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Ledeed on lying.

Thread ID: 15727 | Posts: 4 | Started: 2004-11-22

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Sertorius [OP]

2004-11-22 06:36 | User Profile

November 18, 2004, 8:23 a.m. WWMD? Machiavelli on how to deal with wounded enemies.

EDITOR'S NOTE: This is excerpted from Machiavelli on Modern Leadership, pp. 93-94

Machiavelli is commonly taken to be saying that the ends always justify the means, but he does not believe that. Quite the contrary. He simply recognizes the reality that there are times when a leader must accept dreadful responsibility in serving the common good.

We all know this to be true. Consider the story of Henry Tandey, a British infantryman in the Duke of Wellington Regiment in the First World War. On September 28, 1918, Tandey participated in an attack against enemy trenches near the small French town of Marcoing. The British carried the day, and as they advanced, Tandey Cautiously peered into a trench. He saw an enemy soldier, a corporal, lying bleeding on the ground. It would have been easy for Tandey to finish off his enemy, as he had killed many that day; Tandey had played an heroic role in the battle and later was awarded the Victoria Cross, the highest wartime decoration, for his great courage. But he felt it was wrong to shoot an injured man, and he spared the corporal's life.

In 1940, during the Nazi bombardment of Coventry, when Tandey worked as a security guard at the Triumph automobile factory, he gnashed his teeth. "Had I known what that corporal was going to become! God knows how sad I am that I spared him." The corporal was Adolf Hitler. Tandey's human gesture had led to the deaths of millions of people and, in a bitter irony of military destiny, had placed his own life at the mercy of the monster whose life he could have taken.

Murder is surely evil, yet every reasonable person will agree that the cause of good would have been greatly advanced if Henry Tandey had killed Hitler in that trench. History abounds with examples of good actions furthering the cause of evil...

— Michael Ledeen, an NRO contributing editor, is most recently the author of The War Against the Terror Masters. Ledeen is Resident Scholar in the Freedom Chair at the American Enterprise Institute.

[url]http://www.nationalreview.com/ledeen/ledeen200411180823.asp[/url]

One small problem with this story, Michael. It isn't true and you damn well know it, but then again, you're a Zionists and your kind believes not only that the ends justify the means but also you can't make an omelett without breaking a few eggs! You know as well that the idiots who get all their "news" from trash like NRO and "talk radio" are too ignorant to catch you, which is why you constantly pull this :dung:. -S

Faust

2004-11-23 00:54 | User Profile

Sertorius,

Wow, that is some twisted sick Neoconish lying!

TexasAnarch

2004-11-25 21:29 | User Profile

"Murder is surely evil, yet every reasonable person will agree that the cause of good would have been greatly advanced if Henry Tandey had killed Hitler in that trench. History abounds with examples of good actions furthering the cause of evil..."

The following preludes further argument that the specific underlying neo-con agenda is to kill both morality and Christ. The second part is in preparation.

Unless he wishes to argue against Kant, this statement must be judged certainly false.

Imputation of reason into morality implies evaluation according to a general, not uniquely particular, standpoint.  What is general in the act is what is generalizable:  its point of agreement with other acts of the same kind.  Whatever holds of one (instance of the kind) holds of all (instances).

From this, the principle of necessity derived from the law of non-contradiction – that which contradicts itself is necessarily false; the denial of whatever is necessarily false is necessarily true – yields:  “whatever contradicts itself in the individual act cannot be true of all (is necessarily false)"

An abstract maxim becomes effective only through an act of will.  This inner determinant (of the act, the act of willing it to happen) is particular in itself, but general in scope if judged morally.  Morality is a system of judgments of  right and wrong in action independent of particularities; in particular, of who is holding the gun on whom.  What holds looking from one side of the barrel must also hold when looked at from the other side; otherwise, whoever holds the gun dictates what is moral and that contradicts reason.

According to morality, then, the positions of Henry Tandey and Hitler are reversible: If he wills to act on the principle of shooting whoever might endanger him (or the Jews), then the maxim he acts on calls for Hitler to shoot him (them) if given the opportunity. Kant’s general principle of morality applicable to all through reason is: act only on that maxim thou canst at the same time will to become universal law. No man can rationally will to kill himself; it is a self-contradictory for what is given as the impetus to life to serve death Therefore, since killing Hitler in the described circumstances could not be willed without self-contradiction, it would be immoral, according to reason, to do so.

It follows that no reasonable person could advocate Ledeen’s view; that it is self-contradictory for anyone to hold it; and that doing so represents a contradiction in nature itself. (Kant, or course, allowed that action could be determined by self-contradictory maxims; the necessity in moral reasoning guarantees nothing contingent.)

Regarding the further argument: A rational basis of morality is compatible with Christ, but not with the ethics of Jewish neo-cons.

TexasAnarch

2004-11-26 04:29 | User Profile

Kill Hitler/Kill Christ morality

As shown above, Ledeen’s proposition “with which every reasonable person will agree” (roughly:  that killing young Hitler would have been moral) is not just self-contradictory, thereby excluded from any morality compatible with reason (=a proposition no rational person could affirm); it is also specifically anti-Christian in content (=a proposition no Christian could accept because to do so would negate their religious identity).  This does not equate Christ with Hitler, but does say that those who would kill the latter would kill the former by the same principle, grounded in a false (pre-emptively closed-on-itself) metaphysics of experience.

This is demonstrable, if “Christ” is permitted to stand, in relation to action, for the spirit of impartiality implicit in the act of will according to moral law.  Morality cannot be defined by who holds the gun, for is abandonment of morality entirely.  In order for moral judgment to apply, as opposed to particular personal considerations, who is on which end of the gun barrel can never be relevant.  The positions must be reversible because what applies to one applies to all.  Of course morality is such a bore; when the exciting firearm are brought out, forget it.  But….

The above point is tacitly recognized in discussion of torture of prisoners.  Whoever does it has nothing to say if/when the favor is returned, which is the main reason not to do it.  That it will happen belongs to the deep layer of the human psyche where push-me’ goes directly over to ‘pull you’; which, where hurts are concerned, comes directly under the principle of “an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth”.  “I wasn’t  hurting you until you started hurting me” justifies retaliation in kind against  aggressors.

Therefore there is this commonsense, rational constraint against aggression.  However, it is based essentially on self-interest: fear of harm to the aggressor as repayment in kind.  That is as far as the eye-foe-an-eye morality can go.  It has been recognized since in the Christian era that it is a lower-order morality.  Let Henry Taney put his gun aside, if we want to put ourselves imaginatively into that scene Michael Ledeen paints, and have a little heart-to-heart talk with Cpl. Schicklegruber, aka Die Feuhrer.  Maybe he could change the future that way..

The over-riding principle, of course, is the Golden Rule: Behave toward others as you would have them behave toward you. It is a guarantee against willfully harming others -- of not “sinning” from willful  aggression.  The Golden Rule principle has a, inner “upbeat” dynamic.  They who follow it are kinder, gentler.  Not being required by to expect harmful behavior, they would be free of the need to defend against it, and against the anxiety when the defenses are threatened.  If kind returns in kind, and the kind extended is upper, the kind returned will be upped. .

But this would still be a calculated, self-serving morality, unless following the Golden rule were motivated by something more.  Something that includes the self, but others, as well, in the maxim.  The will to act in accord with moral law was seen to follow the principle of reason, but reason has no intrinsic power or force, itself, unless desired.  And how could it be desired if it contradicted particular desires whose satisfaction could be attained only at the expense of, say, someone else’s worthless hide?   In other words, how could one reasonably bind oneself in advance to Golden Rule morality if it works against maximizing personal self-interest (pleasure)?  They couldn’t.  Therefore the motive to will in accord with reason does not derive solely form respect or love or reason itself, but from spirit beyond the pleasure principle.

It is this extra-rational motivation Christianity adds to Kantian morality.  Not that the great German philosopher failed to notice this point, later confirmed on psychological grounds by Sigmund Freud; the topic of morality within  the bounds of reason does not require its recognition. The spirit that presses the ego beyond the pleasure principle for Freud was the death drive,  metaphysically;  The super-ego, functionally.  Fear of death is the ultimate, and only, threat the psychic system has available to restrain instinctual  passions, from the biological perspective. God, the Father Almighty punisher  of the Old Testament, from this point of view, is the mythological form taken by the death-wish by the children of Israel.

This, however, is only the Jewish perspective.  The biological standpoint

in regard to man is not a metaphysics of experience, anymore (or less) than the atomic- molecular (chemical) standpoint; the phenomenal (“world as it appears to me”) standpoint, the moral (“the world of personal interactions”) standpoint, the existential (“world lived through from the standpoint of the individual person”) standpoint, the semiotic (“world under sign-use”) standpoint; the theological (“world Completed under God (=single psychosemiotic container)) standpoint. (This last standpoint does snot use the word “God” as a name, but as the psychosemiotic function standard use of the word evokes as a name.). These seven standpoints – chemical, biological, phenomenal, moral, existential, psycho-semiotic, theological – correspond to and are derived from the distribution of the signs used in communication, according to (slightly different) ordering of their tokens according to type of text. All seven standpoints are required for a metaphysics of the experienced totality.

These standpoints as a metaphysics can accommodate a higher motivating principle for morality than the choice between the pleasure principle vrs. the death-drive.  The theological standpoint includes the Christian Trinitarian understanding of what Jews can only recognize under the name of their covenant’s “monotheism”.  Unless this is taken literally, in terms of a cosmic entity, the merely human scientist (man as knower; the psychosemiotic + existential standpoints) is thrown back on empirical data of sense-experience, that is to say, to the two lower levels of experience (“Organic”, for short), which arbitrarily precludes an autonomy in the constraint of the upper standpoints on the will.

Indeed, the upper three standpoint, as a group, correspond to God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit, where each standpoint is taken as separate containers, each step taking the completion up a grade higher in Being-inclusivenes (Spirit – Son – Father); and altogether, expressed in moral action, animating the otherwise purely biological motivations in striving toward a Completed totality.

This is one way of understanding Kant’s argument that the categorical imperative of morality proves the existence of God. .