This blog entry is in english. Yet english is not my native language (italian is), so bear some indulgence with typos or grammatical mistakes. Also, I have been told that I write complex things - whether this is good or bad I don't know: but so, if you are unfamiliar with complex prose you may see grammatical errors not only where there could be some, but also where just a prose you're not acquainted with is. Native speakers with an A+ grade in english say my english, obviously not perfect, imports no major issues. Lend a deaf ear to the errors, vocally disagree with my thesis if you want, but enjoy the style all the while.
To the First PartSaddam Hussein once indicted elections and he won them with no less that
100% of the votes, thereafter declaring it "an exceptional
example of
democracy".
What distinguishes these approaches is, as I noted elsewhere, the misconception that voting is only a blundering that democracies commit in the pursuit of an ideal goal, unanimity, which could as well be attained by
shorter routes.
Elections are thus basically viewed as an optional feat, highly dysfunctional to the objective, and voting is a courtesy act of good manners just
like washing one's hands before sitting at the table and start feasting.
I remember that Mussolini reproached Giolitti that "also your men like eating", and that Giolitti answered: "
true, but
at least they knew
how to behave when at table".
They are in this line, those who today keep threatening a "revolution" in Iraq that they
never dared even to mention under Saddam Hussein; so that it is somewhat tragic and comic at once seeing today persons who declare themselves patriots against "american oppression" when they
spent 35 years failing precisely on this account against Saddam Hussein - who wantonly killed them
daily.
What kind of revolution and statehood may ensue from these guys who are making a show of this contradictory and absurd record?
Every sect is now attempting to crop spaces for itself by exerting violence because they think that free elections would never grant them with the
disproportional power they covet, but
only a power
proportional to their votes namely to their
effective following.
«It is not Montaigne, nor Locke, nor Bayle, nor Spinoza, nor Hobbes who have carried the torch of discord into their countries; it is in the main theologians who, having begun by aiming at being heads of a sect, soon aimed at being heads of a party too. (...)
What becomes a Revolution in England, is only a sedition in other countries. In Spain, in Turkey, a city takes up arms to defend its privileges; at once it is subjugated by mercenary soldiers, punished by executions, and the rest of the nation kisses its chains. (...)
The chiefs of these savages who have ravaged France, Italy, Spain and England, made themselves monarchs (...) Hence these margraves, lairds, barons, sub-tyrants who often fought against their King for the spoils of the nation were birds of prey fighting an eagle over sucking the blood of doves.»
(Voltaire, Letters On England)Of course, there are many ways to maim Democracy, and also within democracy we can find persons that never truly
reconciliated themselves with democratic rights: what Arno Mayer called "The Persistence Of the Ancient Regime" exists, and too many alleged pacifists simply woo with totalitarianism.
As I stated elsewhere (modernity and its enemies) the answer to the question "Why are the USA 'hated'" is much less appealing to the petitioners than they argued it should have been: because the USA are an
objective symbol of
modernity, and by rejecting the USA what is implied is
very likely to be a rejection of modernity
altogether; this also to account for a recent The Guardian's article: for it is
centuries that this battle between feudalism and modernity goes on, and quite simply
feudalism has its supporters.
It is a misconception believing that Peoples want to be free:
Europe's history teaches to us precisely how much they coveted their
feudal chains in their more coruscant versions.
You do are a supporter of feudalism when the whole of your approach is focused upon attacking the USA, feasting upon whatever debris you find that can be wielded to belittle it: modernity is
not perfect, it is simply infinitely better a system than any of those envisioned and enlived by they who belittle it.
No modernity can
coexist with any surreptitious or
hidden agenda meant to disparage, dismantle, or inspire enduring loath for one of the more striking and undisputed
paradigms of modernity.
Once you jeopardize
that paradigm, you don't prove any critic spirit (in fact see how
unilateral pacifist criticism is), but you prove an unremitting underlying
enmity towards modernity, expressed in what should be called by its name namely
hatred, that spells nothing good about your intentions -and
capacities- to bring about a different modernity you probably didn't really care one thing about.
Modernity is
one, freedom of choice as a principle too, and its
kernel is not open to the vagueness of
one million interpretations: for in the last run the quest for a
different modernity is just like the chase for a "socialism with a human face": it ends up on
feudalism as well as that race invariably ended up in real socialism as well, it ends up on shores where modernity is so much different
to be no longer.
This does not mean you can't find limits to amend in modernity: but it does means that you can't, under
the disguise of amending modernity, pursue a plan whose eventual intention is to brush modernity aside
exploiting those issues, or to flirt or justify those whose intention is such:
september 11 as a paradigm means that by now on these attempts to pursue a
battle in disguise (a model well embodied by
terrorism as a paradigm) will be regarded as what they truly are:
factual & overt war, moreover waged in order to promote the persistence of feudalism: as Timothy Gusinov stated, many "don't fight for the
future, but to
perpetuate their fedual past".
When an association has pledged itself to provide combat striven regions with medical care, it is still liable to be simply the convenient incarnation of a
hidden political agenda that, like von Clausewitz defined "
war as the prosecution of politics by other means", merely incarnates
the prosecution of a politics by other (medical) means, and consequently it is not medical care but
still again war by other means.
That such associations do not even lend a medical care that could produce at least lasting effects but only those opportunistically and
temporarily accessory to the political goals, is proved by the fact that these associations rush to Iraq attracted and lured by
600 victims in one month, but in the very same months they do not rush to Sudan at all (only exception: Human Rights Watch), though
there there are
6000 victims a day.
It is therefore
legitimate wondering about a choice that is so openly inconsistent with the alleged intentions and even the statutes of these associations.
Running into
Sudan would have been the most
logical and productive allocation of a private association's
limited resources and funds.
Scrambling for
both Iraq and Sudan would have made sense
too.
But electing
Iraq only and completely neglecting the concurrent and
coexistent death cry of Sudan makes one suspect that the reason Iraq is chosen with so deep a determination and Sudan not even considered, is that only Iraq allows the chairmen of such associations, as mr. Gino Strada in Italy, to appear
on Tv shows every day blaming the Usa for whatever endowed with bad smell they can pick from the reeking ground they like revelling unto as vultures - Usa blaming which Sudan clearly would
not afford, regardless of the
daily and incomparably much higher amount of war casualties and grief it does affords.
True, in mr. Gino Strada's case, he was in Afghanistan under the
soviet rule too - and under the
taliban regime too.
But what strikes is precisely this: he started talking on Tv
only when he could complain against the Usa, though needless to say "western" media would have been happy and
pretty prompt to provide him with their attentions if he would have spoken against the USSR, since they provide him with attention even now he speaks against the USA.
But, simply, mr Gino Strada was
nowhere to be seen on any medium then, so to blame the soviets and the talibans in the name of
those very same human rights he so passionately defends now because now he can quote the USA in his verbal attacks. And this all is
objectively very asburd.
And so Sudan, Rwanda, Chechnya and the alike
get downright ignored by those who say they are disquieted by human rights and involved with peace worries.
Or, which perhaps is
even worst, such other unfortunate countries receive just the
ancillary verbal consideration of a
desultory premise constructed with nearly military tactics so to
better prepare the terrain for the much wider, longer, articulated, constant and lasting thrusts against the Usa.
Such speeches, authentic rhetorical patterns of academic anarchists, invariably provide the premises with an impartiality of concerns achieved by the mere
mention of issues whose compelling importance they
absolve by footnotes moved to the top, and then
soon repudiate these forewords dismissing them with the flood of the incomparably higher amount of
verbal attention and massive physical actions bestowed upon anti Usa
theaters. The
endless declamations following the phoney and hypocritical prefaces takes care of liquidating their own bogus preambles expeditiously, so that the orators don't risk shifting too much the precious and whimsical focus of their listeners from the
only hinge they really want it to revolve around.
So why calling
such "criticism" of the USA a criticism, when it is
not? I entertain a higher opinion of criticism, incompatible with making it such a bad service by identifying it with sectarian odium.
Or why possibly argue that I may be wanting to prevent criticism against the Usa? These are
not critics of the Usa: they are
military actors by all accounts with an intentional political agenda, wilfully planned and designed to exploit death and sorrow, in order to achieve a goal that has nothing to do with the
merely cover up means.
The
war on terrorism as a paradigm is somewhat predicating that
this mask is off, and that such things as medical care flags waved just in order to release under their banners a set of daily interviews viciously attacking the Usa for
everything, are going to be regarded and dealt with not for what they declare they would have been but for what they actually
are:
open enmity from a
weapon carrying fiend with the
military intentions to make a
military front
prevail against modernity, and to promote harm and injury under an artful disguise: it is guerrilla forces and psy-
war expertise camouflaged as medical (or whatever) concern.
They are not offering aid care: they are buying cannon fodder for a cause bad enough that it wants cannon fodder.
Anyway for your convenience here is the
only world from which you can pick an alternative, frozen at a time, ours, which is certainly a better one than the way the same political map looked simply 60 -and not even 600- years ago; yet you still have
only one life and only one world to pick from, and beware:
only one chance too, if you are unfortunate enough to pick the wrong choice; pluck from the map the
alternative route to modernity, as wealth and freedom, you prefer, remembering that when you grab from Europe (I have a
vague idea your finger might end up lingering above there), the West of it was rescued from that
Nazism it
opted for and the East of it from those various
real Socialism flavours it had to endure as imposed upon it:
Let's speak of limits in modernity as
friends of modernity and not as its sworn enemies in disguise, then.
Laws can be violated, of course; yet they can be also simply
disregarded and just go unobserved rather than
openly offended: but the outcome is the same, for in both cases law is no longer in vigor.
Ralf Dahrendorf reminds us of Amartya Sen: a few autocracies would allow you to have goods, say one million dollars, but do not confer upon you the
rights to actually
access or enjoy that million. Others provide you with the rights, but don't provide you with the million. That's the same in disguise.
This
synergy between entitlements (rights) and goods implies that whatever infringes upon one, does
not leave the other unaffected.
It's worth while citing Dahrendorf and the so called Martines Paradox:
«(Minister Martines answered:) "It seems to me you mean to criticize the fact there are not many goods to purchase on our shelves. Perhaps it is true. But let me say to you one thing: before the revolution our malls were crammed with goods. Whatever you can find in Miami, was to be found here too. But the majority of the people could not afford anything of what was on sale."
Many persons laugh when I report this episode. yet the Martines Paradox tells the story of a passage from (a paradigm of) growth without redistribution to (a paradigm of) redistribution without growth. It tells the contrast between provisions without entitlements, and entitlements without provisions.»Whenever I impose a tax on the circulation, a tax on the purchase of a car, a tax on each single item the car is made of, a tax on fuel, and I set up a compulsory warrant to pay in order to drive it, and I set up fines for whatever infraction I may envision, and then maybe I add a tax on the purchase of a plate, and whatever else my fiscal fantasy may suggest to my voracious needs, what I am doing is that by
insisting upon the good I am
inflicting on the right too: the right of being free to move about my own country.
The american revolutionists had a battle cry: No taxes without representatives!
Sacrosanct.
We'd now add one: one good, one tax. You can
only tax a provision once.
Which also gives a precise idea about how and in which direction whatever true agenda of tax relief should be pursued.
Thence I have a right to join my nation's political life, and yet all the accesses are clogged.
Thence I have a right to make a career out of my talent, but I am constantly between jobs.
Rights grow facing a
process of aging: their actual practice can over time consume their original actual meaning. You ought to be vigilant onto them and perform
regular overhauls; you ought to attend them. It is not
always necessary the blood of the patriots to attend them; at times
ink may suffice.
To these processes of obsolescence
cartels and
nepotism add typical insults.
An
anti nepotist act is badly needed, and though it might sound anti constitutional, we cannot but wonder whether the practice that arose and which disavows the Constitution is more consitutional than an anti nepotism act would be.
If you consider the amount of house representatives who are
sons of
former representatives or who got enrolled or coopted because they were sons and
daughters of previous state
officers,
ambassadors, embedded long range
journalists, former vice secretaries of
something, former
Party leaders, and the alike, you'd have a striking evidence of this
persistence of the Ancient Regime amidst Democracy.
You should not complain against democracy, but for democracy.
Of course, it is still true that the texture of a Nation can overcome its own unavoidable limitations: as George Orwell pointed out, though both France and Uk made the same mistakes dealing with Hitler, yet there was still some
underlying basic difference that prevented the Uk from consigning its own citizens as slaves to Hitler
as France did.
In the Usa a free market is still the true bulwark against this: for how long nepotism might affect politics, the life of the country is not wholly played on politics but in the market arena.
And yet it would still be something to be corrected this possible forthcoming show of a USA presidential race between the son of an ex president of the Usa with the wife of an ex President of the Usa vying to become President of the USA. And I don't think anyone can blame me of saying this out of prejudice against G. W. Bush or Bill Clinton or out of biased anti-americanism.
Every dutiful modern political agenda ought to include not only
economical maneuvers that affect the provision side, but also regular
entitlement maneuvers that don't lose sight of the
trade off between the two.
Such revisions should remove those hindrances grown over time that alterate the enjoyment of a right, as well as those
legal bottlenecks developed out of laws approved over time and that clumped together inadvertently and that prevent the hypothetical flux of an entitlement from streaming
as much unabridged as in the
original constitutional intentions it was
meant to.
Entitlements are subject to silent wounds. I am not arguing that you have to invent new rights: I am rather saying that in order to attain the necessary ones, you periodically till the ground around them and you periodically root out the
weed and the parasites that
each season brings about and that
hinder their natural display to the effect that a few among our rights might suddenly be left to
fade away in a slow death, forlorn and
neglected in a dark corner.
It is the maintenance of the entitlements what makes the provisions stabler.
For if provisions and entitlements are bound together, then all the might of a country doesn't reside in the quantity of the rights but in the concrete enforcement of those available.
Make sure all rights are available, make sure like the Templars that "the roads to Jerusalem are always open": for entitlements are the
highways upon which the wealth of the nations travels.
Governing well an affluent western society, and make it more powerful and wealthy, is not a despot's or a demagogue's or an engineer's job: it is
a gardener's job, as Voltaire would concur.
We cannot say that it is not true, that it is not noble, that it is not just the Napoleonic battle cry:
«La carrière ouverte aux talents» -
Careers open to the
talents!
But it is a matter of rights - thence
Universal Rights, the only
true International Legality worth talking about.
And it is no objection that occasionally you can find episodes against human rights in our Democracies: when British soldiers
at war perpetrate an abuse, what must be considered is not only that the abuse is an exception,
not an endorsed rule; but most of all we ought to remember that we eventually
know about it, whereas in tyranny you know
nothing if not by casually hearing the screams, and we
punish it by making the culprits face
martial courts and dishonor - whereas in Tyranny what they risk for the same or for worst actions is getting a
medal.
Failing this discrimination is like the child who can't discriminate safely between good and evil; for one thing is the
systematic and the rewarded and another is the
episodic and the punished: the difference is
irrelevant only for those who find no difference between Churchill and Hitler as well, simply because also in Churchill's Army you could still find a handful of bastards.
So this napoleonic cry that resounds of human rights, «La carrière ouverte aux talents», belongs to us all: from Iraq to the Usa, deeply and dramatically belongs, and calls upon us
all, every day.
"Vive l' Empereur" was shouted in attack and defeat both from the Dragoons of Napoleon.
What may have induced these men, often coming out from the Ecole Politecnique, into swooning with this yell on their lips, if not the feeling there was something
universally and not
sectarian or merely locally true for what it was worth while living, making room for oneself with sabre slashes, or perish?
But perhaps nothing is more difficult than communicating the meaning of light to those who spent their lives upon cages and twilights.
Yet as Benjamin Constant wrote, I feel like sharing his conclusion:
«For they absolutely maintain that nothing pertaining to Law can exist when it comes to governing mankind, and all they have as far as intelligence is concerned, they employ it all to demonstrate the impotence of intelligence it Social State is to them made up of a thin amount of very simple elements: prejudice to cheat men, supplices to frighten them, avidity to bribe them, frivolity to vilify them, arbitrariness to lead them and -this is required too- a few data picked from some science so to exert arbitrariness in a more appropriate way.
I am not going to believe that the travail of forty centuries amounts to this.»
But rather than that: "
Vive L' Empereur!".
And so let's partake of the cry as Victor Hugo magnificently brings it back to us in its full original, denser meaning:
«The northern door, which was beaten in by the French, and which has had a piece applied to it to replace the panel suspended on the wall, stands half-open at the bottom of the paddock; it is cut squarely in the wall, built of stone below, of brick above which closes in the courtyard on the north. It is a simple door for carts, such as exist in all farms, with the two large leaves made of rustic planks: beyond lie the meadows. The dispute over this entrance was furious. For a long time, all sorts of imprints of bloody hands were visible on the door-posts. It was there that Bauduin was killed.
The storm of the combat still lingers in this courtyard; its horror is visible there; the confusion of the fray was petrified there; it lives and it dies there; it was only yesterday. The walls are in the death agony, the stones fall; the breaches cry aloud; the holes are wounds; the drooping, quivering trees seem to be making an effort to flee. This courtyard was more built up in 1815 than it is to-day. Buildings which have since been pulled down then formed redans and angles.
The English barricaded themselves there; the French made their way in, but could not stand their ground. (...) A massacre took place in the chapel. (...) The walls are covered with inscriptions. Near the feet of Christ this name is to be read: Henquinez. Then these others: Conde de Rio Maior, Marques y Marquesa de Almagro (Habana). There are French names with exclamation points,--a sign of wrath. The wall was freshly whitewashed in 1849. The nations insulted each other there. (...)
It was in this garden, further down than the orchard, that six light-infantry men of the 1st, having made their way thither, and being unable to escape, hunted down and caught like bears in their dens, accepted the combat with two Hanoverian companies, one of which was armed with carbines. The Hanoverians lined this balustrade and fired from above. The infantry men, replying from below, six against two hundred, intrepid and with no shelter save the currant-bushes, took a quarter of an hour to die.
One mounts a few steps and passes from the garden into the orchard, properly speaking. There (...) the wall is hidden on the outside by a tall hedge; the French came up, thinking that they had to deal only with a hedge, crossed it, and found the wall both an obstacle and an ambuscade, with the English guards behind it, the thirty-eight loopholes firing at once a shower of grape-shot and balls, and Soye's brigade was broken against it. Thus Waterloo began.
Nevertheless, the orchard was taken. As they had no ladders, the French scaled it with their nails. They fought hand to hand amid the trees. All this grass has been soaked in blood. (...)
There is in this day an obscure interval, from mid-day to four o'clock; the middle portion of this battle is almost indistinct, and participates in the sombreness of the hand-to-hand conflict. Twilight reigns over it. We perceive vast fluctuations in that fog, a dizzy mirage, paraphernalia of war almost unknown to-day, pendant colbacks, floating sabre-taches, cross-belts, cartridge-boxes for grenades, hussar dolmans, red boots with a thousand wrinkles, heavy shakos garlanded with torsades (...)
Ney drewhis sword and placed himself at their head. The enormous squadrons were set in motion.
Then a formidable spectacle was seen.
All their cavalry, with upraised swords, standards and trumpets flung to the breeze, formed in columns by divisions, descended, by a simultaneous movement and like one man, with the precision of a brazen battering-ram which is effecting a breach, the hill of La Belle Alliance, plunged into the terrible depths in which so many men had already fallen, disappeared there in the smoke, then emerging from that shadow, reappeared on the other side of the valley, still compact and in close ranks, mounting at a full trot, through a storm of grape-shot which burst upon them, the terrible muddy slope of the table-land of Mont-Saint-Jean. They ascended, grave, threatening, imperturbable; in the intervals between the musketry and the artillery, their colossal trampling was audible. Being two divisions, there were two columns of them; Wathier's division held the right, Delort's division was on the left. It seemed as though two immense adders of steel were to be seen crawling towards the crest of the table-land. It traversed the battle like a prodigy.
Nothing like it had been seen since the taking of the great redoubt of the Muskowa by the heavy cavalry; Murat was lacking here, but Ney was again present. It seemed as though that mass had become a monster and had but one soul. Each column undulated and swelled like the ring of a polyp. They could be seen through a vast cloud of smoke which was rent here and there. A confusion of helmets, of cries, of sabres, a stormy heaving of the cruppers of horses amid the cannons and the flourish of trumpets, a terrible and disciplined tumult; over all, the cuirasses like the scales on the hydra.
These narrations seemed to belong to another age. Something parallel to this vision appeared, no doubt, in the ancient Orphic epics, which told of the centaurs, the old hippanthropes, those Titans with human heads and equestrian chests who scaled Olympus at a gallop, horrible, invulnerable, sublime--gods and beasts.
Odd numerical coincidence,--twenty-six battalions rode to meet twenty-six battalions. Behind the crest of the plateau, in the shadow of the masked battery, the English infantry, formed into thirteen squares, two battalions to the square, in two lines, with seven in the first line, six in the second, the stocks of their guns to their shoulders, taking aim at that which was on the point of appearing, waited, calm, mute, motionless. They did not see the cuirassiers, and the cuirassiers did not see them. They listened to the rise of this flood of men. They heard the swelling noise of three thousand horse, the alternate and symmetrical tramp of their hoofs at full trot, the jingling of the cuirasses, the clang of the sabres and a sort of grand and savage breathing. There ensued a most terrible silence; then, all at once, a long file of uplifted arms, brandishing sabres, appeared above the crest, and casques, trumpets, and standards, and three thousand heads with gray mustaches, shouting, "Vive l'Empereur!" All this cavalry debouched on the plateau, and it was like the appearance of an earthquake.
All at once, a tragic incident; on the English left, on our right, the head of the column of cuirassiers reared up with a frightful clamor. On arriving at the culminating point of the crest, ungovernable, utterly given over to fury and their course of extermination of the squares and cannon, the cuirassiers had just caught sight of a trench,-- a trench between them and the English. It was the hollow road of Ohain.
It was a terrible moment. The ravine was there, unexpected, yawning, directly under the horses' feet, two fathoms deep between its double slopes; the second file pushed the first into it, and the third pushed on the second; the horses reared and fell backward, landed on their haunches, slid down, all four feet in the air, crushing and overwhelming the riders; and there being no means of retreat,-- the whole column being no longer anything more than a projectile,-- the force which had been acquired to crush the English crushed the French; the inexorable ravine could only yield when filled; horses and riders rolled there pell-mell, grinding each other, forming but one mass of flesh in this gulf: when this trench was full of living men, the rest marched over them and passed on. Almost a third of Dubois's brigade fell into that abyss.
This began the loss of the battle. (...)
Every one knows the rest,--the irruption of a third army; the battle broken to pieces; eighty-six months of fire thundering simultaneously; Pirch the first coming up with Bulow; Zieten's cavalry led by Blucher in person, the French driven back; Marcognet swept from the plateau of Ohain; Durutte dislodged from Papelotte; Donzelot and Quiot retreating; Lobau caught on the flank; a fresh battle precipitating itself on our dismantled regiments at nightfall; the whole English line resuming the offensive and thrust forward; the gigantic breach made in the French army; the English grape-shot and the Prussian grape-shot aiding each other; the extermination; disaster in front; disaster on the flank; the Guard entering the line in the midst of this terrible crumbling of all things.
Conscious that they were about to die, they shouted, "Vive l'Empereur!" History records nothing more touching than that agony bursting forth in acclamations. (...)
It reaches the grandeur of AEschylus!»
(Victor Hugo, Les Miserables)
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