In reality,
however, it is primarily an oligarchical society which
requires an enemy
image,
because that society is based on
an irrational principle
of
domination
which cannot stand the scrutiny
it would receive in
peacetime.
George Orwell understood this aspect well
when he suggested
in 1984 that
The Endless War among Oceania,
Eurasia,and Eastasia was
really
A War waged by each of these states
against its own population,
for the purpose of perpetuating
a hierarchical society.
The key concept
dates back
at least to Ibn Khaldun,
the 13th century father of
Sociology,
who noted that The Arabs only
stopped fighting each other when
it was necessary to unite against
An Outside Enemy.
from
CARL SCHMITT: POISON GAS ON GERMAN CITIES
Leo Strauss was the product of three main intellectual and political influences.
First among these was the proto-Nazi Friedrich Nietzsche, who was designated by Nazi ideologist Alfred Rosenberg as one of the four precursors of Hitlerism (the others were the operatic composer Richard Wagner, the anti-Semitic LaGarde, and the racist Houston Stewart Chamberlain).
A second was the card-carrying Nazi Martin Heidegger, who praised Hitler in his inaugural speech as rector of the University of Freiburg.
Finally, there is the card-carrying Nazi Carl Schmitt, the main legal theorist of the Third Reich.
Schmitt’s ideas have directly contributed to the shattering of the US political consensus under the Bush regime. For Schmitt, politics comes down to the distinction between friend and foe. Starting from this extremely meager reduction of human motivation, he goes on to equate politics with warfare: if there is no warfare or conflict, then politics is dead, and life is no longer worth living. Schmitt therefore wants politics to be the monopoly of a strong state, and he does not like the idea that the state or the government could be influenced by the citizens. Schmitt’s thought is thus revealed as authoritarian, dictatorial, fascistic. It is from Schmitt that Samuel Huntington got his idea that an enemy image is absolutely necessary for the cohesion of any society. In reality, however, it is primarily an oligarchical society which requires an enemy image, because that society is based on an irrational principle of domination which cannot stand the scrutiny it would receive in peacetime. George Orwell understood this aspect well when he suggested in 1984 that the endless war among Oceania, Eurasia, and Eastasia was really a war waged by each of these states against its own population, for the purpose of perpetuating a hierarchical society. The key concept dates back at least to Ibn Khaldun, the 13th century father of sociology, who noted that the Arabs only stopped fighting each other when it was necessary to unite against an outside enemy.
The card-carrying Nazi Schmitt was also a bitter opponent, not just of the Treaty of Versailles and the League of Nations, but of international law and international treaties in general. Like his neocon descendants of today, he was an ardent unilateralist. Here are some of Schmitt’s typical comments about international law: “We are talking again about basic rights, about the basic rights of peoples and of states, and especially about the basic rights of those states who have, mindful of their own race, gotten themselves into the proper domestic order. Such a state is the national socialist state, which has led the German people back to an awareness of itself and its race. We proceed from the most self-evident of all basic rights, the right to one’s own existence. This is an inalienable, eternal basic right, in which the right to self-determination, self-defense, and to the means of self-defense is included. . . . From our solid standpoint we can see through that world of legalistic argumentation and that huge apparatus of treaties and pacts, and assign this tower of Babel to its rightful place in the history of international law.”
Schmitt was the author of Article 48 of the 1919 Constitution of the Weimar Republic, which was the clause that allowed the Reich President to declare an emergency or state of siege and thereafter rule by decree. Schmitt’s activity during the 1920s was largely devoted to agitating in favor of the dissolution or marginalization of the Reichstag (parliament) and the institution of a dictatorship of the President of the Reich. One of Schmitt’s favorite sayings was that sovereignty meant the ability to declare a state of emergency. If you can find what organ of government has the ability to call out the state of siege, suspend the legislature, and impose martial law, Schmitt reasoned, you have found the place where sovereignty is actually located.
For Schmitt, the concept of emergency rule is a totally lawless realm; under it, the ruling authority can do literally anything it wants, without regard to law, separation of powers, constitutional freedoms, equity, or anything else. In one of his essays Schmitt approvingly quotes a speech by the Reich Justice Minister Schiffer to the Reichstag on March 3, 1920, in which Schiffer points out that under Article 48, the Reich President can attack “German cities with poison gas, if that is, in the concrete case, the necessary measure for the re-establishment of law and order.” (Schmitt, Die Diktatur, 201) Schmitt was adamant that the emergency provisions of the Weimar constitution were theoretically and practically unlimited, and could be used to justify the greatest imaginable atrocities. We see here a tradition of thought, alive in the Schmittian-Straussian neocons of today, which would have no trouble in accommodating a crime on the scope of 9/ 11.
In July, 1932 the Nazis and their allies carried out a cold coup against the minority Social Democratic caretaker government in Prussia, the largest political subdivision of Germany. The pro-Nazi government in Prussia then became the springboard for Hitler’s seizure of power via a legal coup in January 1933. Carl Schmitt was the lawyer for the coup forces in the German supreme court in Leipzig. (The parallels of this action to the Schwarzenegger/ Warren Buffet oligarchical coup in California in 2003 are more than suggestive, since California is the largest US political subdivision in the same way that Prussia was in Germany.) Schmitt also provided legal services for Hitler’s seizure of power in January, 1933.
Carl Schmitt wrote articles for the gutter-level anti-Semitic tabloid Der Stürmer, edited by Julius Streicher. In 1934, when Hitler massacred the brown-shirted SA leader Ernst Röhm and his faction for supporting a second revolution against the financiers, industrialists, and the army, Schmitt quickly emerged as one of Hitler’s most shameless apologists. In his scurrilous pamphlet, “Der Führer Schützt das Recht” (“ The Führer defends the law”), Schmitt endorsed the Byzantine theory according to which law is a successful act of strength by the stronger party against the weaker. Schmitt wrote that the primary task of the Führer was “to distinguish friend from enemy . . . The Führer takes the warnings of German history seriously. That gives him the right and the power to found a new state and a new order. . . . The Führer protects the law from the worst abuse, when he–in the moment of danger–through the power of his leadership as supreme judge, directly creates law. His role as supreme judge flows from his role as supreme leader. Anyone who wants to separate one of these from the other is trying to unhinge the state with the help of the justice system. . . . the Führer himself determines the content and scope of a crime.” (Schmitt 200)
This opens the door to every arbitrary outrage under color of law. While these ideas, so dear to today’s ruling neocons, have been applied to Abu Ghraib, it is also clear that they are equally applicable to 9/ 11.
Masculinity is all about Direct, Forward-Moving Energy —
We Do Not Turn Back.
"Now, what did he do?
It was in the spring of 1856, John Brown and
his men are travelling along a roadway and they get word of the beating
of Charles Sumner on the floor of The Senate.
I think it was first told
to them that Sumner was all-but-dead, this, to him, great abolitionist
senator.
And Brown, it appears, went into a frenzy and vowed revenge,
and a couple of days later he and four of his sons, or three of his
sons, went and did visitations at three houses along Pottawatomie Creek
in eastern Kansas, known to be an area settled by slaveholders or
pro-slavery people, and they dragged several men from their houses, in
front of their wives, and hacked them to death — five men to be exact —
hacked them to death with these huge broadswords, and deposited their
bodies on the front steps of their cabins.
To John Brown, he had
kind of tried to even the score because just a few — a couple of weeks
before that pro-slavery forces had sacked, attacked and burned the
anti-slavery capital of Kansas — Lawrence, Kansas — burned a hotel and
killed six people.
Brown, by killing five, said he hadn’t quite evened
it up.
"I have, may it please the court, a few words to say. In the first
place, I deny everything but what I have all along admitted -- the
design on my part to free the slaves. I intended certainly to have made a
clean thing of that matter, as I did last winter when I went into
Missouri and there took slaves without the snapping of a gun on either
side, moved them through the country, and finally left them in Canada. I
designed to have done the same thing again on a larger scale. That was
all I intended. I never did intend murder, or treason, or the
destruction of property, or to excite or incite slaves to rebellion, or
to make insurrection.
I have another objection; and that is, it is unjust that I should
suffer such a penalty. Had I interfered in the manner which I admit,
and which I admit has been fairly proved (for I admire the truthfulness
and candor of the greater portion of the witnesses who have testified in
this case)--had I so interfered in behalf of the rich, the powerful,
the intelligent, the so-called great, or in behalf of any of their
friends--either father, mother, brother, sister, wife, or children, or
any of that class--and suffered and sacrificed what I have in this
interference, it would have been all right; and every man in this court
would have deemed it an act worthy of reward rather than punishment.
This court acknowledges, as I suppose, the validity of the law of
God. I see a book kissed here which I suppose to be the Bible, or at
least the New Testament. That teaches me that all things whatsoever I
would that men should do to me, I should do even so to them. It teaches
me, further, to "remember them that are in bonds, as bound with them."
I
endeavored to act up to that instruction.
I say I am yet too young to
understand that God is any respecter of persons.
I believe that to have
interfered as I have done--as I have always freely admitted I have
done--in behalf of His despised poor was not wrong, but right.
Now, if
it is deemed necessary that I should forfeit my life for the furtherance
of the ends of justice, and mingle my blood further with the blood of
my children and with the blood of millions in this slave country whose
rights are disregarded by wicked, cruel, and unjust enactments-- I
submit; so let it be done!
Let me say one word further.
I feel entirely satisfied with the treatment I have received on
my trial.
Considering all the circumstances it has been more generous
than I expected.
But I feel no consciousness of guilt.
I have stated
that from the first what was my intention and what was not.
I never had
any design against the life of any person, nor any disposition to commit
treason, or excite slaves to rebel, or make any general insurrection.
I
never encouraged any man to do so, but always discouraged any idea of
that kind. Let me say also a word in regard to the statements made by some
of those connected with me.
I hear it has been stated by some of them
that I have induced them to join me.
But the contrary is True.
I do not
say this to injure them, but as regretting their weakness.
There is not
one of them but joined me of his own accord, and the greater part of
them at their own expense.
A number of them I never saw, and never had a
word of conversation with till the day they came to me; and that was
for the purpose I have stated.
Now I have done. "
Probably what
sustained him — and we know a good deal about this — was his religion,
his faith, his theology if you want. He was a kind of orthodox
nineteenth century Calvinist. He believed in such things as innate depravity, providential design, predestination, on some level, and the total human dependence on a sovereign and arbitrary God, and an arbitrary God that sometimes chose certain individual human beings in history to act for Him.
He believed in an Old Testament kind of justice, an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.
He punished his children and his employees with Mosaic vengeance.
He had a puritanical obsession with the wickedness of other people. He could be domineering, vane, obstinate, as one friend once put it, "impervious to a joke."
Probably not a lot of fun to just have lunch with. He gave orders, remembered Brown’s younger brother, quote, “like a king against whom there is no rising up.” He was a thorough going non-conformist. He probably never joined any formal anti-slavery organization, although he went to lots of their meetings. He never joined a political party. We’re not even sure if he ever voted. He was a practitioner of what would become known in these years — certainly by the 1850s — of a kind of higher law doctrine about slavery, an allegiance to God’s will and God’s law above man’s law.
To
John Brown, put simply, slavery represented an unjustifiable state of
war, by one portion of the people against another; and in a state of war
you do what’s necessary to defend yourselves.
He believed slavery was
an evil so entrenched — and he was dead serious about this — so
entrenched in America that it required revolutionary ideology and
revolutionary means to eradicate it.
It had led him — as it has often in
history led most proponents of revolutionary violence — that the means
can, therefore, justify the end.
As
God had willed so often in his Old Testament that the wicked must die,
so too had he willed that slaveholders and their defenders at least
deserved the same fate.
John Brown came to believe that violence in a righteous cause was like a rite of purification.
After The Earth was used up, we found a new solar system and hundreds of new Earths were terraformed and colonized.
The Central Planets formed The Alliance and decided all the planets had to join under their rule.
There was some disagreement on that point....
MILLINGTON:
This is just the bait.
DOCTOR:
For The Germans?
MILLINGTON:
Russians.
DOCTOR:
But they're your allies.
MILLINGTON:
After The War, Doctor —
When they're no longer allies.
This is what The Russians want.
A House Divided Against Itself Can Not-Long Stand One Another —
Because
, just for one thing, it is constantly either running-low or running out of fresh milk supply and/or else guzzling it ALL down, practically by the gallon
• Stand Up for The Oppressed.
• Be a Prince of Peace.
• Don’t Be Too Civilized.
• Organize Yourself with Other Men.
We Are Not Friends,
But Allies.
“My countrymen, one and all, think calmly and well upon this whole subject. Nothing valuable can be lost by taking time. If there be an object to hurry any of you in hot haste to a step which you would never take deliberately, that object will be frustrated by taking time; but no good object can be frustrated by it. Such of you as are now dissatisfied still have the old Constitution unimpaired, and, on the sensitive point, the laws of your own framing under it; while the new Administration will have no immediate power, if it would, to change either. If it were admitted that you who are dissatisfied hold the right side in the dispute, there still is no single good reason for precipitate action. Intelligence, patriotism, Christianity, and a firm reliance on Him who has never yet forsaken this favored land are still competent to adjust in the best way all our present difficulty.
In your hands, my dissatisfied fellow-countrymen, and not in mine, is the momentous issue of civil war. The Government will not assail you. You can have no conflict without being yourselves the aggressors. You have no oath registered in heaven to destroy the Government, while I shall have the most solemn one to "preserve, protect, and defend it."
I am loath to close. We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.”
“The Struggle both within and without,” one advisor told Lincoln [in 1864] “is for Our National Existence.”
