

[And now for some official gobbledygook:]
"The answer lies in the lives of those men who, with God's grace, have truly been dedicated priests, seeking each day not to be served but to serve their people, faithfully representing in word and example the teaching of the Church in its fullness, including God's revelation that sexual expression is intended only to take place between a husband and a wife in a loving, faithful and life-giving marriage," Skylstad said in his official statement.

Translation: It's important that you remain committed to being celibate priests not having sex while continuing to affirm the centrality of fertile heterosexual copulation. What does all this "slack" mean? The rope around your neck chafes more than it chokes.

Skylstad urges church leaders to have a "comprehensive discussion" about the affective, or emotional, maturity of every candidate for the priesthood.

"In particular, bishops and major superiors should be available to speak freely with brother priests and seminarians who personally face the problem of homosexual inclinations," Skylstad stated.

The bishop's statements raise the question of how priests can be full human beings with mature understandings of their sexualities yet remain celibate, said the Rev. James Bretzke, chairman of theology and religious studies at the University of San Francisco.

"He's saying, 'Let's not go into the closet, let's not do "don't ask, don't tell," let's talk about this and talk about it with a sense of freedom and openness,' " Bretzke said.

Oh, and in case you were wondering about what "deep-seated [homosexual] tendencies meant: "the prohibition against men with "deep-seated tendencies" means a person actively looking at pornography or visiting gay bars would not be acceptable in the priesthood, but simply having an attraction to men would be. supporting gay culture means that a seminarian is "so concerned with homosexual issues that he cannot sincerely represent the church's teaching on sexuality."

Posted by John Stevenson at 9:33 AM | |

 
Hating Bush, Fisking McCain

After the failures of the Bush Administration, conservatives are lining up for a home-run hero; they don't want any more false conservatives. Bush, who was thought to have arguably remade the Republican Party until the Miers revolt, has betrayed "conservatism" on every account, particularly when it comes to fiscal issues. For the more snobbish and intellectually-inclined conservatives, references to Edmund Burke or Russel Kirk are obligatory.

Jeffery Hart, professor emeritus of English at Dartmouth, presents an excellent example "conservative" anti-Bush vitriol in his latest op/ed entitled, "George W. Bush, Bogus conservative."

George W. Bush is not a conservative, but a right-wing ideologue who steers by abstractions in both foreign and domestic policy. Inevitably a perilous gap opens between his abstractions and concrete realities.

A conservative steers by prudence, uses history as evidence for the behavior of nations and individuals. A conservative is aware of the complexity and resistance of cultures, and of course considers abstractions and utopian schemes to be dangerous. A conservative matches means to ends as a practical necessity.

In a very important but widely overlooked speech at the American Enterprise Institute on Feb. 26, 2003, Mr. Bush makes it clear that he has a Wilsonian view of human behavior:

"Human cultures can be vastly different. Yet the human heart desires the same good things everywhere on Earth [italics added]. ... Freedom and democracy will always and everywhere have greater appeal than slogans of hatred and tactics of terror."

But that happy thought is flatly untrue. Do human beings really desire the same good things everywhere on earth? Don't human beings desire power, conquest, empire, do not adherents of rival religions and secular dogmas slaughter one another? Did the 9/11 suicide bombers desire, in their hearts or otherwise, the same good things as the people who went to work that morning in the World Trade Center? Mr. Bush was talking idealistic nonsense, deadly nonsense, while believing it to be reality.

Now, to Woodrow Wilson's goal of "making the world safe for democracy," President Bush, and his theoreticians, added two improvements. In his syndicated column of Feb. 23, 2004, National Review Editor Rich Lowry offered this analysis:

"The reinvigorated Wilsonian foreign policy championed by Mr. Bush -- and motivated less by Woodrow Wilson's secular values (international law, etc.) and more by religious beliefs (the God-given rights of all people) -- is a reflection of President Bush's Christian base."

But, now, wait a minute. Since when has Woodrow Wilson been a conservative hero? He has always been a liberal icon. And Mr. Bush's theory that "the human heart desires the same good things everywhere on earth," derives from John Locke's optimistic assumption that human interests converge (they often do not, even "in their hearts"), and from Rousseau's belief in the natural goodness of human beings. With history in mind, if you believe that human beings are naturally good, then you will believe anything. Locke, Rousseau -- these are not conservative guides.

Tom DeLay, the most powerful Republican in the House, and now, among many others, under indictment, provided this diagnosis of Terri Schiavo, whose cerebral cortex had been destroyed and so was entirely oblivious: "Terri Schiavo is not dead; she talks and she laughs, and she expresses happiness and discomfort. Terri Schiavo is not on life support." Wheeeee! Did Tom DeLay have a hand in Iraq planning?

Franklin Roosevelt, Dwight Eisenhower and Ronald Reagan were successful presidents. All were re-elected by landslides. All were conservative in the context of their times. All, somewhere, are glaring angrily at the messes that President Bush's folly has made.

Hart's analysis was precious, right down to the "wheeee" at the end of a paragraph about Tom Delay. What is most amusing, and instructive about this retrospective, ad hoc conservatism is that Locke doesn't get to make the cut whereas FDR does. When did FDR become a conservative? I think another "wheeee" is in order.

More importantly, when was Locke kicked out of the conservative pantheon of saints? Stephen Bainbridge, law professor, whom I will upbraid in a moment, quotes Russell Kirk who wrote, "... the true conservative does stoutly defend private property and a free economy, both for their own sake and because these are means to great ends." Locke, particularly as he was invoked by Robert Nozick in Anarchy, State, and Utopia, the bible of libertarian conservatism, was one of the first theorists to defend the right to property at almost all costs. In fact, for Locke, the beginning of liberty was the ability to input value into property. Locke so thoroughly believed in the right of property that he even defended British colonialism in America on the contention that British settlers would add value to the land, and that this right of property transcended any government's ability to interdict or interfere. Locke was definitely a conservative.

Conservative fury over Bush, moreover, has also led to the beginnings of the campaigns pre-2008 against Senator John McCain. Stephen Bainbridge on that point wrote:

I get all schizo when I think about John McCain. I admire his life story and I think his "national greatness" version of conservatism is an interesting take on the problems of the day. But there's so much about him that drives me nuts. Ultimately, I can't imagine supporting him in light of:

He basically gutted the first amendment in the guise of campaign finance "reform"
He and his allies consistently smeared former FEC chairman Brad Smith for defending the first amendment
He's inconsistent on influence peddling
He gave Dick Durbin cover fire when the latter made some incredibly stupid comments about Iraq and our troops
And most important of all: He seems to have no notion of what the phrase "limited government" means
John McCain should not be the GOP nominee in 2008. Accordingly, I hereby expressly disavow any prior suggestion to the contrary.
After reading Stephen Moore's report on interviewing McCain, I would add to that list the following:

McCain can't be trusted with running the American economy

Stephen Moore's piece can be summed up in this paragraph:

[McCain] views himself, I believe, as a kind of modern-day Robin Hood, a defender of the downtrodden and tormentor of the bullying special interests, which is endearing and unquestionably a big part of his broad political appeal, but often leads to populist and parasitic economic policy conclusions like higher taxes on the rich and attacks on "huge oil profits." He wants to be the caped crusader against corruption. The buzzword for the McCain Straight Talk Express in 2008 will be reform: "I want to reform education, reform Medicare and Social Security, reform lobbying and campaigns. Reform immigration. Reform. Reform. Reform."

Bainbridge then, after trotting out a quote by Russel Kirk, concludes that McCain's reformist tendencies aren't truly conservative--I'm wondering how that squares with his statement at the beginning of post "his "national greatness" version of conservatism is an interesting"--and that ultimately we should avoid McCain if we want a "real" conservative in the White House.

Now McCain's conservatism, and I'll prove that it's conservative in another post some other time, is summed up his view about immigration: "America must remain a beacon of hope and opportunity. The most wonderful thing about our country is that this is the one place in the world that anyone--through ambition and hard work--can get as far as their ambition will take them." All of the evils Bainbridge attributes to McCain come from the senator's basic willingness to prevent the uncaring titans of capitalism and government from choking out the ambition of drive of individual Americans. And it is this ability of individuals to make a fate and a living for themselves that makes America great in the McCain vision. For McCain, the malefactors of great wealth, a ballooning national deficit, and a badly managed war in Iraq all limit the ability of this country to be great. And I can't see why conservatives should disagree with that.

Posted by John Stevenson at 8:00 AM | |

 
Nuremberg's Continuing Importance

The Nuremberg trials of the Nazis after World War Two are arguably the bedrocks of international law. The Nation memorialized Telford Taylor, a Nuremberg prosecutor who died in 1998, as the man to whom the "human rights movement owes much of its legal foundation. . . [Taylor's work in] Nuremberg gave legitimacy to the concept that the world had something to say about how governments treat their own citizens. In 1950 the United Nations codified Nuremberg's most important statements into seven Nuremberg Principles, which have since been adopted by the legal systems of almost every major nation." Wikipedia suggests the conclusion of Nuremberg led to four important conventions now considered sacrosanct in international law: (1) The Genocide Convention, 1948, (2) The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 1948, (3) The Convention on the Abolition of the Statute of Limitations on War Crimes and Crimes against Humanity, 1968, and (4) The Geneva Convention on the Laws and Customs of War, 1949; its supplementary protocols, 1977.

Eric Posner, a professor of law at the University of Chicago, criticizes the Nazi war crimes tribunal by suggesting that the judgements of Nuremberg are not law in any meaningful sense. If Posner is correct, then all of the conventions, treaties, and norms that declare Nuremberg as their inspiration are legally smoke and mirrors. Let us begin with Posner's comments on Nuremberg. After that, I shall briefly point out some flaws in Posner's critique and offer why Nuremberg is still important.

Posner's observations crystallize around three points. One, Nuremberg was a legal act in only the thinnest sense. The "legal" basis of Nuremberg stemmed directly from a policy paper, the London Charter, and was nothing more than a "sensible, politically expedient decision [disguised] as a moral judgment." Any enforcement of this policy paper would be political and not truly legal. Posner himself develops that point most succinctly: "Involvement of lawyers and judges does not convert an administrative procedure into a legal procedure, much less convert a political act into a tribute to Reason, at least not in any morally important sense."

Two, contrary to Jackson's assertions, the Allies did not stay hand of vengeance in any meaningful way. By the time the war ended, the Soviets, the British, and the Americans had bombed thousands of German civilians and massacred millions of German troops. Those Germans who were fortunate enough to survive watched the victors divide their country and rape the women while the neighboring countries purged their territories of Germans. There was indeed vengeance, Posner argues, and the Germans felt it.

Three, Posner continues, Nuremberg tried the leaders as symbols of Nazi criminality and forced them to give account and take responsibility for the atrocities they caused. The allies made no attempt to try, detain, arrest, and indict all those responsible for the war and for implementing the dictates of the National Socialist party--indeed they could not if they wanted Germany to continue as viable nation. Pragmatism demanded that "thousands of culpable nationalists and militarists were permitted to resume ordinary life." Trying the symbols of the failed regime, Posner concludes, "might have been sensible from an administrative perspective, from a public relations perspective...[or even] politically shrewd under difficult circumstances. But it was not a great moral victory, much less a vindication of the rule of law." In fact, the limitations and expediency of the entire Nuremberg process, in that "it did not establish an effective international rule of law that would constrain states over the next half century," suggests that its celebration as "one of the most significant tributes that Power has ever paid to Reason" is unwarranted.

Gary Bass's, a professor of political science at Princeton, work on Nuremberg is useful for contextualizing Posner's point about the postwar situation. He wrote a book entitled, appropriately enough "Stay the Hand of Vengeance:
The Politics of War Crimes Tribunals", and came here to the University of Chicago, at Eric Posner and Eugene Kontorovich's invitation to present his work at the International Law workshop. Bass maintains that war crimes tribunals, of which Nuremberg was not the first or the last, are messy affairs, especially "if one wants to get rid of undesirables; using the trappings of a domestic courtroom is a distinctly awkward way to do it. Sustaining a tribunal means surrendering control of the outcome to a set of unwieldy rules designed for other occasions, and to a group of rule-obsessed lawyers. These lawyers have a way of washing their hands of responsibility for the political consequences of their own legal proceedings." Postwar diplomacy is messy and legal rules and trappings don't help. So why use war crimes tribunals? Bass develops the answer at length:

The core argument...is that some leaders do so because they, and their countries, are in the grip of a principled idea....Some decision makers believe that it is right for war criminals to be put on trial—a belief that I will call, for brevity's sake, legalism.

There are strict limits to the influence of legalism. Above all, legalism is a concept that seems only to spring from a particular kind of liberal domestic polity. After all, a war crimes tribunal is an extension of the rule of law from the domestic sphere to the international sphere. Although illiberal or totalitarian states accustomed to running domestic show trials might try to do the same at the international level, the serious pursuit of international justice rests on principled legalist beliefs held by only a few liberal governments. Liberal governments sometimes pursue war crimes trials; illiberal ones never have.

In fact, even though Winston Churchill wanted to shoot all the Nazis after the war, President Roosevelt right before the Yalta conference, had become persuaded by the need for a case to document the crimes of the Nazi regime. Stalin agreed with Churchill's basic sentiment of shooting Nazi leaders but quipped, "In the Soviet Union, we never execute anyone without a trial." Churchill agreed saying, "Of course, of course. We should give them a trial first." All three leaders issued a statement in Yalta in February, 1945 favoring some sort of judicial process for captured enemy leaders. Stalin and Churchill's support of the trials, however, were only intended as cover for doing what they wanted to do anytime: stick it to the Germans and the Nazis for their third major war in seventy years.

The British and American judges, however, saw the point differently, and were committed to a fair process. Justice Robert Jackson conceded that although whether to hold trials or not was a political question. "It's a political decision as to whether you should execute these people without trial, release them without trial, or try them and decide at the end of the trial what to do. That decision was made by the President, and I was asked to run the legal end of the prosecution", once the politicians had decided in favor of trials, the rule of law should reign supreme. Jackson, in his discussion with negotiators from the other nations, further stipulated: "What we propose is to punish acts which have been regarded as criminal since the time of Cain and have been so written in every civilized code." This might have, and indeed did, lead to some leaders being acquitted under the rules established for the proceedings. In fact, as Bass pointed out in the workshop--between making fun of my purple hat--the Soviet judges, accustomed to rubber-stamping the political decisions of the Communist party, were upset when their British and American colleagues voted to acquit some Nazi leaders.

For the Americans and the British, the tribunals represented the postwar moment where, through legal proceedings and the rule of law, the vengeance expected on the battlefields and in the prison camp was bracketed and sublated into the rules-governed adversarial process of legal adjudication. The Soviets, on the other hand, saw trials, massacres, and shootings as equal opportunity tools of a victor's justice of vengeance. Leaders were tried before they are shot--the judicial legitimates the political and the violent--;the soldiers and POWs were executed and deported; the women, at the mercy of the soldiers, were raped to atone for the German crimes of aggression; and the industry and workers of E. Germany, where the Soviets reigned supreme, were shipped back to the homeland to aid in the cause of socialism. Posner pointed out that some militarists went back into civilian life because we couldn't catch them all. That was only really true in W. Germany; in the east, the Communists, after spending years in the prison and death camps, sought to purge Germany of the fascist militarism, and largely did through the wholesale slaughter and internment of a good portion of the adult population.

Does it matter that even in W. Germany, Nuremberg wasn't really law in the way that American domestic law is law? Not really. That Nuremberg took the form of law and legal processes was important--that it was a vindication of the rule of law was less central to the lessons of Nuremberg. Posner is disappointed because Nuremberg was essentially legal enforcement of a policy decision. But the strength of Nuremberg is not the fact that it's good law--Posner's right on that point--but that it underscored the importance of (1) using lawyers, judges, and legal processes to carry out politically sensitive jobs and (2) time-bounded institutions as means of resolving delicate questions.

First, because of the professional importance of following rules and procedures, and, more importantly, creating legitimacy for their actions, legal processes and languages have become important ways of cooling down hot potatoes. What do we do with Saddam, Milosevic, and Pinochet? We could shoot them; it's probably more than they deserve. No, instead, the United States wants to try them and demonstrate, plainly for all to see, that like Eichmann, these men are not just criminally culpable, they represent a type of evil in the international system that can only be contained by leaders who submit their authority to the rule of law. Like Eichmann, Napoleon, or any of the others leaders tried before tribunals, Pinochet, Milosevic, and Hussein "never aspired to be villains. Rather, they over-identified with an ideological cause and suffered from a lack of imagination or empathy: they couldn't fully appreciate the human consequences of their career-motivated decisions." Even American presidents have done atrocious things in the name of power politics--Bush I watched the Kurds die and Nixon destroyed many countries in South Asia--but ultimately the rule of law, in this case elections and threat of impeachment--removed the cancerous sores from the American polity.

Second, these temporally specific institutions, established to do one job, grant states and non-state actors a place where they can create political frameworks designed to deal with a specific situations. This political understandings often create convergence around new normative frameworks--like the principle of distinction or the concept of genocide after Nuremberg--that give state leaders rhetorical tools to legitimate their actions and non-state actors normative tools to mobilize support and criticize states.

Legal process are the best forms of institutional legitimation and power to accomplish the resolution of delicate political questions.

Posted by John Stevenson at 9:00 PM | |

 
Autumnal Beauty and Thanksgiving

I hope that everyone is having a splendid Thanksgiving. In light of the day, I wanted to link to something quite beautiful. Enjoy.



Posted by John Stevenson at 7:00 AM | |

 
Re-evaluating the Panthers: Was King right and the Black Power movement wrong?

One of the first things you learn in Civil Rights history is that Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King is the icon of inclusion, tolerance, and the fight for justice. Teachers and historians alike ascribe to his message-- that discrimination and racism are inconsistent with American ideals--the adjective "universal." By that term they mean that King's message was a message for all people in every social position to resist racism and discrimination everywhere they found it. However, we also know that there was at least another message broadcast concurrently with King's: the message of black power.

The Black power movement, unfortunately, always lives in the shadow of King's movement; lacking the "wide appeal" that King's movement had, politicians and pedagogues today encourage us to remember the black power movement as the failed illegitimate side of the struggle for civil rights. Thus, the black power movement, ironically, is marginalized in the civil rights history and discourse. There are two main ways analysts dismiss the movement. The first method is to cast black power as a violent response to the death of King. The civil rights movement, in this story, fragmented without King's unifying touch, and became divided along class and racial lines within and outside the black community. The second way historians remove black power from the scene is to remind audiences of its "particularity." By using this word, analysts distinguish the specificity of black power from the generalness of civil rights. King's movement then becomes the re-presentation of justice for all and malice toward none whereas black power is simply more discrimination from one group to another rather than a break from the cycle. This dichotomy--of the general and the specific--allows the historian to castigate black power's ideology while supposedly continuing the tradition of civil rights. King is everything that black power was not.

Is this the way we want to remember black power: as a failed, illegitimate, twisted shadow created in and by King's light? Surely not; remembering the history in this way prevents us from understanding the motivations of both movements and obscures the hierarchies of race and raced difference that both movements struggled to overturn.

Black power was about black people. It was uncomfortably militant, irredeemably particular, and dominated by young people who wanted revenge for the wrongs that they believed society had heaped upon them. The character of the movement was largely due to the demographic from which black power drew its earliest support: young black men. Whereas King's movement operated from the social position of the black elite with the support of many Protestant churches and Northern white liberals, the black power movement drew together isolated individuals outside of an institutionalized context into a paramilitary organization designed to fight the oppression of blacks. The youth were not only disenfrachised and disaffected, but they were worldless. At times the oppression seemed so thick and all-encompassing that each person believed that it just him alone against the world; black power aggregated those lives of separate resistance into a cohesive movement. The militancy of the movement scared away potential supporters--then as well as now.

King's movement did enjoy larger passive support than the black power movement, especially when it was about southern racism. The southern states, with their redneck culture, have always been the perfect villain for the democratic mind. Southern racism was unapologetically discriminatory; it was as crude as it was callous. The yearning for black power, particularly as manifested in the Black Panther party, tackled racism in the North and West as opposed to the South, starting first in California. The party criticized American racism as a feature endemic to the American institutions of governance and capital; blacks were oppressed not only due to the racist culture of the United States, but also due to the systems of distribution, legitimation, and rule. Unsurprisingly, the Northerners were less willing to sign on to a project that suggest the whole of American society was flawed, a fact that King himself discovered when he turned from civil rights to jobs for the poor.

Nevertheless, like King, black power was never exclusively about the lives of blacks, just primarily about them. The slogan of the Panthers was "all power to the people." They actively encouraged all blacks, minorities, and workers to take up arms against the government and the capitalistic system. Though their message was largely about black people--they wanted to talk about the same subjects the racists found so fascinating--it was for all oppressed. They didn't want to live harmoniously in a society whose very existence required the degradation of some for the enrichment of others. The logic of capitalism, for them, was the logic of slavery: one man's work became another man's dollar. (Women were largely outside of the story.) The history of black power, then, should not be remembered as a call of blacks against whites, but as a call to democracy against capitalism. If King believed that the genuine expression of democratic equality militated against raced difference and the reproduction of racial ideologies, then the Panthers believed that democracy militated against capitalist exploitation.

I want to conclude by listing the ten point program of the Black Panther party.

1. We Want Freedom. We Want Power To Determine The Destiny Of Our Black Community.

2. We Want Full Employment For Our People. We believe that if the White American businessmen will not give full employment, then the means of production should be taken from the businessmen and placed in the community so that the people of the community can organize and employ all of its people and give a high standard of living.

3. We Want An End To The Robbery By The Capitalists Of Our Black Community.

4. We Want Decent Housing Fit For The Shelter Of Human Beings.
We believe that if the White Landlords will not give decent housing to our Black community, then the housing and the land should be made into cooperatives so that our community, with government aid, can build and make decent housing for its people.

5. We Want Education For Our People That Exposes The True Nature Of This Decadent American Society. We Want Education That Teaches Us Our True History And Our Role In The Present-Day Society. We believe in an educational system that will give to our people a knowledge of self. If a man does not have knowledge of himself and his position in society and the world, then he has little chance to relate to anything else.

6. We Want All Black Men To Be Exempt From Military Service. We believe that Black people should not be forced to fight in the military service [in Vietnam] to defend a racist government that does not protect us. We will not fight and kill other people of color in the world who, like Black people, are being victimized by the White racist government of America.

7. We Want An Immediate End To Police Brutality And Murder Of Black People. We believe we can end police brutality in our Black community by organizing Black self-defense groups that are dedicated to defending our Black community from racist police oppression and brutality. The Second Amendment to the Constitution of the United States gives a right to bear arms. We therefore believe that all Black people should arm themselves for self- defense. (emphasis added)

8. We Want Freedom For All Black Men Held In Federal, State, County And City Prisons And Jails. We believe that all Black people should be released from the many jails and prisons because they have not received a fair and impartial trial.

9. We Want All Black People When Brought To Trial To Be Tried In Court By A Jury Of Their Peer Group Or People From Their Black Communities, As Defined By The Constitution Of The United States. We believe that the courts should follow the United States Constitution so that Black people will receive fair trials. The Fourteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution gives a man a right to be tried by his peer group. A peer is a person from a similar economic, social, religious, geographical, environmental, historical and racial background. To do this the court will be forced to select a jury from the Black community from which the Black defendant came. We have been, and are being, tried by all-White juries that have no understanding of the "average reasoning man" of the Black community.

10. We Want Land, Bread, Housing, Education, Clothing, Justice And Peace.
When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume, among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and nature's God entitle them, a decent respect of the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That, to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed; that, whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it, and to institute a new government, laying its foundation on such principles, and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and, accordingly, all experience hath shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But, when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object, evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security.

In closing, I will say this: the platform of the Panthers is much less radical today than it was when it was first offered. The Panthers were clearly committed to a non-capitalist democratic system because they believed that a racist market society would not provide for the welfare of its poorest members. This intuition is a common one on the left in America today. The Panthers argued that an all-white jury would not provide justice to black defendants. The Supreme Court stipulated the same thing years ago. The Panthers maintained that police brutality was a problem for black communities. Rodney King made their observation a national question. The Panthers argued that people have a second amendment right to bear arms. So does the Republican party. The Panthers reminded us that education was the key to self-knowledge. Most lawmakers would endorse that statement. Lastly, in point ten, the Panthers quoted the opening statement of the Declaration of Independence to remind us that governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. The Founders may have been proud. It seems that we are all Black Panthers now.

Posted by John Stevenson at 10:00 PM | |

 
No Post on Tuesday

I am sorry for not posting something on Tuesday. For all you loyal fans--all three of us (ChienWen, Rabbi Gray, and me), I usually update after my workshop but yesterday I had an engagement on the North side. Since I could have predicted that it would prevent me from coming home before 2AM, I should have update before I left. However, that just means that Tuesday, I will post twice. One post will deal with the invasion of Iraq and the other post will gesture at some thoughts about the black power movement. For all of you who will not be able to read for the rest of the week due to family engagement, I wish you all a wonderful Thanksgiving. I will post on both Thursday and Friday, and, as usual take the weekend off.

Thank all you readers; leave a comment and tell a friend about the Observer.

Posted by John Stevenson at 2:00 AM | |

 
No Civilians Left?: Fighting Wars Today

Child soldiers, some of whom are no older than six, are to be found in three quarters of the world's current fifty or so conflicts. In Sierra Leone's Revolutionary United Front (RUF), 80 percent of the fighters were aged between seven and fourteen. Twenty thousand children are reported to have served in Liberia's protracted civil wars, and there were many children among Rwanda's génocidaires. As if to make their use more palatable, many of these children were given childlike names. The Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka had a Baby Brigade and called their girl soldiers "Birds of Freedom"; there were "Little Bells" and "Little Bees" in Colombia and "Brave Sprouts" in Myanmar. Saddam Hussein called his child warriors "Lion Cubs."

Are there any civilians left in the brutal wars of today?

A chief principled assumption about conflict today is that harming civilians is bad and wrong. In the technical lexicon, this is known as the "principle of distinction." Whenever large numbers of civilians are killed on purpose, we use terms like "murder" and "massacre" to connote our outrage. For example, we don't refer to Lt. Kelley of Vietnam's action as "The Unhappy Incident of Mai Lai", but rather as "The Mai Lai Massacre." Even when civilians death are acceptable, as in the doctrine of collateral damage, their never ok; we still express shock that any civilians have to die at all.

This chief assumption, though, faces one major flaw-- a flaw that becomes obvious the moment one is on a battlefield or knows someone who has been--the principle of distinction implies or assumes that a soldier can tell a civilian from a combatant when his or her life is in danger, or when he or she is in the field. And as always in a time of war, it's never that easy and definitely never that simple.

The New York Review of Books, from which I took that opening quote, describes the terrible landscape of warfare in some of the most war-torn societies:

Rwanda, where neighbors hacked each other to death with machetes, happened soon after, and Srebrenica, where eight thousand Muslim men were led away under the eyes of UN peacekeepers and murdered, and Sierra Leone, in which villagers thought to be sympathetic to the government had their hands and arms chopped off by rebel troops. In this new kind of war, said Sommaruga, everyone and everything—babies, crops, livestock, houses, old people—had become fair game.

Nothing is sacred; there are no distinctions only a need to survive. What makes it worse is that there are no civilians left in this landscape. Even children, the archetypal civilian, must take up arms to defend themselves, and the interests of their cruel masters. Dante's Inferno, with its boundaries and systemic orderliness, would be heaven compared to the world that some of these child soldiers live in. Who are these child soldiers, this "lost generation"?

Demographers started talking about the "lost orphan generation," they were usually referring to the 1.8 million South Africans who had lost one or both parents to AIDS. Long before that, however, the term "lost" had been used to describe another group of children altogether, also from Africa: these were the "lost boys" of Sudan, so called after Peter Pan's orphans cast as children into the world of adults. These "lost boys" were the 3,800 young Sudanese chosen from among the survivors of the thousands who had been separated from their families in Sudan's long civil war between North and South, and who now, in the new century and amid considerable publicity, were being welcomed to new lives in the US.

Kaplan's The Coming Anarchy, in a way, was a characterization of what life would be like after states collapsed. The national economy would revert to a quintessential, cruel, parody of feudalism: control of land and the power of the military would be the means of securing a livelihood in the literal sense of the word.

What brought all this about, as Singer points out, is in part the emergence of warlords and rebel armies hastening to fill the void left by failing states, seeking control not so much of countries as of poppy and diamond fields, or of coltan mines, which provide a mineral needed for cell phones and laptops. But the use of children was also made possible by the lightness, availability, and cheapness of weapons, the rifles, grenades, mortars, and machine guns dumped in the wake of the end of the cold war. You no longer have to be rich or strong to carry a Kalashnikov: it weighs little more than a small dog and, in parts of Africa at least, costs about the same as a chicken. A handful of children today, it seems, has the equivalent firepower of an entire regiment of Napoleonic infantry.

Surely, as citizens of the world's most powerful state, this is not the fate we should allow any human being to wallow in. The tragedy, however, do not stop at the child soldiers. The supposed innocence of children quick retreats in the face of such appalling circumstances. The second tragedy is that when children lose their childhood, the category of civilians disappears as a meaningful distinction. The loss of civilians, in an age of total war, means that there is no one keeping alive a social space into which one can repatriate. Without civilians, there is no civilization, no post-war world, no normalcy, no peace.

Posted by John Stevenson at 6:00 PM | |

 
Dissenting Opinions? Gay-friendly opinions on the Christian Right

I was reading Christianity Today online a short time ago when I stumbled onto a link that contained a suprisingly interesting discussion. The article, entitled, Baylor Dismisses Gay Alumnus From Advisory Board, detailed the removal of a very active alumnus from the Baylor social scence.

The article tells a story typical of good people who are betrayed by their Christian, supposed cosmopolitan, community due to a politicized difference:

He graduated from Baylor University in 1983, with a degree in accounting, worked his way up in the business world, picking up a Harvard MBA, working with a venture capital firm, and running a technology company. In the last decade, he has personally given about $65,000 in gifts to Baylor, and he raised another $60,000 to endow a fund in honor of a business colleague and the colleague’s wife — the couple had met at Baylor.

But this fall, he received an unexpected call from the business dean telling him [Smith] he would need to leave the advisory committee because he is gay.

Smith said he would find other places for his philanthropy and his time now. And he said he does not feel any personal bitterness toward Maness, who Smith said faces unfortunate pressure to adhere to anti-gay policies. “No dean at Baylor is ever going to get fired for getting rid of a homosexual, but he does risk his job for retaining one,” Smith said.

No one is, naturally, surpised that a conversative Baptist institutions is homophobic. Sadly, we have come to expect that an institution based primarily on an act and gift of love by it's founder, Jesus Christ, would subscribe to some of the most hateful behavior. What was interesting here were the comments on the article.

The comments take directly to task the flawed logic of politicized difference masquerading as sound theology.

This was a choice comment:

Do you think Baylor has ever dismissed someone from their board for coveting the possessions of others? because that’s also an abomination. Deuteronomy 7:25 “thou shalt not covet the silver or the gold that is on them, nor take it unto thee, lest thou be snared therein; for it is an abomination to the LORD thy God.”

This person was probably a social scientist:

Shelia, The Bible is somewhat ambiguous about these issues, but, as we can see, not all religious institutions think the bible requires them to expel gay people – and some think that it requires them to provide them with health benefits ! Since it is impossible to get an objective reading of what constitutes the “correct” religion, I think that people should proudly declare that they don’t like gay people – even if they are discrete about it – and stop hiding behind a bible (which they selectively quote from).

This person wins the apposite sound bite award:

I suppose IF homosexuality were a sin, Christians at Baylor would have the inherent abiltiy to “Love the sinner and hate the sin.” Was dismissing Smith an act of love. I think not. So, homosexualiity, as matter of life and not choice, its “acceptable” to hate the person. Makes me wonder... What would Jesus REALLY do? He probably wouldn’t apply to Baylor and if he did, he’d probably be dismissed for not wearing trousers!

My personal favorite:

Sinners need not apply
I’m with Sheila: everyone who violates a single tenet of the old or new testament should be shunned by all Christian people and banned from their schools and administrative positions.

That would include:

Artists & photographers ("You shall not make for yourself a graven image")

Football players ("Remember the sabbath day")

Soldiers ("You shall not kill")

Divorcees w/new spouses("You shall not commit adultery")

The Secretaries of State, Defense, and Homeland Security ("You shall not utter a false report")

George W. Bush ("You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor")

White people, straight people, Christians, oh, and everyone else ("You shall not wrong a stranger or oppress him")

Congratulations, Sheila, you’re the new Advisory Board of Baylor University!

And of course, the one that goes for the gullet:

No one’s “shocked” by the actions of Baylor University, Sheila—we’re appalled. Appalled at the hypocrisy; appalled at the self-righteousness; appalled at the startling lack of sophistication displayed by “liberal Christians,” “compassionate conservatives,” or what have you, in reading, interpreting, or applying their own scriptures. Notice how the bible is always “clear” only on issues that suit the conservative social agenda, but mysteriously unclear when it comes to interpreting those prohibitions that good Christians violate on a daily basis. Somehow gays and liberals are the only ones who need to be held accountable to scripture, while the administrators who make these decisions have managed to stay clear of “sin.” Please...sell me some beachfront property in Arizona while you’re at it! When good Christians start holding their own leaders (and themselves) accountable to the same standards that they apply to others, then maybe the rest of us will take such “principled” stands as the one Baylor has taken a little more seriously. Ask George Bush to step down, then tell me it’s okay to dismiss gay people from their well-earned positions in our schools, churches, and communities.

Appalled is exactly right. Maybe there is hope for a counter-bigotry position to arise from within Christian communities. I could just be too optomistic though.

Posted by John Stevenson at 5:15 PM | |

 
Kaplan on Kissinger

I just finished another Kaplan book: The Coming Anarchy -- a collection of essays, all of them written before 9/11, on the state of the world following the Cold War. The essay that I'm singling out here is the one on Kissinger and his doctoral dissertation on Metternich and Castlereagh. In it, Kaplan argues that Nixon and Kissinger kept American troops in Vietnam for as long as they did so as to maintain the US's strategic position vis-a-vis China and the USSR. Kaplan cites a couple of American foreign policy successes such as Nixon's visits to China and the USSR in order to substantiate this thesis, but he also writes that "there is no way to prove or disprove connections between the Nixon administration's cold-bloodedness in Indochina and its ability to project power elsewhere, to America's obvious benefit." I'd be interested in your views on both Kaplan's original argument, and on his claim that it can't be proven or disproven.

Posted by Chien Wen Kung at 4:54 AM | |

 
To the land of Oz I go

I'll be overseas in Australia from Sunday evening to Wednesday evening. Alas, it's an official visit, so I can't say much about it. I hope to blog a little before I go, but no promises.

Posted by Chien Wen Kung at 9:52 PM | |

 
Obsession: The Search for Women

We Americans are obsessed with women; it is a national pastime. References to and insinuations about women are to be found in every magazine, television show, song, work of philosophy, journal, and newspaper. The appetites of our imaginations to know Woman and to understand Her seem to show no sign of abating nor of being satiated. We have colonized every part of Woman: her imagination, her body, her sex life, her gender, her difference, her clothing, her religion, her most sacred communions of love and giving. What we enjoy most about Woman is discussing Her relation to Herselves. In that vein, the project of feminism--making women equal partners in social discourses and liberating them from hierarchies of sex and sexed difference--is the social-mental climax of our obsession. Feminism is all about women; talking about feminism is just another excuse to talk about Woman and Her "authenticity", Her relationship to Herselves.

It is with that idea in mind--that we are obsessed with Woman's authenticity--that I will seek to understand the articles and essays which follow. After suggesting why the quest for authenticity is a bad way to do feminism, I offer a critical re-orientation for feminist projects.

The Columbia Spectator on 3 November 2005 ran an article entitled "Is Feminism Screwing Women? Or Are Women Screwing Feminism?" (Thanks to Rabbi Gray for this tip.)The title itself betrays the author's presupposition that women are uniquely the authors and targets of feminist inquiry. To the extent to which a feminist critique is a challenge to hierarchy, inequality, and sexed difference, it is also a relational proposition for both men and women. Feminism is, to be sure, the articulation and culmination of women claiming their humanity and personhood, but the claims to that humanity and that personhood are claims about belonging to a cosmopolitan group inclusive of all and exclusive of none, especially on grounds of sex. At the heart of this project are twin goals, both equiprimordial, of liberation and equality. Understanding the feminist project is crucial to understanding how women today relate to that project, and whether Woman is being true to Herselves.

I take up here the challenge of answering the question "Is Feminism Screwing Women? Or Are Women Screwing Feminism?". In order to get at the question we need to know what feminism isn't, what feminism is, and who are women?

Contrary to popular belief, feminism is not the sexual revolution.

Harvey Mansfield a Harvard political philosophy professor made famous most recently by his tactic against grade inflation—giving students As on their transcripts and a separate grade they deserved—has been talking about nothing but feminism these days. His new book on manliness explores the boundaries of feminism, making the argument that there is nothing “liberating” about women trying to rack up sexual partners like guys. By playing “the men’s game,” women are just submitting to its restrictions. With Levy and Mansfield on my mind, it was impossible to see the various varieties of slut nurse, slut policewoman, slut angel, slut devil, and slut maid strutting around this Halloween and not ponder the question of feminism.

The misunderstanding here comes from a conflation of the message of sexual liberation and the project of feminism. The aim of the sexual revolution was to cast aside cumbersome social mores and rules surrounding the public pursuit and acknowledgement of the act of sex. The goal of sexual liberation is the pursuit of the good "fuck" without any authority, secular or ecclesiastical, providing prohibitions on the path of pleasure. The sexual revolution was rooted in biological and psychological desire; it freed the individuals to get what they wanted without sympathy, remorse, or second thought, and, most importantly, to be able to talk about it the next day. The revolution was particularly helpful in bringing the sex lives of those who have them--and the pity for those who don't—into full public view, thus allowing sexual discourses to be medicalized as a regulation for the safety of the body.

The author's conflation of the revolution of sex with the project of feminism is no where more apparent than in her/his description of a Chabad Jewess as "an orthodox woman, wife, and mother who covers not only her body out of modesty, but also her hair...[and] has been either pregnant or breast-feeding for the past seven years." He/she continues: "in a culture where some claim feminism means flashing your tits to drunken guys on spring break, certainly a[n] [orthodox] woman... is more than worth considering." Feminism is more than about getting off and getting wet. The project of feminism has to be more than the ability of females to fellate guys they hardly know, of two guys to make out in public, or of two lesbians to give each other a hand during an awful movie. Sex isn't politics and feminism was quite political.

Karen, our Chabad Jewess, however, tell us a lot about what the project of feminism is. "I discover that she runs a 501(c)3 and is pursuing a master’s degree in psychology at Teacher’s College. To those who still turn their nose up at her way of life, she says, “If you say you’re a feminist and you are judging women like me, maybe you need to rethink your feminism." Karen's life, lived in accordance to religious authorities and as a head of a 501(c)3, demonstrates both the liberating and equalizing components of the feminist project. Feminism is liberating in the sense that it grants persons, especially women, the ability to speak and act in public fora without being constrained by their sex and social sexed difference. It is equalizing to the extent to which the hierarchies of sexed difference, and in particular the manipulation of those hierarchies to uphold male privilege and the enforcement female subordination, are challenged, exposed, and subverted.

The feminism project is incomplete, however, because our society is still caught up over the issue of women. Whether in the mini-skirt or the veil, men and women in positions of power continue to want to regulate and prescribe actions for women so that they can signal their social position. When one listens to the "dance Hip-Hop" so popular these days, the rappers encourage the women to "shake their asses" to signal to "brothas" and other ladies their intents. Conservative Jewesses and religious Muslim women are under intense pressure to dress their part. Arrogant and/or diva/ ghetto fabulous thick women are derisively told by horny men to "act their weight" when these men's offers of sex are rebuffed and rejected. Liberal feminists froth over how religious women dress, encouraging the religionists to forsake their garbs to display female solidarity against oppression. Prurient men defend their right of free speech to pornographically depict women as sexual objects for heterosexual male fantasies; even if is free speech, the voice of the women in these videos are obscured by the penises in their mouths and vaginas, and the possessive, rough male hands on their heads.

Feminist preoccupation with the right of abortion demonstrates just how co-opted the movement has become from its radical roots. I quote this passage from Washington Post to gesture briefly at a larger problem.

One of the major issues facing Alito is where he stands on abortion. All you have to do is read his dissent in Planned Parenthood v. Casey to figure out where his feelings are. The case had to do with a requirement that a wife prove she had notified her husband that she intended to have an abortion. The Supreme Court sided with Planned Parenthood and overruled Alito.

Nancy comes into the living room, where Horace is watching television.

Nancy: I have something important to tell you.

Horace: Can it wait until the game is over?

Nancy: It is very important.

Horace: What could be more important than the Redskins' offense?

Nancy: Remember when we drove to Maine and stopped at the cute little bed-and-breakfast in Bangor?

Horace (not taking his eyes off the set) : Yeah. It was a nice trip.

Nancy: Do you remember the bedroom?

Horace: Yeah. It was a nice bedroom. Jeez, the Redskins just fumbled.

Nancy: All right, we're getting somewhere.

Horace: They can still tie the game.

Nancy: It was a beautiful bed with a spring mattress and pink sheets.

Horace: Why do we have to live in the past when I'm watching television?

Nancy: I'm getting to the point. We made love in that bedroom.

Horace: We're married. What's the big deal? We also made love in Bar Harbor and Nantucket.

Nancy: There is one problem. You didn't have any protection in Bangor and all the drugstores were closed.

Horace: It wasn't my fault.

Nancy: Yes, it was, because I'm pregnant and I'm too old to have a baby.

Horace (jumping out of his chair) : He dropped a pass! The dummy let it fall right out of his hands. We can't have a good quarterback if his receivers don't catch the ball.

Nancy: I'm not ready for more babies. We both agreed when our children grew up we wouldn't have any more.

Horace: A field goal should tie the game.

Nancy: I'll be frank. I want to have an abortion.

Horace: He made it! (turns to Nancy) Why have you brought up the subject in the middle of the game? You know Sunday is my only day off.

Nancy: The law says I have to inform my husband if I have an abortion.

Horace: Do what you want.

Nancy: You have to sign legal papers that I notified you.

Horace: I will after the game is over. As long as you're up, will you get me a beer?

Is the main problem here that Nancy has to ask Horace's permission to get an abortion, or that Horace feels its ok to ignore Nancy for a game? Or maybe that ultimately Nancy is alone in the world when it comes to the issue of children and her pregnancy? If she has the baby, Horace will hate her; if she does not have the baby, she alone must make the decision to undergo the procedure.

Feminism has a long way to go when the defense of Western aggression into the postcolonies is a defense of white men and women saving brown women from the brown men and their gods. Of all critical projects, feminism should know that military imperialism hardly ever creates conditions of equality. The fact that veil is still a site of struggle and contestation between legal-religious authorities, women of the postcolonies, western feminists, and western political leaders in France, in Turkey, in Germany, in Afghanistan, in Saudi Arabia, and numerous other countries means that feminism is incomplete.

Feminism will be complete when it understands that targeting hierarchies of sexed difference means undermining all projects and philosophies that seek to define women as women and to confine them as such. This means exposing all hierarchies of difference--class, race, gender, and sexuality--and unmaking those hierarchies so that all can achieve their humanity. At least that is what I mean when I say that I am a feminist.

Posted by John Stevenson at 7:00 PM | |

 
Finances, Freedom, and Autonomy: Early Thought for the Day

There will be another Friday update. Hopefully I will finish responding to at least one of the articles sent to me by Rabbi today. (The one about women I think.)

I was reading the archives of my Livejournal and came across this thought-piece written on 15 March 2005 which I wanted to share with all of you:

Who ever said that money can't solve all your problems? It was probably a rich or middle class person. The irony of our current market society is that people with money maintain that their money causes them so many problems whereas the less fortunate pine for less strict finances. God has blessed me greatly as an undergraduate by allowing me to go to Dartmouth. On the whole, the College is, monetarily speaking, very supportive and providing of my needs. The freedom of financial aid, combined with a host of outside scholarships, has basically allowed me to escape the tragedy of my family situation.

Being at Dartmouth has given me the ability to see a common character trait among many of my friends and acquaintances. A lot of us have what I call, quite unoriginally, "the Dartmouth syndrome." TDS has a number of causes. The leading cause is pre-undergraduate success. Many of us were class leaders in academics, services, athletics, class organization. I myself was the valedictorian of my high school class. We were used to being told how smart we are, how our hard work in high school would open so many doors, and how we would make great future leaders and citizens of America. Exorbitant praise, coupled with the contagious and ubiquitous national euphoria of the mid and late 90s (yay DotCom era), created a real, but unjustified sense of self-worth. Our talents, skills, and in some cases hard work, gave us the luxury of being either elitists or perfectionists. Coming to Dartmouth changed all that perspectivally.

For many, their undergraduate years at Dartmouth was the unpleasant alarm clock after the "dream" that was high school. (Even in the cases when HS wasn't a dream, most people's memories begin to nostalgically romanticize and valorize the good old days.) Save for one person in the house at the moment, and an 04 who just graduated, all of our GPAs after freshman year were not where we wanted them to be (in the top 1% of the class); the reality of competition put all of our achievements into perspective. We may have been intelligent, but we probably weren't brilliant. Common stories from freshman and sophomore year include: persons confuse as to why their papers no longer effortlessly earned As, the discovery that the math department sucked and the 4/5 on the AP calculus exam(s) didn't make it that much easier, the endless wondering of why your high SATs scores didn't make this a breeze, the crushing reality that many of the people here with 1200s and low 1300s on the SATs appeared more intelligent than you. The reality of competition led to endless rationalizations-- I didn't try hard enough, the class wasn't really hard--, the avoidance of hard classes --I'll stick to these easy classes so that I can feel validated or that profs a hard grader--, and discouraged perfectionism.

The symptoms of Dartmouth syndrome are loss of self-respect, endless comparing of oneself to others, hyper-belief in standardized tests (see I'm smart the test says so), and discouraged perfectionism. The worse symptom, discourage perfectionism, manifests as excessive messiness and disorganization, complaining about bad professors, fear of failure, extreme procrastination, and the fear that Dartmouth is the last great thing that will happen to you. (Woe to those who have 3.0-3.4s. You are too smart to be pitiful and too dumb to get a job.)

All of the philosophizing occurred on the 14 March when I was reviewing my undergraduate financing award for my last term as an undergraduate. It dawned on me that even though I had about 1200USD in loans, outside scholarships and Dartmouth had completely financed me for four complete years. This financial safety of Dartmouth's generosity freed me to work quarter-time and study my way through college. I've probably earned 6000 to 6600USD over the three year period at Dartmouth, and even though a good chunk of that has been funnelled into books for class, Christmas presents, (very few birthday presents I usually don't bother), and to Mother, I have been able to live quite comfortably. I've been able to cook for myself every interim, buy books each term, buy a few books and Cds on the side, and go out to dinner two to three times a term. Not an awful lifestyle I assure you. I have also been blessed enough to be let into UChicago who will also finance me (with stipend support even). I don't think I will get a job for the first year so that I can focus entirely on my classes.

Nevertheless, to achieve title status, I want to close with three independent points of crystallization. The first is that money is freedom. This is largely true for persons, families, and nations. I encourage all persons who read this entry to give liberally of your finances and your taxes to supporting the least well-off. Society is deprived of a lot of talent because many persons scrape to get by and are not able to pursue other options. My second point is that Dartmouth is changing the world, class by class, through its financial support of promising young students from many backgrounds. Graduates of the college have a moral obligation to send at least $5USD a month to the college for the rest of their life. Resolve now to do so. The third point is that success is relative to your goals. You don't have to be the best to be successful. At the end of the day, you should be able to say that I got ought of this activity, this day, or this class the ideas, the experience, the knowledge that I wanted to receive. I may have gotten an A-, or G-d forbid, a B-/C+, but what matters is that I feel good about myself. It's more important to be happy with yourself and with the communities in which you socialize than it is to run the rat race.

I wanted to share.

Posted by John Stevenson at 7:00 AM | |

 
Public Scrutiny of Poverty

David Shipler, a minor celebrity at Dartmouth College, provokingly wrote: "[W]hat government fails to do is usually not defined as news. But it should be, for neglect is a form of policy, too. When government ignores a problem, the problem festers and usually fades into the shadows of coverage until a Hurricane Katrina ravages New Orleans or a riot tears through South-Central Los Angeles.... Katrina, then, has offered an opportunity for the press to rethink its inattention to a national disgrace. No problem gets cured unless it is first turned out into the sunlight."

Race and poverty hadn't always been so jolting the nation, Shipler argued, because there was a time when newspapers regularly featured stories on such issues. What had been different in the past was government action; when the government did anything involving the issue of poverty--from Lyndon Johnson's the Great Society to the 1996 welfare reform--the media centers covered the effects of those government policies. However, as the government did less work on those areas, or, as the government's services to those areas became routinized over time, media coverage dropped. Shipler goes on to suggest that the administration's mismanagement of the response the Hurricane Katrina re-centered the question of poverty and race in the public consciousness, and, for a time, put the issue back into the news.

Nevertheless, just because Americans were paying attention to racial inequality for the first time since the 1990s, doesn't mean that everyone was suprised. In fact, Shipler forwards the proposition that those living and working among the impoverished were certainly not surprised.

The deep suspicions of authority among impoverished African Americans — the distrust of police, politicians, and even rescue workers — would not have puzzled anyone who has worked on racial issues, and it should not have amazed a literate public educated by solid reporting on racial tensions and injustices. Surely it was no revelation to those who work in nonprofit antipoverty agencies that many of the poor lived in neighborhoods most vulnerable to flooding but could not evacuate because they had no car, no place to go, no credit card for a motel, or — even if they owned vehicles — too little money for a tank of gas.

Unfortunately, people who staff antipoverty programs hardly ever get interviewed, although they’re primary sources of nonideological information about the grassroots problems of the poor. Many of these workers, once poor themselves, transcend the liberal-conservative political dispute about who’s at fault and see clearly the intersecting factors of personal failure and societal failure that create the ecology of poverty.

If reporters spent time at job-training centers, malnutrition clinics, legal-aid offices, housing agencies, and the like, they would get more powerful stories in a week than they could write in a month — not about the programs themselves, not the puff pieces that program directors who compete for funding would prefer, but rather about the problems the programs aim to solve. Good coverage would also connect the dots by demonstrating the influence of one problem on another and the links among problems and policies.

I take Shipler's point and think it's a good one: the media does not focus enough on policy neglect as much as it focuses on policy failure. In doing so, corporate media allows the government to define the scope of the national conversation. More importantly, however, in an administration such as this, its failures do not, most likely, outnumber its negligence. This analysis, as helpful as it was, neverthless obscures the more important questions: (1) Is Katrina an issue of racial poverty? and (2) Has the media changed its portrayal of black Americans and politics?

What benefits do Americans accrue by viewing Katrina as an issue of race? The negative consequences, in my mind, outweigh the positive. The benefits of the racial poverty angle, for people like Shipler, are that it: (a) demonstrates the public neglect of the intersection of race and poverty, (b) decreases the likelihood that blacks will vote for Republican presidential and congressional candidates, (c) offers reasons why the federal and state governments are still necessary, and (d) proposes further modifications to the United States defense and infrastructure planning. The negatives, for people like me, are that it (a) underscores black Americans as being uniquely in need of governmental intervention, (b) threatens to break the progressive coalition by galvanizing people around either the issue of class or race, (c) under-emphasizes the role that properly functioning governmental agencies can have, and (d) will be seen as an excuse to defund other governmental initiatives.

In a way, I sympathize with Shipler's desired project of re-centering issue areas where the federal government can make a difference through involvement. However, as he himself noted, tackling racial poverty cannot occur within left-right discourses about limited versus expansive conceptions of the federal government. This national discussion needs to transcend those categoies to get to the heart of the matter. But can the nation sublate a left-right discourse without furthering harmful racialized discourses and ideologies?

More important issue than trascending left-right binaries is this: in acknowledging that there are those persons in our country who have a truly terrible material existence when compared the relative affluence of the United States, to what extent will these persons be otherized as passive, foreign, racial, or incapable? Shipler calls for more public scrutiny and ackwoledgement of poverty and racial inequality; scrutiny and acknowledgement require an act of perceiving of one subject onto another. It is the dynamics of the public writ large perceiving the poor that worry me: how will those who need help be portrayed? If we are to have more public scrutiny on poverty will that scrutiny come with the usual historical baggage of the removal of agency or the impugning of blame onto the receiver of charity?

Let me put it more concretely. Policy discussions on the issue of poverty, racial poverty, and governmental assistance tend to revolve around blacks Americans. The very fact that the idea of a "culture of poverty" still tends to surface in discussions about the black poor, or, that poverty becomes an issue of laziness and non-assimilation in the case of urban black and Hispanic (male) youth should reveal much about American thinking on the subject. It is the difference of those black and Hispanic male youth from us that is the reason for their poverty. These differences appear either as helplessness or pathologized, vagrant behavior.

On the one hand, some policy analysts and politicians argue that absent intervention and involvement the poor--whether they are black, Hispanic, or female--would be helpless. Ironically, in a move made to "save" the poor from their circumstances, the poor are stripped of their agency and become politically relevant to the extent to which their behavior and lives are shaped by the governmental intervention. Many conservatives, particularly black conservatives, react very negatively to this. On the other hand, other policy analysts and politicians argue that poverty is merely a function of effort, qualifications, and worthiness. On the lazy or the weak are truly poor; opportunities abound for any who are intelligent enough to seize one. However, we know that a not insignificant portion of the material conditions of a person's life are determined by historical and sociological factors beyond their control. The family and social position into which one was born is primarily a function of randomness: you could have been born into some other family with a different social position. Liberals react negatively to the creation of super-agency and the absolution of responsibility and duties of some empowered social classes.

There should be public awareness of the issues of iniquity, scorn, and stigma that arise from a person's social position in all of its complex axes of race, class, gender, religion, sexuality, country of origin, familial resources, etc. The justification of the duties that some who are in certain social positions owe to others requires a political conversation in which all persons distribute social and personal resources to increase everyone's ability for political and social action and inclusion rather than on images of pathologized, reified, big-"O" Others.

Posted by John Stevenson at 10:00 PM | |

 
Bush and Business-friendly Jurisprudence

In my first post on the issue, I offered that the main reason Bush nominated Miers was due to her pro-business tendencies rather than her moral positions. It seems that Alito too is business-friendly. Indeed, the business of America is business.

Posted by John Stevenson at 10:00 PM | |

 
Presidents Say the Darndest Things

Thanks to Demosthenesfor this tip.

President Bush prodded China on Wednesday to grant more political freedom to its 1.3 billion people and held up archrival Taiwan as a society that successfully moved from repression to democracy as it opened its economy.

Posted by John Stevenson at 12:00 AM | |

 
How Conservative is Alito?

The Agenda Gap has an excellent post by guest-blogger David Herman on Alito's very conservative beliefs. All the recent controversy stems from Alito's 1985 job application to be assistant attorney general under Reagan. Stephen Bainbridge, law professor, cheers Alito on in a post entitled "Alito on Abortion: Vindication for the Anti-Miers Crowd.

In particular this quote of Alito jumps out at me:

[Alito wrote that he believes in:] "very strongly in limited government, federalism, free enterprise, the supremacy of the elected branches of government, the need for a strong defense and effective law enforcement and the legitimacy of a government role in protecting traditional values." [Alito also noted:] In college, I developed a deep interest in constitutional law, motivated in large part by disagreement with Warren Court decisions, particularly in the areas of criminal procedure, the Establishment Clause, and reapportionment.

There are several claims that I wish to bring forward to the reader's attention. Alito envisions a government that is (1) limited, (2) federal, and is (3) under the general guidance of the "elected branches." To move from the euphemistic to the concrete, I shall unpack each term very briefly.

(1) A limited government is a government that restricts its size and influence to such a degree that the basic enforcement of free and equal rights for all is forsaken. Under a perfectly limited government, the political and legal institutions codify and legitimate the current holdings and social positions of the actors in that society; this has the net effect of transforming questions about the care of the least well off and the most vulnerable into question for power politics between the strongest economic and political actors of that society outside the institutions of representative, liberal government. Some situations require the government's presence to ensure the right to have rights. Gay marriage and a definition of freedom for the emancipiated slaves, I have argued, are good examples of this.

(2) The word "federal" means a strong theory of state's rights qua themselves. I have argued in the past that the Constitution was never designed to protect the rights of states as an end in itself, but only as means to ensuring republican liberty for individuals.

Madison provides what he considers to be an easy rhetorical question for his readers: "...was the precious blood of thousands spilt, not that the people of America should enjoy peace, liberty, and safety, but that the government of the individual States, that particular municipal establishments, might enjoy a certain extent of power, and be arrayed with certain dignities and attributes of sovereignty?" I added to the emphasis to highlight that Madison juxtaposes state's rights as ends in themselves to state's rights for the purpose of guaranteeing rights. As I wrote earlier state's rights suffered a huge blow during Reconstruction and then again during the New Deal when it became plainly evident that the states were not protecting individual liberties. Madison's radicalism did not diminish once the Declaration was written; indeed he offered that the motivating principles behind the constitution were more important than the historical forms by which these principles manifested: "It is too early for politicians to presume on our forgetting that the public good, the real welfare of the great body of the people, is the supreme object to be pursued; and that no form of government whatever has any other value than as it may be fitted for the attainment of this object." The teleology of government is the protection of the people; its power the people's consent.

Madison would not endorse the ultimate thrust of late Chief Justice's quixotic and reactionary opening to United States v. Lopez (1995): "We start with first principles. The Constitution creates a Federal Government of enumerated powers" which he subsequently expanded on in United States v. Morrison (2000). "The Constitution requires a distinction between what is truly national and what is truly local. . . . Indeed, we can think of no better example of the police power, which the Founders denied the National Government and reposed in the States, than the suppression of violent crime and vindication of its victims." Rehnquist is incorrect; the framers of the various amendments of the Constitution distinguished between the national and the local only if the local was promoting the aims of the American government: individual rights. In fact, their fear was that when the states were protecting the inalienable rights of properties men, the Federal government's intervention into the matter would threaten rather than enhance the rights of the persons involved.

I shall address (3) in refuting Brainbrige's defense of Alito's exclusionist jurisprudence. In particular, Some bloggers, in commenting on Alito's response, have gone so far as to conclude that he is "against democracy." Bainbridge responds that to infer such a thing is an awfully "thin read" of Alito's response, which, he argues must be taken in context. As Bainbridge reads it, Alito

is not objecting to reapportionment qua reapportionment, but rather to the overall mindset of which the reapportionment cases were a part.

... in another reapportionment case, Harlan complained, “these decisions give support to a current mistaken view of the Constitution and the constitutional function of this Court. This view, in a nutshell, is that every major social ill in this country can find its cure in some constitutional ‘principle,’ and that this Court should ‘take the lead’ in promoting reform when other branches of government fail to act” (Reynolds v. Sims 1964, 624).

I would disagree with the claim that Alito is against democracy per se. He clearly believes in states, the Congress, and the Executive. My claim is that Alito's restrictive view of the judiciary confines and extirpates one of the corrective institutions of our federal government. When political maneuvering and bigotry leave some citizens--like gays in relationships who wish to start families or emancipated blacks after the Civil War--vulnerable to the ideological machinations of uncaring titans, the judiciary, as the protector of the Constitutional principles animating our liberal democratic regime, may be the last recourse for those who need federal action. Without the judiciary, those human beings being tortured at Guantanamo and those persons whose relationships have become stigmatized due to the bigotry of a few and the indifference of many would be condemned to have their dignity and humanity denied.

The United States posses a federal government composed of three co-equal branches. I have written in the past that "institutional and precedent conservatives are also unwilling by disposition to create new precedents to better defend and protect non-privileged persons. The Supreme Court of the United States, and its lower courts that operate under it, share a co-equal burden in the governance of America. Precedent conservatives...should respond to the challenge and govern co-equal." The judiciary is an important check on the Executive and legislative branches; if any branch does not uphold its task of ensuring liberty for all, the other branches of government have powerful mechanism to prevent its partners from doing bad things and potent capabilities to set the government back onto the right track. Bainbridge would criticize my ideal court as activist. In response I would offer that only when the other two branches have (1) failed to act or (2) are acting in a manner incommensurate with their duties to protect the most vulnerable and the least well-off should the judicial branch "take the lead." At all other times, it should operate co-equally with the other branches, being neither overbearing nor deferential.

In a few cases, like Reconstruction, the Executive and the legislative led the way to freedom. In many cases the judiciary is that light. No branch of our federated governmental structure is going to be the best moral actor all the time; however, if any one the branches relieves itself from the duty of protecting its citizens, the likelihood of justice being deferred radically increases.

Alito, then, is too conservative if he is unwilling the bear the responsibility for being the head of one of the branches of the United States government is role no less or more important than any senator, representative, or member of the Executive staff.

Posted by John Stevenson at 8:00 PM | |

 
Bush: War Criminal?

Eric Posner has an insightful post on that question at the UChicago Law Faculty Blog, particularly, because he goes through the evidence and ulitmately concludes its a meaningless thought exercise.

Money quote:

So is Bush a war criminal? Perhaps. But we are all legal realists now, so we need to ask whether it matters if Bush is a war criminal. Probably not, because no court is likely to try him. Other states have no interest in pressing the question because they would not want to acknowledge that their own leaders could be tried and convicted on similar theories, nor would they want to risk losing American aid or cooperation.

Why is international law called "law"? Equality under the law only means something if there is a sovereign to back it up qua itself. International "law" on the other hand seems to me to be merely a codification of the exercise of power by some to the detriment of others. That isn't law in any true sense of the word.

As for my opinion, since we are all legal realists now, it doesn't matter that Bush can't be a war criminal. Indeed, Posner is right that "it would require the conclusion that many recent American presidents – including Truman, Kennedy, Reagan, and Clinton – were war criminals (or arguably so, in some cases indictable but not necessarily convictable), as well as most of the leaders of western nations that have recently employed military force or violent covert operations – and this includes France, Britain, Germany, and Israel, to say nothing of Russia and China." I'm not particularly invested in trying, indicting, or convicting Bush per se. But we shouldn't have to chose between idictment and silence.

However, I think Eric's proposition that: "the claim that modern statecraft is criminal is not useful. If the category is to be applied to leaders, one needs a definition of war crime that permits an overall assessment of the good as well as the bad that the leaders accomplished. But this is politics or political morality, not law" excuses too much. He's right that calling modern statecraft criminal doesn't really matter for politicians and statespersons. It does matter, however, if the special tribunals and international courts continue to overlook America's role in fermenting these disasters and breaches of international morality. International law further decreases in its "law" status if it simply comes to mean "the set of norms and principles codified in legalese that are applied to our vanquished enemies." Bad things happened in the past, in part, because of American interference; acknowledging that should case no great harm. International law loses more, I think, if these tribunals ignore, overlook, and disavow American responsibility--even if we can't find legal culpability due to realist concerns--while making the bad guys that we've dethroned out to be monsters.

For all those devoted readers of this blog, and I heart you, this is not the post of the day. There will be one much later today after classes and homework. Hopefully, I will finish a response to the article on feminism that Rabbi Gray sent me. Enjoy your day until then, and stay tuned.

Posted by John Stevenson at 12:00 PM | |

 
The Reading List

Alright, this is the reading list from now until January 2. Let's see how many of these I can finish before I have to start thinking about, in a concrete and systematic way, what I am going to write my MA thesis on.

Non-fiction

Enrique Dussel, Beyond Philosophy: Ethics, History, Marxism, and Liberation Theology
Jose Marti, Jose Mart Reader
Gina Barreca, Babes in BoylandStephen Brooks, Producing Security
Marc Sageman, Understanding Terror Networks
Howard Ball and Phillip Cooper, Of Power and Right
Noelle McAfee, Habermas, Kristeva, and Citizenship
bell hooks, All About Love
Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, Racism without Racists
Emmanuel Eze, Achieving our Humanity
Ellen Meiksins Wood, Empire of Capital
Page Smith, The Rise of Industrial America


Fiction
Gabriel Garcia Marquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude
George R. R. Martin, Feast of Crows

These books are in no particular order, and, there is an asymmetry between fiction and non-fiction. This partly has to do with my reading interests--I prefer non-fiction--and partly has to do with a lack of recommendations concerning good fiction that I might read. Though since only three of the books on this list have a direct relation to international relations literature, the other texts are bonus knowledge representing a pool of information that may not be directly shared by others who share my interests. My excuse for the fiction is: (1) Solitude is a classic and was purchased for me last year so I should read it, and (2) Feast is the most recent book in a series that some friends and I are reading together.

Posted by John Stevenson at 7:00 PM | |

 
Humanity in an Age of Terror: Reflections on the Riots in France

I got an excellent tip from Connor on The Little Green Blog. He wrote: "If you are the sort of person who actually wants to know why riots are happening in France, you are probably the sort of person who should read this Afro-French chick's blog. It's been passed around a lot but it's quality."

True to form the website is very instructive. In my most recent post about the French riots, I forwarded the theory that the French riots were a reaction to the hard-line taken by the French interior minister and the police brutality that followed, which also led to the deaths of the two black youths. I argued that the proposition that the rioters were burning cars because they were black or poor was insufficient persuasive as a causal explanation of the violence; rather the racially and economically stratified nature of French society and its politicization of the black woman's body and her progeny as a threat to the French nature accounts for the character of the violence.

This blog seems to confirm my theory in two ways.

First, the title of the post is "Mort pour rien - Dead for nothing." The choice of title immediately indicates the tragedy of the situation: the lives of two youths were thrown away simply because they were black. The author maintains this posture in the opening paragraphs and is worth quoting at length.

The riots were triggered by the death of two youths of African decent, Bouna Traore, aged 15, and Zyed Benna, 17, were electrocuted at an electricity sub-station in Clichy-sous-Bois as they ran from the police. A third youth who escaped death, said they panicked and ran because they found themselves near the scene of a break-in incident where police began to arrive. The police of course deny any involvement in the boys death. It should be noted that these young people are not immigrants. Their grandparents and possibly their parents are but they are born in France and are French citizens. Constantly referring to them as "immigrants" is a problem in itself and reinforces their exclusion from mainstream French society.

The boys did not have criminal records nor were they known to the police so why did they run[?] The explanation given in Indymedia Paris by Laurent Levy is very plausible given the appalling racist record of the French police. They knew what would happen to them if they were stopped for an ID check. They would risk being detained and spending several hours being humiliated at the police station - you do not have to have much of an imagination to know the kind of taunts the boys would be subjected to. It was late and they wanted to get home where they were expected by their families. Levy also asks why the Minister of the Interior Nicolas Sarkozy had to say that this drama took place after a burglary attempt implying the boys were invovled or boys "like them" ie Africans and Arabs. (emphasis added)

Second, the police overreacted to the intiatial response to the dead youth. The author then observes, "Following the death of the boys on Thursday there were two days of riots. On the Saturday community members in an attempt to calm the situation organised a silent march in memory of the teenagers." The author's re-telling appears to complicate my story somewhat because the original riots were only two days. In fact, another damning piece of evidence against my theory is that these riots typically break out and at least 80 cars a night reguarly are burned around Paris. (I noted that frequency of the burnings in my original post.) This evidence, however, is not as damning as it seems for I argued that the hardline of the minister and the police brutality led to the big riots. The minister's declaration of war on the "scum" charged the atmosphere; the police's brutal response to the peaceful protest (which I will detail below) leads to the rioting.

In the evening, some 150 young Africans met with the Mayor to discuss the events. The mayor talked about the cost of the damage but did not make any reference to the heavy handed policing. The youths became very angry at the police, the repression, the abusive language directed at their mothers, calling them sluts. The police began to arrive with flashballs (for shooting rubber bullets) and riot gear provoking the crowds. They then told the brother of one of the dead youths to go home. He took three steps towards the police who then began to fire tear gas at the crowd. The following day, about 8.30pm on Sunday evening there was another incident which took place around the local Mosque. By this time according to Netlex things had calmed down but it seems the police presence was heavy in the area. It is not clear what exactly happened but the police released tear gas grenades one of which landed in the local Mosque during prayers which was full of families. A panic followed as the building filled with smoke and people were crying and coughing and running. It is this incident that triggered the riots again and they have continued ever since spreading into a worsening situation and spreading to other French cities.

Laurent Levy, whom the author quotes, and whose reflections I shall also reproduce, also credits the charged atmosphere created the by Interior Minister and the police for the situation.

Why did the Minister of the Interrior make a point of saying that these events took place following an attempted theft? Doubtless, he wanted to play on the fantastic and disastrous idea that people have of the “suburbs,” an idea that he himself helps to spread. That they are lawless places ruled by criminals, threats to public safety, breeding grounds of delinquency.
If some young people die while fleeing the police, you might as well tell the good people that it is because they had done something wrong. Anything will do.
If the story takes place on the edge of a poor neighbourhood in the “inner suburbs” around Paris, it is because we’re dealing with “trash.”
. . .
What we may doubt, though, is that we have the same idea of what is “tolerable” and what is not: after all, what is intolerable in a civilized society is not the revolt of those whose children, brothers and friends are hunted down and killed. What is intolerable is the arrogance of the authorities, of irresponsible police, of the State which is waging war against the poor.
Throughout these events the agents of the State have acted as if they were in a civil war.
. . .
And so it was that during their prayers, on the Night of Destiny, that the Moslems of Clichy were given a chance to appreciate the efficiency of their country’s police. They have no need to fear for their safety. They got to see how the Flash-Balls work. They got to see the children running scared while their mothers, trying to protect them, were called “whores” and chased down the stairs by the Mr Sarkozy’s soldiers.
Those who did not know are now able to see what “colonial neighbourhood management” means. Tomorrow, it will be clear.
Tomorrow they will be told about the republic, about liberty, equality and fraternity. They will be reminded of how well respected and admired the country that produced the rights of man is all around the world. Tomorrow, the suburbs will be taken care of – and just wait til you see how!
The Minister has already set a date; every week he will visit a “sensitive neighbourhood,” for this is the new name for working class neighbourhoods. He’ll do what’s necessary. There will be units of riot police and special intervention squads. And yet, people were not asking so much: simply to be allowed to live. Of course, this was doubtless asking too much.

Levy's and the African-fem's outrage is one of the many expressions of people looking for their humanity in the 21st century. Message to democratic governments of the world: do not sell the lives of your poor short. We, the poor, have our humanity and our dignity. We will not be denied.

All to often in America the politics of race, crime, and class are conflated to justify inhumanity to some of the nation's most vulnerable citizens. This must stop.

Posted by John Stevenson at 7:00 AM | |

 
Geographies of Privilege: Keeping the Backyard Clean

The situation in France has inspired me to think about the relationship between the urban centers and the suburbs in a cross-national context. My intuition is that, at least in the United States, the city serves two social geographic functions: (a) as a site of gentrification and (b) as a slum for the poor. The suburbs, in contrast, are (1) where the rising and established persons of middle class status make their homes and (2) serve as nodes of capital flow and investment for smaller commercial and residential enterprises. In Europe, particularly on the Continent, it seems to me that there is a greater concentration of the established and the rich in the cities whereas the poor live on the outskirts. Outside of Europe, especially in the poorest countries and the countries with the least developed political institutions, the cities are administrative centers (rather than centers of capital concentration and investment) which live off the wealth and production of the non-urbanized sections of the countries. In the richer, non-European countries, I don't have a sense about what the perception is.

So I'm trying to wrap my head around these issues when I discovered an article in Slate named "Is Urban sprawl really an American menace." The article is a book review of Sprawl: A Compact History (pun-intended I presume) both of whom's main point is summarized as "Sprawl is and always has been inherent to urbanization. It is driven less by the regulations of legislators, the actions of developers, and the theories of city planners, than by the decisions of millions of individuals—Adam Smith's "invisible hand." Sprawl the is a description of people physically locating their residences outside the city by some invisible hand.

But this begs the questions: who is fleeing from whom and why? The historical record, as portrayed by Slate and the book, offer mixed evidence:

As long ago as the Ming dynasty in the 14th century, the Chinese gentry sang the praises of the exurban life, and the rustic villa suburbana was a common feature of ancient Rome. Pliny's maritime villa was 17 miles from the city, and many fashionable Roman villa districts such as Tusculum—where Cicero had a summer house—were much closer. Bruegmann also observes that medieval suburbs—those urbanized areas outside cities' protective walls—had a variety of uses. Manufacturing processes that were too dirty to be located inside the city (such as brick kilns, tanneries, slaughterhouses) were in the suburbs; so were the homes of those who could not afford to reside within the city proper. This pattern continued during the Renaissance. Those compact little cities bounded by bucolic landscapes, portrayed in innumerable idealized paintings, were surrounded by extensive suburbs.

During the 17th and 18th centuries, while the poor moved increasingly eastward, affluent Londoners built suburban estates in the westerly direction of Westminster and Whitehall, commuting to town by carriage. These areas are today the Central West End; one generation's suburb is the next generation's urban neighborhood. As Bruegmann notes, "Clearly, from the beginning of modern urban history, and contrary to much accepted wisdom, suburban development was very diverse and catered to all kinds of people and activities."

When inexpensive public transportation opened up South London for development in the 19th century, London sprawl took a different form: streets and streets of small brick-terrace houses. For middle-class families, this dispersal was a godsend, since it allowed them to exchange a cramped flat for a house with a garden. The outward movement continued in the boom years between the First and Second World Wars, causing the built-up area of London to double, although the population increased by only about 10 percent—which sounds a lot like Atlanta today.

Residential location, then, always seems to have been about wealth, class, and social status. Earlier in history, the rich couldn't suffer to have the poor and the dirty industries destroying their beautiful urban landscapes. Then societies reached a point where the middle classes, particularly during the industrializing period, viewed public transportation as a "god-send"--a gift from heaven--to escape the confines of the city into the beautiful lands where they would have space for the family and for the garden.

The connection of space, beauty, and residential location took on a very sinister logic in industrializing England and in America during the immediate post-WWII era. Marxist historians often remind us that the cities were a cauldron into which the proletariat and the Irish were thrown, subjected to wage-slavery, and ground into nothing. The machine(s) of capitalism literally consumed the worker in production. The working class became precisely the working classes because, lacking property, they only had the labor power of their bodies to sell for a wage. The wage was then translated into monies with which they could purchase subsistence. Their addiction to the wage, then, developed from a set of imperatives derived from lack of a viable substitute to the wage.

In America, the GI Bill's implementation led to the creation of white flight suburbanism and home-ownership; the blacks and the Irish who had moved the cities in the "Great Migrations" of the two world wars to replace the men who were fighting abroad couldn't be sent back to the South. The returning victor-veterans could, however, flee to the suburbs and institutionalize wealth disparities. If the Berlin Wall became the symbol of Cold War divided Europe, then the white picket fence should represent the literal barring of the poor and minorities from the suburbs. (Legal segregation didn't help either.)

Questions of geography and sprawl, then, are not questions of "good" and "bad"--and Slate would agree with me here--but are questions of equity. And in so far as one's residential location was the physical depiction of one's class and social position, a government ostensibly obliged to protecting and fostering equality--like present day France or America--has a present, real, legitimate, and material interest in regulating the conditions of sprawl and flight.

Posted by John Stevenson at 6:45 PM | |

 
Need Ideas

What should I blog about over the next few days? Send me an email or leave a comment.

Posted by John Stevenson at 6:40 PM | |

 
What's At Stake in the French Riots: Moving Beyond Redistribution and Recognition

France, invoking its curfew laws and emergency government power from the Algeria War, has managed to lessen the chaos that has engulfed the country for the past two weeks. (Only 617 cars were burned last night.) Monsers and Critics reports the French government's response to the issue:

Tuesday afternoon, Villepin told deputies in the National Assembly that, in addition to the steps taken to increase security, the government would enact a series of measures to attack what he called 'social inequality' in France.

'The republic has come to an hour of truth,' Villepin told deputies. 'What is at stake is our model of integration.'

Can we really believe (Prime Minister) Vellepin's characterization of the event as a mere contestation of the country's "model of integration"? De Vellepin's earlier reponse to situation was along the same lines: "There are bands of youths, some very young, who are in a state of social, family and educational breakdown," he said, choosing his words with characteristic care. "They are in a destructive mind-set."

For other people who are following the situation, like Daniel Pipes and Thomas Blankley, the latest contestation is not for more welfare redistributionist policies, but for political recognition of the Islamic youth. (Links to websites found at IRIS blog.)

The French insurrection is by no means the first instance of a semi-organized Muslim insurgency in Europe – it was preceded days earlier by one riot in Birmingham, England and was accompanied by another in Århus, Denmark. France itself has a history of Muslim violence going back to 1979. What is different in the current round is its duration, magnitude, planning, and ferocity.

The riots started eight days after Mr. Sarkozy declared a new policy of "war without mercy" on urban violence and two days after he called violent youth "scum." Many rioters see themselves in a power struggle with the state and so focus their attacks on its symbols. A typical report quotes Mohamed, 20, the son of a Moroccan immigrant, asserting that "Sarko has declared war …, so it's war he's going to get." Representatives of the rioters have demanded that the French police leave the "occupied territories"; in turn, Mr. Sarkozy partially blamed the riots on "fundamentalists."

Tony Blankley provides a similar perspective and emphasizes the non-assimilationist aspects of the violence.

Even when the current violence subsides -- even when the French government attempts to placate their radical Muslim population by offering more welfare benefits and programs -- it will not be the end of the story. A new benchmark of the possible will have been established. The flaccid and timorous response of the French government will only increase the radicalizing Muslim elements' contempt for Western cultural weakness.

...

As Mr. Belien reports, look what a typical radical Muslim leader, Dyab Abou Jahjah, the leader of the Brussels-based Arab European League says: "We reject integration when it leads to assimilation. I don't believe in a host country. We are at home here and whatever we consider our culture to be also belongs to our chosen country. I'm in my country, not the country of the Westerners."

Welfare programs will only strengthen the resolve of the rioters, Blankley argues, because their identity as Muslims are ultimately at stake, not their pocketbooks.

I am skeptical that Messrs. de Vellepin, Pipes, and Blankley really know what is at stake here. Let me offer one key piece of evidence which should complicate our reading of the French riots as something more than demands for redistributionist policies on the one hand, and an ethno-religious intifada for recognition on the other hand.

The New York Times provides some evidence that there has always been low-level violence in the suburbs, making this particular upsurge in violence unnoticeable until late.

France was slow to react to the spreading violence set off by the accidental deaths of two youths on Oct. 27, in part because the initial nights of unrest did not seem particularly unusual in a country where an average of more than 80 cars a day were set on fire this year even before the violence.

Most of the rioters, however, are children of immigrants who were born in France. "It's the attitude of the police; they insult us," said a man of Algerian origin who gave his name as Medhi. "People here don't feel like they're a part of the political system. Their only recourse is to violence."

There has always been low-level violence in the areas where the immigrants from African live; the suburbs are also the poorest areas of France. Commentators and news junkies are all trying to explain a particular outcome: the upsurge in violence. Since the foreignness and poverty of the rioters are constant and do not change (as far as we know the rioters didn't become any more black or any more poor on 27 October), we cannot point to those factors as the explanations for the outcome. What explanatory variable can I offer to explain both (a) the upsurge in violence and (b) the religious overtones of the violence? I offer that a change in the politics of foreignness caused the increase in violence.

The uprising started after a member of the political opposition, Mr. Sarkozy, declared a new policy of "war without mercy" on urban violence and two days after he called violent youth "scum." Within a week of this new war, two youths are electrocuted fleeing the police--the first casualties--of the new war started by the French government. Sarkozy's pronoucement, and the death of the two youths as result, changed the dynamic of being an African immigrant in France. The problem is not foreignness per se. Foreignness signifies different things depending on what work that foreigness is being made to do in the political discourses. It is characteristic in French society for the elites to openly wonder why the immigrants aren't becoming "more French" and why they are so poor. Women's bodies, in particular, are the sites of contestation of negotiating foreignness in France. The most dangerous aspects of the Muslim immigration to France is that (1) their women won't unveil and display solidarity with the French and (2) that the Muslim settler women are out producing the natives due to their higher birthrates. The veiled female body produces more aliens into the French society, all of whom, according the French elite, are waiting for the moment when they can overturn the white, Christian, French, European order. (The French position on Turkey's admission to the European Union also reflects these fears.)

This isn't a problem of recognition or redistribution in France; it's a problem of French racism, and the aspects of African identity that have become fetishized and politicized in France. In order to end the violence, all of those who live in France must remake the French state so that it does not demand that all people who are not "us" must "assimilate." The French nation is black and well as white. Turning the African immigrants into a resident enemy alien not only unfairly creates a situation of war--you can only destroy or defeat an existential threat--but it undercuts the possibility of a post-racial democratic future for Europe. If we are all to achieve our humanity--as blacks and whites around the world--then we being to embrace a post-racial future in America and Europe.

Posted by John Stevenson at 12:00 PM | |

 
Is Saddam's Trial Important for peace?

Transitional justice is hard to achieve. With a full-fledged insurgency still raging in Iraq, and legitimate fears about the stability of the new regime, the many observers who are curious about the outcome of this Iraqi national project watch with anticipation. The trial of Saddam Hussein is one of the the many gambles in which the new regime is participating. The chancy nature of the matter was quite apparent on the first day with Saddam trying to bully the judge and the tribunal attempting to demonstrate its power.

A website, entitled the Grotian Moment Blog, believes, in regards to Hussein's trial that is "arguably the most important war crimes proceeding since Nuremberg." The website continues:

the trial of Saddam Hussein is likely to constitute a "Grotian Moment" -- defined as a legal development that is so significant that it can create new customary international law or radically transform the interpretation of treaty-based law. This Website features key documents related to the Iraqi Special Tribunal, answers to frequently asked questions, and expert debate and public commentary on the major issues and developments related to the trials of Saddam Hussein and other former Iraqi leaders.

If we are to believe the claims here, then we must greet the news that "2 Lawyers in Hussein Trial Shot" with heavy hearts. The Grotian Blog, as a result of this shooting, offers:

the public and the press needs to recognize that the defense attorneys in part brought this tragic situation upon themselves when they elected to have their faces and identities broadcast during the first day of the trial, and when they subsequently refused to accept the Iraqi Government and U.S. military's offers of security. Now they are seeking to exploit the tragic -- but not unforeseeable -- murders of their colleagues in an attempt to derail the proceedings.

The blog continues in that vein resolving that the trials should continue:

After the murder of Sadoun Nasouaf al-Janavi, counsel to defendant Awad al-Bander, three weeks ago, the Iraqi Government and the U.S. military each independently offered to provide security for the defense counsel. The defense lawyers declined, saying that they did not trust the Iraqi Government or U.S. military. This was a ploy; a deadly gambit to justify their boycott of the trial and attempt to delay or derail the proceedings....I think that the judges will end up dealing with this problem by requiring the defense counsel to accept US military protection. If the defense lawyers continue to refuse to do so and to boycott the trial, the judges may tell them that as duly appointed defense counsel, they are officers of the court, and have a responsibility to accept the security and continue to participate in the trial, or they can face sanctions such as fines, imprisonment, and disbarment, and they can be replaced by court-appointed defense counsel who will not play these kinds of high-risk games in an effort to disrupt the proceedings.

The blog further posits that to prevent this disruption to the fair legal process, the trial should move to a nearby location.

Iraqi authorities should thus seriously consider moving the proceedings temporarily to a nearby location such as Dubai. A temporary move would preserve the essentially domestic character of the proceedings yet at the same time would also address the concern that proceedings in Iraq cannot take place fairly due to security concerns. Such a move would would both signal the tribunal’s commitment to secure conditions for all participants as well as help improve actual security on the ground.

Eric Posner disagrees with the idea that an impartial smooth trial is the goal. While a legally fair trial would accomplish the professional legal goals of a judicial establishment, Saddam's trial is not primarily a legal question, for Posner, but a political one.

what would the alternative to trial be? Release is out of the question if we care about reducing the violence in Iraq, and an international trial would not eliminate the moral awkwardness because this awkwardness arose from the means of his capture not the form of the trial. Indeed, one suspects that early supporters of an international forum for Saddam must secretly feel relieved that international judges do not have to confront the problem of how to treat a defendant whose seizure resulted from an invasion that violated the UN charter. The problem, then, is that if one cannot condemn the trial of Saddam without dishonoring his victims, one cannot endorse the trial without disparaging the UN charter, which is at the heart of modern international law. What to do? The Eichmann trial provides the precedent here: an inconvenient trial that cannot be made compatible with conflicting norms of international law is best forgotten, and likely will be.

But these are problems for the international community, not for the Iraqis, who would do well to recall the reaction to the Eichmann trial in Israel, where it was a grand (domestic) political success. The Eichmann trial marked a turning point when victims of the Holocaust could be recognized and honored rather than shunned, and the Holocaust itself became central to Israeli identity. The trial of Saddam could play a similar role in Iraq. It could mark the point, in historical memory, at which Iraq abandoned its authoritarian traditions and began the transition toward democracy. Of course, the trial could be failure; it could instead provoke further violence. But if it is a success, the trial will be of great moral and political importance for the Iraqis. As for the rest of the world, it will be a useful even if awkward reminder that the requirements of international law and morality are not always consistent with the needs of a long-suffering people.

Back in September, I agreed with Posner that the question of the tribunal was primarily political. However, the decision was not political simply because the invasion that ousted Saddam was illegal under international law, but also because the actions of some--namely the United States and its allies--would never be investigated whereas the actions of others--namely Saddam Hussein's regime--were left to be demonized. Posner is right that the tribunal smells a lot like the Eichmann trial. But it's also a lot like the Milosevic trial where our war of aggression is retrospectively justified through a legal process that maligns our enemy without implicating us. Saddam's trial is important for peace--now more than ever--because from the ashes of the memory of his odious regime can emerge an invigorated Iraqi constitutional process and democratic government.

Posted by John Stevenson at 9:45 PM | |

 
Law and Order?

"To err is human; to really screw it up you need France." I think someone famous said that once. I could be wrong.

Rioting spreads throughout France is somewhat neglected news story. CBC has the details.

French President Jacques Chirac struck a more conciliatory note Monday as rioting by French youths spread to almost 300 towns and police reported that the violence had claimed its first fatality - a 61-year-old man beaten to death while trying to put out a trash fire.

As urban unrest spread to neighbouring Belgium and Germany, the French government faced growing criticism for its inability to stop the violence, despite massive police deployment and continued calls for calm. One riot-hit town in suburban Paris said it was preparing to enforce a curfew.

On Sunday night, vandals burned more than 1,400 vehicles, and clashes around the country left 36 police injured, setting a new high for overnight arson and violence since rioting started last month, national Police Chief Michel Gaudin said at a news conference.

The unrest began Oct. 27 in the low-income Paris suburb of Clichy-sous-Bois after the deaths of two teenagers of Mauritanian and Tunisian origin. The youths were accidentally electrocuted as they hid from police in a power substation. They apparently thought they were being chased.

About 4,700 cars have been burned in France since the rioting began and 1,200 suspects were detained at least temporarily, Gaudin said.

And just so that you are aware, President Jacques Chirac was re-elected to a seven year term in 2002 on a platform of "law and order." Anyone else convinced?

Posted by John Stevenson at 6:31 PM | |

 
Inner Split

If you've been reading this blog for the past few weeks, you know that I have been disappointed with Vice President Cheney championing torture and detainment as acceptable United States policies. The Washington Post has another article on the issue today. What's new, and the reason why I am linking to it, is that it seems the Condi Rice, as Secretary of State, has been vocal in her opposition within the Administration of the Vice President's policies. This is significant because many critics of the Bush administration suggested that Rice has played a coy and passive role as Cheney and Rumsfeld formed their own foreign policy cabal. This article complicates that reading of Rice's passivity and whether she is capable of giving good advice to President Bush.

In recent months, Cheney has been the force against adding safeguards to the Defense Department's rules on treatment of military prisoners, putting him at odds with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and acting Deputy Secretary of Defense Gordon R. England. On a trip to Canada last month, Rice interrupted a packed itinerary to hold a secure video-teleconference with Cheney on detainee policy to make sure no decisions were made without her input.

In other good news, the Senate, forced into closed session by the Democrats, is starting to admit that the connections between Al-Quaeda and Iraq are specious.

Posted by John Stevenson at 6:17 PM | |

 
Potentially Good News

The Supreme Court has granted certiorari (agreed to hear) to Hamdan v. Rumsfeld. Balkanization, as usual, elegantly sums up the importance of the case:

Suffice it to say that the D.C. Circuit’s decision to allow the use of secret evidence and to not permit the protections granted by the Geneva Conventions to be enforced in federal court deeply undermines international law and human rights here and around the world. Yesterday, 450 law professors (including myself) issued a statement urging the Court to grant certiorari in Hamdan to address “foundational questions” involving “the relationship between the President's constitutional powers as Commander-in-Chief and the existing constitutional, statutory, and international rules and tribunals that govern the conduct of war.”

Balkanization more recenlty suggested the Supreme Court, as opposed the 2nd Circuit Court, should be the finally authority on whether the judical branch should be exteremly deferential to the executive's framing of this war.

Hamdan offers the Court an opportunity to provide some much-needed oversight. The lower court’s opinion in Hamdan has not been called a “blank check” to the President in the war on terror without reason. It allows the President to convene extra-Constitutional military tribunals to try detainees in the war on terror and prohibits the detainees from enforcing the protections of the Geneva Conventions in federal court. Moreover, the tribunals are stripped of important procedural protections, allowing, for example, the use secret evidence and unsworn statements. Defendants do not even have the right to be present at their own trials. At the very least, the Court should want take a look at this case and decide for itself if this unprecedented grant of authority is warranted.

I look forward to the judgement of the court. If you wish to know what the 2nd Circuit decided on the matter, and what my take on that was, I direct you to my post on the issue entitled "Applying the Geneva Conventions". And if you think the worst of the torture revelations are over, I counter with evidence from the Guardian that more accusations of mistreatment emerge every day.

The charges were issued Saturday against five soldiers from the 75th Ranger Regiment in connection with a Sept. 7 incident ``in which three detainees were allegedly punched and kicked while awaiting movement to a detention facility,'' the U.S. military said in a statement.

And in case you were wondering what torture meant, Andrew Seal breaks it down for us in a quote from Bush's speech.

Our country is at war, and our government has the obligation to protect the American people. The executive branch has the obligation to protect the American people; the legislative branch has the obligation to protect the American people. And we are aggressively doing that. We are finding terrorists and bringing them to justice. We are gathering information about where the terrorists may be hiding. We are trying to disrupt their plots and plans. Anything we do to that effort, to that end, in this effort, any activity we conduct, is within the law. We do not torture.

Posted by John Stevenson at 5:56 PM | |

 
EU Demonstrating Political Power

The EU has been demonstrating a considerable amount of finesse and power these days in international politics.

(1) The Middle East

In the Middle East, the EU is directly participating in Israel-Palestinian peace process by monitoring the border out of Gaza into Egypt. The EU is also being very forceful with Iran over its nuclear weapons programme. Finally, we see the EU very involved the in the condemnation of Syria and its perceived role in the assasination of the Lebanese former prime minister.

(2) The Mediterranean
The EU is hosting a summitt with 10 Mediterranan countries. "The EU is holding its first summit with 10 southern Mediterranean states on November 27-28 in Barcelona, Spain to mark the 10th anniversary of a partnership that covers trade, aid and political and cultural dialogue."

Posted by John Stevenson at 5:42 PM | |

 
While I will update the site every day of the week, on the weekends (Saturday and Sunday) my updates shall be sporadic. If something really big happens, I'll comment on it briefly. Sometimes I'll link to a cool article from the archive. Enjoy

From the archives: "Education and Government". This post discusses the importance of education to Democratic life.

Posted by John Stevenson at 12:03 PM | |

 
Unfinished Business

Ross Douthat, citing Terry Teachout, writes on not finishing books. It happens to me all the time. Just yesterday, for example, I stopped reading Christopher Bayly's Birth of the Modern World after the first chapter; I just couldn't get a sense of where the book was going, despite re-reading the Introduction twice. Maybe it was the post-lunch drowsiness: I do tend to read better at night, for some reason.

Other notable books which I've started but not finished include Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (I stopped at the chapter on Gnosticism); Don Quixote; Jonathan Spence's Search for Modern China; War and Peace; The Silmarillion (after only a few pages!); the first volume of Fernand Braudel's Mediterranean; and Arendt's Origins of Totalitarianism.

Posted by Chien Wen Kung at 5:19 AM | |

 
Assessing the Bush Doctrine

Commentary has rounded up 36 pundits and sought their views on the Bush Doctrine. The responses of Messrs. Buckley, Ferguson, Pipes, Joffe, Hanson, et al. can be found here.

Posted by Chien Wen Kung at 4:33 AM | |

 
Conservative Jurisprudence

Valid social science concepts must possess a characteristic named "operationalizability." That clunky term simply means: How do we know a concept when we see it? How can we distinguish this concept from other related concepts?

Washington Post columnist Michael Kinsely, What's Too Conservative?
, operationalizes the "conservative" in conservative jurisprudence for us in helpful ways. His goal is to outline when someone might be considered too conservative for the Supreme Court. To do this, he outlines three types of judicial conservatism that might appear in a nominee or a judge. His clear framing of the issue provides the readers with an avenue for a political response to judicial conservatism. In each of the sections below I will quote Kinsely's helpful formulation and offer reasons why we should reject judicial conservatism on principle.

(1) "First, conservatism can mean a deep respect for precedent and a reluctance to reverse established doctrines. All judges are supposed to be bound by precedent, and it's a bit of a mystery when and why they feel empowered to change course. But this meaning of conservatism is mainly advanced by liberals, who like the idea that conservatism itself will stay the hand of conservative judges in reversing great liberal precedents....But recent Supreme Court nominees have found that asserting a deep respect for precedent is a great way to reassure senators that they won't overturn Roe, whatever they might think of it on the merits and whatever they actually intend."

This type of conservatism is probably the best type we could hope for from a judge lauded as conservative. This, however, is one of those examples when the best is simply not good enough. Respecting key "liberal" precedents is good. However, if not directly overturning a decision, in the name of stare decisis (let the decision stand), is simply a cover for slowly narrowing the reading of a past case over time, then we have gained little. Yale law professor Jack Balkin warns us that the conservative movement's embrace of the concept "super stare decisis", a term that Senate Judiciary Chairman Arlen Specter invoked a number of times in the Roberts hearing, will allow institutional and precedent conservatives to narrow without overturning cornerstone decisions in American law.

People have tried repeatedly to reverse a particular precedent, and fought long and hard for many years, but were rebuffed repeatedly in the courts. As a result, although they think the precedent is wrongly decided, they accept it as settled law. They will attempt in future litigation to get the courts to read it narrowly but will cease trying to overturn it directly. This conception of "superprecedent" means nothing more than that a struggle over constitutional meaning has been settled in practice. It does not mean that everyone accepts the precedent wholeheartedly or unreservedly or believes that it has "legs," i.e, that it should be extended generously to other situations or expanded in the same way as precedents that are clearly correct expressions of the Constitution. Former opponents will continue to read it narrowly; they will simply cease to demand that it be overruled.

Institutional and precedent conservatives are also unwilling by disposition to create new precedents to better defend and protect non-privileged persons. The Supreme Court of the United States, and its lower courts that operate under it, share a co-equal burden in the governance of America. Precedent conservatives, and the conservatives of point number two below, should respond to the challenge and govern co-equal. There have been times in our nation's history, like Reconstruction, where the government has abdicated their role of governing; the Federal government was needed to enforce rights and did not do so effectively. There are also civil rights issues today which need the clarity of the Courts in order to secure rights for an entire class of unprotected persons.

(2) "A conservative can [also] mean someone who reads the Constitution narrowly and is reluctant to overrule the elected branches of government. Republicans have been waving this flag for decades, reverencing "strict constructionism" and the Framers' "original intent" while condemning "activist" judges who "legislate from the bench." It's not just that the conservative theory of constitutional interpretation is better than the liberal theory. It's that conservative judges have a theory, while liberal judges are just on an unprincipled power grab. This conceit is what allows Bush to insist that he does not impose any ideological litmus test on judges, as long as they agree with him."

Those judges and constitutional law scholars who defend "strict constructionism" and the Framers' "original intent" propagate a bad jurisprudence which I take to task in a post entitled "The Bankruptcy of Originalist Constitutional Jurisprudence." I provide an alternative framework by which to discern constitutional meaning.

(3) "The third meaning of conservative as applied to judges is a conservative judicial activist: someone who uses the power of the courts to impose conservative policies, with or without the benefit of a guiding philosophy."

These conservatives seem to be the movement conservatives of lore in jurisprudential circle. Using the courts to impose a social policy, without a clear philosophy, seems to be the very definition of an imperial judiciary. Whether liberal or conservative, one person should not simply choose the outcome they wish and vote accordingly. I make the case against movement conservatives when musing that supporting Miers, while she was still up for nomination, might not have been that bad an idea.

I welcome feedback.

Washington Post readers, welcome. Have a look around.

Posted by John Stevenson at 4:00 AM | |

 
Contemporary Islamism and Historical Protestantism

Apropos of this disturbing news article on what are most likely Muslim riots in France, here's Francis Fukuyama in Opinion Journal on the challenges posed by Islamic fundamentalism to Western Europe. Citing the French scholar Olivier Roy, he argues that Osama bin Laden's primitivist (primitivistic?) theology appeals to European Muslims (particularly second and third-generation ones) because it

tells them exactly who they are--respected members of a global Muslim umma to which they can belong despite their lives in lands of unbelief. Religion is no longer supported, as in a true Muslim society, through conformity to a host of external social customs and observances; rather it is more a question of inward belief. Hence Mr. Roy's comparison of modern Islamism to the Protestant Reformation, which similarly turned religion inward and stripped it of its external rituals and social supports.

Roy's comparison of contemporary Islamic fundamentalism and Reformation Protestantism on these grounds leads me to wonder what other meaningful parallels can be drawn between these theologies. I'll try to say more at a later time.

Update:

Fukuyama is profiled here in this Washington Post article, which says that:

Fukuyama even compared bin Laden to Martin Luther, a suggestion that, taken out of context, would inflame just about everyone but atheists. But there's always context, and what Fukuyama is really saying (perhaps) is that to some disaffected Muslims, bin Laden looks like a radical reformer and a visionary, standing astride history, saying no to the oppressive forces that belittle Muslims in a foreign world. European society has abetted his cause because it holds Muslims at arm's length while giving them an unwholesome, neglectful freedom to stew in their alienation, until some cross the line that separates the civilized from the barbaric.

This is a bizarre comparison. Bin Laden and his fellow jihadists advocate violence against secular authorities, which they regard as obstacles to the creation of a pan-Islamic caliphate. By contrast, Luther, as Steven Ozment reminds us in The Age of Reform (a book that I've been reading lately), "permitted individuals to resist tyranny and persecution only passively; revolution and regicide were unacceptable remedies." While many Germans who rebelled against their princes claimed Luther as an inspiration, he was always swift to condemn their actions as "contrary not only to Christian law and the gospel, but also to natural law and all equity." His theology, divorced from ethics and social justice, stands apart from fundamentalist Islam's "drive to power." As Martin Kramer writes:

[Fundamentalist] Islam must have power in this world. It is the true religion—the religion of God—and its truth is manifest in its power. When Muslims believed, they were powerful. Their power has been lost in modern times because Islam has been abandoned by many Muslims, who have reverted to the condition that preceded God’s revelation to the Prophet Muhammad. But if Muslims now return to the original Islam, they can preserve and even restore their power.

That return, to be effective, must be comprehensive; Islam provides the one and only solution to all questions in this world, from public policy to private conduct. It is not merely a religion, in the Western sense of a system of belief in God. It possesses an immutable law, revealed by God, that deals with every aspect of life, and it is an ideology, a complete system of belief about the organization of the state and the world. This law and ideology can only be implemented through the establishment of a truly Islamic state, under the sovereignty of God. The empowerment of Islam, which is God’s plan for mankind, is a sacred end. It may be pursued by any means that can be rationalized in terms of Islam’s own code. At various times, these have included persuasion, guile, and force.

Posted by Chien Wen Kung at 11:30 AM | |

 
Applying the Geneva Conventions

Balkanization gives us the main reason why Article 3 of the Geneva conventions are important.

At page 380 of its Report, the Commission recommended that the United States "engage its friends to develop a common coalition approach toward the detention and humane treatment of captured terrorists," and expressly urged the U.S. to "draw upon Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions on the law of armed conflict," which was "specifically designed for those cases in which the usual laws of war did not apply." Common Article 3's minimum standards, reasoned the 9/11 Commission, "are generally accepted throughout the world as customary international law." (I should briefly add here that there are at least two serious arguments that the Executive is legally obliged to abide by Common Article 3, even if it is "only" a law of armed conflict, rather than a treaty obligation: (i) that the President's constitutional Commander-in-Chief authority only extends in the first instance to conduct that is consistent with the laws of armed conflict (a topic on which David Golove of NYU is currently writing); and (ii) the notion, suggested in the Court's Hamdi decision, that Congress's authorizations to the President to used all "necessary and appropriate" force against certain enemies (such as Al Qaeda) implicitly limit the President to using only those forms of force that are consistent with the laws of armed conflict, such as Common Article 3. But I do not dwell on those arguments here, because the Administration obviously rejects them and is not acting in accord with any such notions.)

Article 3 of the Geneva Convention is designed for those moments and situations where leaders of governments are unclear about the nature of the conflict. The language of Geneva, and the principles behind it, seem to be when in doubt grant more rights.

Of the types of wars and conflicts that Geneva applies to--and this is specifically to address some the concerns of memos to White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales, the convention was designed, in part, to apply in "armed conflict not of an international character occurring in the territory of one of the High Contracting Parties." In these types of conflict, the Convention was specifically designed for "persons taking no active part in the hostilities, including members of armed forces who have laid down their arms and those placed hors de combat by sickness, wounds, detention, or any other cause," who "shall in all circumstances be treated humanely, without any adverse distinction founded on race, colour, religion or faith, sex, birth or wealth, or any other similar criteria."

There has been some confusion as to what exactly constitutes an "armed conflict not of an international character." In the case Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, 2005 U.S. App. LEXIS 14315 (2005), Senior Judge Williams in his concurrence takes those words to mean:

Common Article 3 fills the gap [between other Articles], providing some minimal protection for such non-eligibles in an “armed conflict not of an international character occurring in the territory of one of the High Contracting Parties.” The gap being filled is the non-eligible party’s failure to be a nation. Thus the words “not of an international character” are sensibly understood to refer to a conflict between a signatory nation and a non-state actor. The most obvious form of such a conflict is a civil war. But given the Convention’s structure, the logical reading of “international character” is one that matches the basic derivation of the word “international,” i.e., between nations. Thus, I think the context compels the view that a conflict between a signatory and a non-state actor is a conflict “not of an international character.” In such a conflict, the signatory is bound to Common Article 3’s modest requirements of “humane[]” treatment and “the judicial guarantees which are recognized as indispensable by civilized peoples.”

Most scholars would agree with Senior Judge Williams. Then Judge John Roberts, voting with the majority, narrowed the language of the text to argue that the convention only meant "civil wars" when it said "not of international character." His narrowing suggested that in so far as the conflict with Al Queda was not an internal war, the convention did not apply.

I take issue with the idea that the convention oughtn't apply. The laws of the conduct of nations in war, jus in bello, should always be read expansively due the character of war itself. War is messy; war is hell. In war, any rights that exist are at best provisional. Whereas during peace time, a person could have a prosperous, comfortable existence, in war, life is, as Hobbes reminds us, nasty, brutish, and short.

The laws of war act as a bookend on the confusing state of war. The return to legalized relationships, as codified in the international treaties like the Geneva conventions and as unspoken in customary international law, represents the return to the normalcy of the civilized world. "The people" rule through the law as it demarcates and constructs the relations between persons in peace time. The laws of war speed the transmogrification of the former combatant, who doesn't warrant protection while she was fighting, into the civilian, who does warrant protection under the principle of distinction.

Rejection of the juridical liminal state of the status-category "prisoner of war"--where a person who clearly is a potential danger is accorded the respects and rights of a civilian--means that for the captured prisoner, the war is not over. Being under the law accords the individual the substantive option to not resort to violence as bargaining tactic; interdiction from the civilizing aspects of the rule of law incentivizes the continuation of the armed struggle. Without the protection of the law, the soldier's dignity, respect, and above all else, survival is only assured through her strength and the power of her weapon. To put it most concretely, the United States tacitly admits that there is no reason for a terrorist to surrender or attempt to end the hostilities; the war for the soul of the terrorist shall be waged long after the shooting stops.

Posted by John Stevenson at 10:15 AM | |

 
Torture and Civilization

The framing of the war by the Bush as a struggle between civilization and violence seems ironic and hypocritical due to the revelations of a systematic policy of torture on the part of the Bush administration. However, conceiving of these two phenomena--the sanctioning of torture by the United States and the struggle against terrorism-- as oppositional logics obscures a key move made by the Bush administration in defining and applying international law. This post argues that administration's juxtaposition of the values of civilization and the values of terrorism has provided the Bush administration with the ideological consistency necessary to torture impounded detainees in the defense of liberty.

President Bush, speaking to the United Nations on 21 September 2004, said of the war against terrorism:

In this young century, our world needs a new definition of security. Our security is not merely found in spheres of influence, or some balance of power. The security of our world is found in the advancing rights of mankind.

These rights are advancing across the world -- and across the world, the enemies of human rights are responding with violence. Terrorists and their allies believe the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the American Bill of Rights, and every charter of liberty ever written, are lies, to be burned and destroyed and forgotten. They believe that dictators should control every mind and tongue in the Middle East and beyond. They believe that suicide and torture and murder are fully justified to serve any goal they declare. And they act on their beliefs.

In the last year alone, terrorists have attacked police stations, and banks, and commuter trains, and synagogues -- and a school filled with children. This month in Beslan we saw, once again, how the terrorists measure their success -- in the death of the innocent, and in the pain of grieving families. Svetlana Dzebisov was held hostage, along with her son and her nephew -- her nephew did not survive. She recently visited the cemetery, and saw what she called the "little graves." She said, "I understand that there is evil in the world. But what have these little creatures done?"

Members of the United Nations, the Russian children did nothing to deserve such awful suffering, and fright, and death. The people of Madrid and Jerusalem and Istanbul and Baghdad have done nothing to deserve sudden and random murder. These acts violate the standards of justice in all cultures, and the principles of all religions. All civilized nations are in this struggle together, and all must fight the murderers.

In this speech, Bush elucidates three key details about the war on terror that we should keep in mind when judging his policies of detainment and torture.

(1) Terrorists, in their very being, oppose every political and moral gain of the free world: "Terrorists and their allies believe the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the American Bill of Rights, and every charter of liberty ever written, are lies, to be burned and destroyed and forgotten." The existence of terrorists is a threat to every free person; no amount of reason or persuasion can deter the terrorists from enacting their beliefs.

(2) Terrorists do abide by the principle of distinguishing between civilians and combatants: "police stations, and banks, and commuter trains, and synagogues -- and a school filled with children." In fact, the terrorists measure success by "the death of the innocent, and [by] the pain of grieving families." The more people that suffer, the better. Moreover, the persons chosen to depict these suffering innocents are the pro-typical civilians in Bush's mind, women and children. Our example here is a woman who cannot protect her son and her nephew.

(3) These acts of violence, by the terrorists, "violate the standards of justice in all cultures, and the principles of all religions" making the defenders of this moral order "all civilized nations."

Bush locates the defense of civilization-- the sum total of all standards of justice in all cultures the underlying principles of all religions-- in the defense of protecting civilians, those women and children who are targets of the terrorists when they attack "police stations, and banks, and commuter trains, and synagogues." It is important to note that the physical representations of the vulnerable and weak persons within civilization are women and children. (see article in the upcoming March 2005 edition of the political science journal Political Theory, entitled "Gendering Grotius: Sex and Sex Difference in the laws of wars." There should be links to the journal through the websites of the libraries of major or elite American universities and colleges.)

What distinguishes "us" from "them," presumably, is that "we" hold the lives of these women and children to be worthy of protection and would not sacrifice them toward some ultimate goal. The very values of civilization, those cultural structures which allow us to distinguish between civilians and combatants in the first place, are targeted for destruction by the terrorists. However, if terrorists oppose liberty, and liberty is thing being defended, why does the Administration choose to detain prisoners caught indefinitely and deny them prisoner of war status? Then Attorney General John Ashcroft suggests a legal strategy, and, then Assistant U.S. Attorney General Bybee in a memo to then White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales postulates a number of reasons to not grant prisoner of war status to these detainees. However, these legal hoops are not the true reasons, in my mind, behind the Administration's willingness to depart from customary international law. The true reason is that the Administration believes that the not dead, not detained terrorist is still a threat to women, children, and civilians around the world. If women and children become the permanent proverbial prey, then the "terrorist" becomes the permanent archetypal predators.

In April 2004, Paul W. Butler, special assistant to Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld, confided to the Boston Globe: "''They're dangerous. And we have a responsibility, both to our forces . . . and the rest of the world, to not let those people back out." The Globe also provides, by way of framing, "[o]fficials have spoken publicly about the prospect of indefinite detentions for some, but they had not disclosed that the majority could be held until the war on terrorism is finished." The war against terror could go on for a very long time. The article continues: "Each detainee has been photographed, fingerprinted, and swabbed for a DNA sample. The great fear, the officials said, is that they will release a prisoner, and then find his DNA on the wall of a bombed nightclub in Kuala Lumpur -- or a Starbucks in Columbus, Ohio. Each released detainee is added to the watch lists of people not to be allowed into the United States." These detainees, even when they stop posing an immediate threat, never stop being an imminent one. They're dangerous. For all time.

Supporters of this strategy realize that even for those few detainees who are not considered to be dangerous, and from whom all usable information has been gathered, "some of the delay in releasing them is caused by the complicated negotiations with more than 40 countries to take back their citizens." Why is there a delay? Getting the detainee to face a trial at home is difficult because the incriminating "evidence gathered at Guantanamo may not be usable in that country's courts. The closer another country's legal system is modeled on the US Constitution, the less likely it is to be able to use evidence gathered at Guantanamo."

Nevertheless, what I want you to realize is that the Administration's concern for the lives of civilians, particularly American ones, with the protection of civilians being the linchpin of the current customary international legal order, has caused the Administration to deny prisoners' rights and protections to its detainees around the world.

If my analysis is true, and accurate--and I think it is--how do we form a political response to an ironic reaffirmation of the principle of distinction?

Posted by John Stevenson at 11:45 PM | |

 
Sticky Fingers: Worldwide CIA Torture Network Exposed

News sources confirm that the Administration's policy of detainment stretches far beyond Guantanamo, senior members of al-Qaeda are being detained by the CIA in "black site prisons."

SENIOR al-Qaeda members are being held in top-secret CIA- operated "black site" prisons across the world, it has emerged. According to anonymous CIA sources quoted by the Washington Post, the agency has been transporting the captives to secret facilities in a number of countries for interrogation.

The covert prisons - of which up to eight have been used - are referred to as "black sites" in classified United States documents and virtually nothing is known about who the detainees are, how they are interrogated or about decisions on how long they will be held. Interrogators at the black sites are permitted to use the CIA's approved "Enhanced Interrogation Techniques". They include tactics such as "waterboarding" in which a prisoner is made to believe he or she is drowning.

The covert global prison system was reportedly set up after the attacks on the United States on 11 September, 2001. "Several democracies in Eastern Europe" as well as Thailand and Afghanistan and a small centre at the Guantanamo Bay prison in Cuba were involved.

Abu Ghraib was not the work of a few bad apples. The torture of suspects has been a systematic administration policy from the beginning of the (global) war on terror. This is larger than the psychology of a few people frustrated by circumstances of the war. And, as the New York Times article I linked to earlier shows, most of the mid-level brass is probably using "nonlethal" methods to get their way. Every patriot worth their salt should be calling for the impeachment of the Vice-President, whose office has been fully behind this from day one, and for the resignation of a lot of military leaders. This is unacceptable behavior for a country who wants to export democracy; democratic self-rule has never been built on the scarred-backs of torture victims.

Scott McClellan, white house spokesperson, defended the Administration by saying:

"What I can say ... is the president has charged the administration to be doing what we can to protect America against another domestic attack and to protect our allies and those who are working with America but to do so in a way that is consistent with our legal obligations both domestically and internationally."

I would say that the president's most important responsibility is to protect the American people. It's a responsibility he takes very seriously."

My next posts will attempt to illuminate the following aspects of the Bush Administration's policies:
(1)Why the reasons we are fighting the war on terror allow us to torture people
(2) My take on the Article 3 of the Geneva convention and whether it applies

Posted by John Stevenson at 11:30 PM | |

 
The Political Economy of Divestment

Andrew Samwick, professor of economics at Dartmouth and director of Rocky, posted a response to persons advocating for Dartmouth's divestment from Sudan. I take issue with his framing of the argument.

Samwick wrote:

Suppose that, based on the projected cash flows from selling its products, the company in question is worth $100 per share. Now imagine that a large group of current shareholders decide that they are going to divest the stock. What happens to the stock price? Let's say they are very successful, and it goes down to $80. Since the business operations of the company have not changed, the future cash flows of the company still have a present value of $100 per share. All that the divestment has done is to open up a $20 per share profit opportunity for a new investor in the company. The most natural candidates to see the opportunity and take advantage of it are the existing management or the remaining (less ethical?) shareholders.

Continuing to focus on the capital markets, the way to damage the company is to deny it access to new capital, not to spend a lot of time debating who should own the shares on the existing capital. The $80 share price would matter, for example, if the company intended to issue new equity and had to take a 20% capital loss on all new shares. But very few companies issue new shares in a given year, and for well capitalized multinationals, there are other financing options that don't even require the equity market. So I am very doubtful that the capital market can be used productively in this endeavor, contrary to the conjectures of the editorial. (Similar conjectures are made in a well intentioned op-ed yesterday.)

Samwick makes an avoidable mistake in his poignant criticism of divestment petitions through a narrow focus on the economics of divestment without a subsequent discussion of the political economy of divestment. While viewing the divestment movement's actions in a purely economic framework makes them look silly and ill-informed, situating the discussion of divestment within a political economic paradigm sheds light on the actual goal of the movement.

A political economic analysis of the divestment campaign focuses on the lobby as a strategic political actor. Let us consider the five strategic factors behind divestment.

(1) The first goal should be obvious; petitioners want to make a statement about ethical investing. In declaring that some institutions like Dartmouth ought not invest in companies that do business in places like Sudan, the divestment movement seeks to transform the discourse surrounding investment and holdings from an economic one of profits to a moral one of responsibility. For the divestment movement, to invest in something is more than placing an institution's money at the disposal of the corporation, the choice of investment reflects back on the institution itself.

(2) The second goal follows in the footsteps of the first. Once the terms of the debate reflect moral intuitions and justifications rather than economic ones, the intended audience--in this case institutional investors--can begin to see stock as good or bad, rather than as merely safe, high profit, or stable. The question then becomes: what should one do with the stock of the bad companies? Divest from it to deny them old capital. Bad people shouldn't have had the money in the first place.

Samwick notes that if the movement is very successful, the price of a stock valued at $100 might drop to $80. He then offers: "All that the divestment has done is to open up a $20 per share profit opportunity for a new investor in the company. The most natural candidates to see the opportunity and take advantage of it are the existing management or the remaining (less ethical?) shareholders." (emphasis mine) The futility of the divestment movement in his mind comes at this moment; the price has dropped but a window of opportunity for the less ethical opens. Thus, nothing, beyond a feel good politics, has been accomplished. But, is that all the divestment movement hopes for?

The divestment movement, if it succeeds in making investment a moral issue, has achieved a greater victory than simply creating the opportunity for new investors. It has changed the atmosphere in which investment occurs from one governed by market relations to one operating under the logic of ethics. This paradigm shift grants the movement three additional strategic resources.

(3) This leads me to my third point. A successful divestment campaign raises the profile of both the centers of capital and the beneficiary of investment. The goodness of the institutions who divest are directly produced against the badness of the place from where they have divested. This move incentivizing large sources of capital to both deny and demonize an otherwise perfectly good source of investment, raising the moral stakes and embedding the issue in a moral framework.

(4) Fourth, in this new political economy of investment--one where ethical logics prevail over market logics--the divestment movement can take advantage of issue convergence and issue linkage. There most undoubtedly will be other groups who wish to raise ethical banners and moral awareness around certain issues. The success of a moral group in the one case provides a philosophical and political arena--ethics--where these isolated demands can benefit from each other and where they can link the demands of one with the demands of all who are doing the same thing. For example, the divestment petition can easily link to other anti-mass killing/ humanitarian intervention campaigns. Alternatively, they could use the Sudan issue to bring out issues of racism and toleration. Just as the South African divestment campaign linked capitalist support of South African to the western lack of civil rights for blacks, so could a divestment campaign aimed at the Sudan provide issue linkage and convergence. This leverage, from linkage and convergence, could then be easily translated into a much more crippling boycott.

(5) The fifth and final move goes one step beyond divestment of the bad place. It targets the enemy of the coalition of the good: those companies and institutions who would invest in spite of the morality of the issue. A successful campaign, with broad based support, gives the divestment-boycott lobby the political leverage to defame and denounce those companies who defy their moral reasoning. In the best case scenario, it will give them the ability to boycott those investors also.

Thus, as I have argued, the divestment movement is not a trade-off situation between boycotting and divesting on the one hand, nor, old capital and new capital on the other. Instead, it's about political coalitions and ethical standards prevailing over the more entrenched market logics.

In the "well-intentioned op.ed" that Samwick smugly dismisses, these political economic are highly salient. Consistent with my analysis, the author's main reason for supporting divestment is to build a political coalition.

Divestment would let the world know that Dartmouth is not complicit in genocide. Furthermore, it will provide support for the efforts in Vermont to divest the state pension fund and perhaps even for similar efforts in Illinois. If we gather enough support behind divestment, the companies currently involved in Sudan will be forced to leave or suspend operations there, sharply curtailing the amount of weapons, genocidal infrastructure and militia support that the Sudanese government can afford. In addition, our actions will help persuade the government of the United States that there is a broad consensus for stronger action against the genocide.

Why not support the political goals of the divestment movement knowing that it might lead to some good--and a broad political coalition against something that we can all agree is bad: the mass killing and displacement of civilians?

Ignoring the political considerations of divestment not only let Samwick dismiss the goal as misinformed economically, but encouraged him to invoke his superior training as an economist to identify the tragic irony of a divestment strategy that everyone seemed to miss. Too bad the joke is on him.

Posted by John Stevenson at 8:30 AM | |

 
I'll post the news updates after classes today, after 6pm Central/7pm Eastern standard time. Over the next several days, this blog will be looking in depth at: (1) Syria and the Security Council, (2) reflections on where the writers of this blog stood at the beginning of the Iraq war and why, (3) the Alito nomination, his philosophy, who likes him and who doesn't, (4) the Saddam trials and international law, and (5) what I'm reading and what I've read recently (as well as recommendations for your own reading).

Stay tuned and stay with us. We've got quite a ways to go this week.

Posted by John Stevenson at 8:00 AM | |