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Opinion | It's Not the Collusion, It's the Corruption - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...mueller-report-corruption.html

trump crisis threat democracy report governance politics

shared by Javier E on 19 Apr 19 - No Cached

The Mueller report is like a legal version of a thriller movie in which three malevolent forces are attacking a city all at once. Everybody’s wondering if the three attackers are working together. The report concludes that they weren't, but that doesn’t make the situation any less scary or the threat any less real
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The first force is Donald Trump, who represents a threat to the American systems of governance
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I don’t know if his actions meet the legal standard of obstruction of justice, but they certainly meet the common-sense standard of interference with justice.
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...10 more annotations...
The second force is Russia. If Trump is a threat to the institutional infrastructure, the Russians are a threat to our informational infrastructure.
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The third force is Julian Assange and WikiLeaks. They are a threat to our deliberative infrastructure. Any organization needs to be able to hold private conversations in order to deliberate
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it shows that many of the Trumpists, the Russians and the WikiLeaks crowd all understood that they were somehow adjacent actors in the same project.
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The Mueller report indicates that Trump was not colluding with Russia. But it also shows that working relationships were beginning to be built
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that’s the report’s central importance. We are being threatened in a very distinct way. The infrastructure of the society is under threat — the procedures that shape government, the credibility of information, the privacy rules that make deliberation possible.
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These forces are motivated by self-interest, but their common feature is an operational nihilism. They are trying to sow disorder at the foundation of society. The goal is not really to convert anybody to a cause; it is to create cynicism and disruption that will open up the space to grab what you want to grab.
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They rig the system and then tell everybody, “The system is rigged!” And therefore, all values are suspended. Everything is permitted.
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today, across society, two things are happening: Referees are being undermined, and many are abandoning their own impartiality. (Think of the Wall Street regulators, the Supreme Court, the Senate committee chairmen, even many of us in the blessed media.)
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It’s easy to recognize when you are attacked head-on. But the U.S. is being attacked from below, at the level of the foundations we take for granted.
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In all societies there are rules defining good conduct, and there are supposed to be impartial, honest referees that enforce those rules and make sure the game is fair.
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Economics of Good and Evil: The Quest for Economic Meaning from Gilgamesh to Wall Stree... - 2 views

DIIGO_FILE_HOME/7ui9/74ec4c99e72deda4a64da10692a15bf6

economics history literature good evil theory philosophy philosophers Bible Gilgamesh Adam Smith

shared by Javier E on 15 Aug 19 - No Cached

Instead of self-confident and self-centered answers, the author humbly asks fundamental questions: What is economics? What is its meaning? Where does this new religion, as it is sometimes called, come from? What are its possibilities and its limitations and borders, if there are any? Why are we so dependent on permanent growing of growth and growth of growing of growth? Where did the idea of progress come from, and where is it leading us? Why are so many economic debates accompanied by obsession and fanaticism?
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The majority of our political parties act with a narrow materialistic focus when, in their programs, they present the economy and finance first; only then, somewhere at the end, do we find culture as something pasted on or as a libation for a couple of madmen.
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most of them—consciously or unconsciously—accept and spread the Marxist thesis of the economic base and the spiritual superstructure.
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...297 more annotations...
He tries to break free of narrow specialization and cross the boundaries between scientific disciplines. Expeditions beyond economics’ borders and its connection to history, philosophy, psychology, and ancient myths are not only refreshing, but necessary for understanding the world of the twenty-first century.
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Reality is spun from stories, not from material. Zdeněk Neubauer
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“The separation between the history of a science, its philosophy, and the science itself dissolves into thin air, and so does the separation between science and non-science; differences between the scientific and unscientific are vanishing.”
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Outside of our history, we have nothing more.
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The study of the history of a certain field is not, as is commonly held, a useless display of its blind alleys or a collection of the field’s trials and errors (until we got it right), but history is the fullest possible scope of study of a menu that the given field can offer.
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History of thought helps us to get rid of the intellectual brainwashing of the age, to see through the intellectual fashion of the day, and to take a couple of steps back.
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Almost all of the key concepts by which economics operates, both consciously and unconsciously, have a long history, and their roots extend predominantly outside the range of economics, and often completely beyond that of science.
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That is the reason for this book: to look for economic thought in ancient myths and, vice versa, to look for myths in today’s economics.
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stories; Adam Smith believed. As he puts it in The Theory of Moral Sentiments, “the desire of being believed, or the desire of persuading, of leading and directing other people, seems to be one of the strongest of all our natural desires.”
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“The human mind is built to think in terms of narratives … in turn, much of human motivation comes from living through a story of our lives, a story that we tell to ourselves and that creates a framework of our motivation. Life could be just ‘one damn thing after another’ if it weren’t for such stories. The same is true for confidence in a nation, a company, or an institution. Great leaders are foremost creators of stories.”
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contrary to what our textbooks say, economics is predominantly a normative field. Economics not only describes the world but is frequently about how the world should be (it should be effective, we have an ideal of perfect competition, an ideal of high-GDP growth in low inflation, the effort to achieve high competitiveness …). To this end, we create models, modern parables,
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I will try to show that mathematics, models, equations, and statistics are just the tip of the iceberg of economics; that the biggest part of the iceberg of economic knowledge consists of everything else; and that disputes in economics are rather a battle of stories and various metanarratives than anything else.
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Before it was emancipated as a field, economics lived happily within subsets of philosophy—ethics, for example—miles away from today’s concept of economics as a mathematical-allocative science that views “soft sciences” with a scorn born from positivistic arrogance. But our thousand-year “education” is built on a deeper, broader, and oftentimes more solid base. It is worth knowing about.
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is a paradox that a field that primarily studies values wants to be value-free. One more paradox is this: A field that believes in the invisible hand of the market wants to be without mysteries.
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mathematics at the core of economics, or is it just the icing of the cake, the tip of the iceberg of our field’s inquiry?
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we seek to chart the development of the economic ethos. We ask questions that come before any economic thinking can begin—both philosophically and, to a degree, historically. The area here lies at the very borders of economics—and often beyond. We may refer to this as protoeconomics (to borrow a term from protosociology) or, perhaps more fittingly, metaeconomics (to borrow a term from metaphysics).
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In this sense, “the study of economics is too narrow and too fragmentary to lead to valid insight, unless complemented and completed by a study of metaeconomics.”17
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The more important elements of a culture or field of inquiry such as economics are found in fundamental assumptions that adherents of all the various systems within the epoch unconsciously presuppose. Such assumptions appear so obvious that people do not know what they are assuming, because no other way of putting things has ever occurred to them, as the philosopher Alfred Whitehead notes in Adventures of Ideas.
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I argue that economic questions were with mankind long before Adam Smith. I argue that the search for values in economics did not start with Adam Smith but culminated with him.
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We should go beyond economics and study what beliefs are “behind the scenes,” ideas that have often become the dominant yet unspoken assumptions in our theories. Economics is surprisingly full of tautologies that economists are predominantly unaware of. I
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argue that economics should seek, discover, and talk about its own values, although we have been taught that economics is a value-free science. I argue that none of this is true and that there is more religion, myth, and archetype in economics than there is mathematics.
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In a way, this is a study of the evolution of both homo economicus and, more importantly, the history of the animal spirits within him. This book tries to study the evolution of the rational as well as the emotional and irrational side of human beings.
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I argue that his most influential contribution to economics was ethical. His other thoughts had been clearly expressed long before him, whether on specialization, or on the principle of the invisible hand of the market. I try to show that the principle of the invisible hand of the market is much more ancient and developed long before Adam Smith. Traces of it appear even in the Epic of Gilgamesh, Hebrew thought, and in Christianity, and it is expressly stated by Aristophanes and Thomas Aquinas.
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This is not a book on the thorough history of economic thought. The author aims instead to supplement certain chapters on the history of economic thought with a broader perspective and analysis of the influences that often escape the notice of economists and the wider public.
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Progress (Naturalness and Civilization)
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The Economy of Good and Evil
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from his beginnings, man has been marked as a naturally unnatural creature, who for unique reasons surrounds himself with external possessions. Insatiability, both material and spiritual, are basic human metacharacteristics, which appear as early as the oldest myths and stories.
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the Hebrews, with linear time, and later the Christians gave us the ideal (or amplified the Hebrew ideal) we now embrace. Then the classical economists secularized progress. How did we come to today’s progression of progress, and growth for growth’s sake?
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The Need for Greed: The History of Consumption and Labor
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Metamathematics From where did economics get the concept of numbers as the very foundation of the world?
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All of economics is, in the end, economics of good and evil. It is the telling of stories by people of people to people. Even the most sophisticated mathematical model is, de facto, a story, a parable, our effort to (rationally) grasp the world around us.
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idea that we can manage to utilize our natural egoism, and that this evil is good for something, is an ancient philosophical and mythical concept. We will also look into the development of the ethos of homo economicus, the birth of “economic man.”
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The History of Animal Spirits: Dreams Never Sleep
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Masters of the Truth
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Originally, truth was a domain of poems and stories, but today we perceive truth as something much more scientific, mathematical. Where does one go (to shop) for the truth? And who “has the truth” in our epoch?
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Our animal spirits (something of a counterpart to rationality) are influenced by the archetype of the hero and our concept of what is good.
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The entire history of ethics has been ruled by an effort to create a formula for the ethical rules of behavior. In the final chapter we will show the tautology of Max Utility, and we will discuss the concept of Max Good.
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The History of the Invisible Hand of the Market and Homo Economicus
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We understand “economics” to mean a broader field than just the production, distribution, and consumption of goods and services. We consider economics to be the study of human relations that are sometimes expressible in numbers, a study that deals with tradables, but one that also deals with nontradables (friendship, freedom, efficiency, growth).
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When we mention economics in this book, we mean the mainstream perception of it, perhaps as best represented by Paul Samuelson.
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By the term homo economicus, we mean the primary concept of economic anthropology. It comes from the concept of a rational individual, who, led by narrowly egotistical motives, sets out to maximize his benefit.
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the Epic of Gilgamesh bears witness to the opposite—despite the fact that the first written clay fragments (such as notes and bookkeeping) of our ancestors may have been about business and war, the first written story is mainly about great friendship and adventure.
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there is no mention of either money or war; for example, not once does anyone in the whole epic sell or purchase something.5 No nation conquers another, and we do not encounter a mention even of the threat of violence.
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Gilgamesh becomes a hero not only due to his strength, but also due to discoveries and deeds whose importance were in large part economic—direct gaining of construction materials in the case of felling the cedar forest, stopping Enkidu from devastating Uruk’s economy, and discovering new desert routes during his expeditions.
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Even today we live in Gilgamesh’s vision that human relations—and therefore humanity itself—are a disturbance to work and efficiency; that people would perform better if they did not “waste” their time and energy on nonproductive things.
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is a story of nature and civilization, of heroism, defiance, and the battle against the gods, and evil; an epic about wisdom, immortality, and also futility.
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But labour is unlike any other commodity. The work environment is of no concern for steel; we do not care about steel’s well-being.16
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But it is in friendship where—often by-the-way, as a side product, an externality—ideas and deeds are frequently performed or created that together can altogether change the face of society.19 Friendship can go against an ingrained system in places where an individual does not have the courage to do so himself or herself.
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As Joseph Stiglitz says, One of the great “tricks” (some say “insights”) of neoclassical economics is to treat labour like any other factor of production. Output is written as a function of inputs—steel, machines, and labour. The mathematics treats labour like any other commodity, lulling one into thinking of labour like an ordinary commodity, such as steel or plastic.
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Even the earliest cultures were aware of the value of cooperation on the working level—today we call this collegiality, fellowship, or, if you want to use a desecrated term, comradeship. These “lesser relationships” are useful and necessary for society and for companies because work can be done much faster and more effectively if people get along with each other on a human level
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But true friendship, which becomes one of the central themes of the Epic of Gilgamesh, comes from completely different material than teamwork. Friendship, as C. S. Lewis accurately describes it, is completely uneconomical, unbiological, unnecessary for civilization, and an unneeded relationship
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Here we have a beautiful example of the power of friendship, one that knows how to transform (or break down) a system and change a person. Enkidu, sent to Gilgamesh as a punishment from the gods, in the end becomes his faithful friend, and together they set out against the gods. Gilgamesh would never have gathered the courage to do something like that on his own—nor would Enkidu.
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Due to their friendship, Gilgamesh and Enkidu then intend to stand up to the gods themselves and turn a holy tree into mere (construction) material they can handle almost freely, thereby making it a part of the city-construct, part of the building material of civilization, thus “enslaving” that which originally was part of wild nature. This is a beautiful proto-example of the shifting of the borders between the sacred and profane (secular)—and to a certain extent also an early illustration of the idea that nature is there to provide cities and people with raw material and production resources.
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started with Babylonians—rural nature becomes just a supplier of raw materials, resources (and humans the source of human resources). Nature is not the garden in which humans were created and placed, which they should care for and which they should reside in, but becomes a mere reservoir for natural (re)sources.
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Even today, we often consider the domain of humanity (human relations, love, friendship, beauty, art, etc.) to be unproductive;
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Both heroes change—each from opposite poles—into humans. In this context, a psychological dimension to the story may be useful: “Enkidu (…) is Gilgamesh’s alter ego, the dark, animal side of his soul, the complement to his restless heart. When Gilgamesh found Enkidu, he changed from a hated tyrant into the protector of his city. (…)
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To be human seems to be somewhere in between, or both of these two. We
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this moment of rebirth from an animal to a human state, the world’s oldest preserved epic implicitly hints at something highly important. Here we see what early cultures considered the beginning of civilization. Here is depicted the difference between people and animals or, better, savages. Here the epic quietly describes birth, the awakening of a conscious, civilized human. We are witnesses to the emancipation of humanity from animals,
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The entire history of culture is dominated by an effort to become as independent as possible from the whims of nature.39 The more developed a civilization is, the more an individual is protected from nature and natural influences and knows how to create around him a constant or controllable environment to his liking.
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The price we pay for independence from the whims of nature is dependence on our societies and civilizations. The more sophisticated a given society is as a whole, the less its members are able to survive on their own as individuals, without society.
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The epic captures one of the greatest leaps in the development of the division of labor. Uruk itself is one of the oldest cities of all, and in the epic it reflects a historic step forward in specialization—in the direction of a new social city arrangement. Because of the city wall, people in the city can devote themselves to things other than worrying about their own safety, and they can continue to specialize more deeply.
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Human life in the city gains a new dimension and suddenly it seems more natural to take up issues going beyond the life span of an individual. “The city wall symbolizes as well as founds the permanence of the city as an institution which will remain forever and give its inhabitants the certainty of unlimited safety, allowing them to start investing with an outlook reaching far beyond the borders of individual life.
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The wall around the city of Uruk is, among other things, a symbol of an internal distancing from nature, a symbol of revolts against submission to laws that do not come under the control of man and that man can at most discover and use to his benefit.
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“The chief thing which the common-sense individual wants is not satisfactions for the wants he had, but more, and better wants.”47
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If a consumer buys something, theoretically it should rid him of one of his needs—and the aggregate of things they need should be decreased by one item. In reality, though, the aggregate of “I want to have” expands together with the growing aggregate of “I have.”
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can be said that Enkidu was therefore happy in his natural state, because all of his needs were satiated. On the other hand, with people, it appears that the more a person has, the more developed and richer, the greater the number of his needs (including the unsaturated ones).
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the Old Testament, this relationship is perceived completely differently. Man (humanity) is created in nature, in a garden. Man was supposed to care for the Garden of Eden and live in harmony with nature and the animals. Soon after creation, man walks naked and is not ashamed, de facto the same as the animals. What is characteristic is that man dresses (the natural state of creation itself is not enough for him), and he (literally and figuratively) covers52 himself—in shame after the fall.53
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Nature is where one goes to hunt, collect crops, or gather the harvest. It is perceived as the saturator of our needs and nothing more. One goes back to the city to sleep and be “human.” On the contrary, evil resides in nature. Humbaba lives in the cedar forest, which also happens to be the reason to completely eradicate it.
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Symbolically, then, we can view the entire issue from the standpoint of the epic in the following way: Our nature is insufficient, bad, evil, and good (humane) occurs only after emancipation from nature (from naturalness), through culturing and education. Humanity is considered as being in civilization.
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The city was frequently (at least in older Jewish writings) a symbol of sin, degeneration, and decadence—nonhumanity. The Hebrews were originally a nomadic nation, one that avoided cities. It is no accident that the first important city57 mentioned in the Bible is proud Babylon,58 which God later turns to dust.
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is enough, for example, to read the Book of Revelation to see how the vision of paradise developed from the deep Old Testament period, when paradise was a garden. John describes his vision of heaven as a city—paradise is in New Jerusalem, a city where the dimensions of the walls(!) are described in detail, as are the golden streets and gates of pearl.
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Hebrews later also chose a king (despite the unanimous opposition of God’s prophets) and settled in cities, where they eventually founded the Lord’s Tabernacle and built a temple for Him. The city of Jerusalem later gained an illustrious position in all of religion.
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this time Christianity (as well as the influence of the Greeks) does not consider human naturalness to be an unambiguous good, and it does not have such an idyllic relationship to nature as the Old Testament prophets.
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If a tendency toward good is not naturally endowed in people, it must be imputed from above through violence or at least the threat of violence.
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If we were to look at human naturalness as a good, then collective social actions need a much weaker ruling hand. If people themselves have a natural tendency (propensity) toward good, this role does not have to be supplied by the state, ruler, or, if you wish, Leviathan.
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How does this affect economics?
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us return for the last time to the humanization of the wild Enkidu, which is a process we can perceive with a bit of imagination as the first seed of the principle of the market’s invisible hand, and therefore the parallels with one of the central schematics of economic thinking.
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Sometimes it is better to “harness the devil to the plow” than to fight with him. Instead of summoning up enormous energy in the fight against evil, it is better to use its own energy to reach a goal we desire; setting up a mill on the turbulent river instead of futile efforts to remove the current. This is also how Saint Prokop approached it in one of the oldest Czech legends.
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Enkidu caused damage and it was impossible to fight against him. But with the help of a trap, trick, this evil was transformed into something that greatly benefited civilization.
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By culturing and “domesticating” Enkidu, humanity tamed the uncontrollable wild and chaotic evil
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Enkidu devastated the doings (the external, outside-the-walls) of the city. But he was later harnessed and fights at the side of civilization against nature, naturalness, the natural state of things.
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A similar motif appears a thousand years after the reversal, which is well known even to noneconomists as the central idea of economics: the invisible hand of the market.
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A similar story (reforming something animally wild and uncultivated in civilizational achievement) is used by Thomas Aquinas in his teachings. Several centuries later, this idea is fully emancipated in the hands of Bernard Mandeville and his Fable of the Bees: or, Private Vices, Publick Benefits. The economic and political aspects of this idea are—often incorrectly—ascribed to Adam Smith.
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Here the individual does not try anymore to maximize his goods or profits, but what is important is writing his name in human memory in the form of heroic acts or deeds.
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immortality, one connected with letters and the cult of the word: A name and especially a written name survives the body.”77
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After this disappointment, he comes to the edge of the sea, where the innkeeper Siduri lives. As tonic for his sorrow, she offers him the garden of bliss, a sort of hedonistic fortress of carpe diem, where a person comes to terms with his mortality and at least in the course of the end of his life maximizes earthly pleasures, or earthly utility.
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In the second stage, after finding his friend Enkidu, Gilgamesh abandons the wall and sets out beyond the city to maximalize heroism. “In his (…) search of immortal life, Gilgamesh
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The hero refuses hedonism in the sense of maximizing terrestrial pleasure and throws himself into things that will exceed his life. In the blink of an eye, the epic turns on its head the entire utility maximization role that mainstream economics has tirelessly tried to sew on people as a part of their nature.81
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It is simpler to observe the main features of our civilization at a time when the picture was more readable—at a time when our civilization was just being born and was still “half-naked.” In other words, we have tried to dig down to the bedrock of our written civilization;
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today remember Gilgamesh for his story of heroic friendship with Enkidu, not for his wall, which no longer reaches monumental heights.
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the eleventh and final tablet, Gilgamesh again loses what he sought. Like Sisyphus, he misses his goal just before the climax
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is there something from it that is valid today? Have we found in Gilgamesh certain archetypes that are in us to this day?
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The very existence of questions similar to today’s economic ones can be considered as the first observation. The first written considerations of the people of that time were not so different from those today. In other words: The epic is understandable for us, and we can identify with it.
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We have also been witnesses to the very beginnings of man’s culturing—a great drama based on a liberation and then a distancing from the natural state.
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Let us take this as a memento in the direction of our restlessness, our inherited dissatisfaction and the volatility connected to it. Considering that they have lasted five thousand years and to this day we find ourselves in harmony with a certain feeling of futility, perhaps these characteristics are inherent in man.
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Gilgamesh had a wall built that divided the city from wild nature and created a space for the first human culture. Nevertheless, “not even far-reaching works of civilization could satisfy human desire.”
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Friendship shows us new, unsuspected adventures, gives us the opportunity to leave the wall and to become neither its builder nor its part—to not be another brick in the wall.
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with the phenomenon of the creation of the city, we have seen how specialization and the accumulation of wealth was born, how holy nature was transformed into a secular supplier of resources, and also how humans’ individualistic ego was emancipated.
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to change the system, to break down that which is standing and go on an expedition against the gods (to awaken, from naïveté to awakening) requires friendship.
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For small acts (hunting together, work in a factory), small love is enough: Camaraderie. For great acts, however, great love is necessary, real love: Friendship. Friendship that eludes the economic understanding of quid pro quo. Friendship gives. One friend gives (fully) for the other. That is friendship for life and death,
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The thought that humanity comes at the expense of efficiency is just as old as humanity itself—as we have shown, subjects without emotion are the ideal of many tyrants.
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The epic later crashes this idea through the friendship of Gilgamesh and Enkidu. Friendship—the biologically least essential love, which at first sight appears to be unnecessary
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less a civilized, city person is dependent on nature, the more he or she is dependent on the rest of society. Like Enkidu, we have exchanged nature for society; harmony with (incalculable) nature for harmony with (incalculable) man.
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human nature good or evil? To this day these questions are key for economic policy: If we believe that man is evil in his nature, therefore that a person himself is dog eat dog (animal), then the hard hand of a ruler is called for. If we believe that people in and of themselves, in their nature, gravitate toward good, then it is possible to loosen up the reins and live in a society that is more laissez-faire.
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For a concept of historical progress, for the undeification of heroes, rulers, and nature, mankind had to wait for the Hebrews.
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Because nature is not undeified, it is beyond consideration to explore it, let alone intervene in it (unless a person was a two-thirds god like Gilgamesh). It
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They practiced money lending, traded in many assets (…) and especially were engaged in the trading of shares on capital markets, worked in currency exchange and frequently figured as mediators in financial transactions (…), they functioned as bankers and participated in emissions of all possible forms.
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As regards modern capitalism (as opposed to the ancient and medieval periods) … there are activities in it which are, in certain forms, inherently (and completely necessarily) present—both from an economic and legal standpoint.7
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As early as the “dark” ages, the Jews commonly used economic tools that were in many ways ahead of their time and that later became key elements of the modern economy:
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Gilgamesh’s story ends where it began. There is a consistency in this with Greek myths and fables: At the end of the story, no progress occurs, no essential historic change; the story is set in indefinite time, something of a temporal limbo.
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Jews believe in historical progress, and that progress is in this world.
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For a nation originally based on nomadism, where did this Jewish business ethos come from? And can the Hebrews truly be considered as the architects of the values that set the direction of our civilization’s economic thought?
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Hebrew religiosity is therefore strongly connected with this world, not with any abstract world, and those who take pleasure in worldly possessions are not a priori doing anything wrong.
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PROGRESS: A SECULARIZED RELIGION One of the things the writers of the Old Testament gave to mankind is the idea and notion of progress. The Old Testament stories have their development; they change the history of the Jewish nation and tie in to each other. The Jewish understanding of time is linear—it has a beginning and an end.
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The observance of God’s Commandments in Judaism leads not to some ethereal other world, but to an abundance of material goods (Genesis 49:25–26, Leviticus 26:3–13, Deuteronomy 28:1–13) (…) There are no accusing fingers pointed at
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There are no echoes of asceticism nor for the cleansing and spiritual effect of poverty. It is fitting therefore, that the founders of Judaism, the Patriarchs Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, were all wealthy men.12
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about due to a linear understanding of history. If history has a beginning as well as an end, and they are not the same point, then exploration suddenly makes sense in areas where the fruits are borne only in the next generation.
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What’s more, economic progress has almost become an assumption of modern functional societies. We expect growth. We take it automatically. Today, if nothing “new” happens, if GDP does not grow (we say it stagnates) for several quarters, we consider it an anomaly.
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however, the idea of progress itself underwent major changes, and today we perceive it very differently. As opposed to the original spiritual conceptions, today we perceive progress almost exclusively in an economic or scientific-technological sense.
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Because care for the soul has today been replaced by care for external things,
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This is why we must constantly grow, because we (deep down and often implicitly) believe that we are headed toward an (economic) paradise on Earth.
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Only since the period of scientific-technological revolution (and at a time when economics was born as an independent field) is material progress automatically assumed.
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Jewish thought is the most grounded, most realistic school of thought of all those that have influenced our culture.17 An abstract world of ideas was unknown to the Jews. To this day it is still forbidden to even depict God, people, and animals in symbols, paintings, statues, and drawings.
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economists have become key figures of great importance in our time (Kacířské eseje o filosofii dějin [Heretical Essays in the Philosophy of History]). They are expected to perform interpretations of reality, give prophetic services (macroeconomic forecasts), reshape reality (mitigate the impacts of the crisis, speed up growth), and, in the long run, provide leadership on the way to the Promised Land—paradise on Earth.
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REALISM AND ANTIASCETICISM Aside from ideas of progress, the Hebrews brought another very fundamental contribution to our culture: The desacralization of heroes, nature, and rulers.
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Voltaire writes: “It certain fact is, that in his public laws he [Moses] never so much as once made mention of a life to come, limiting all punishments and all rewards to the present life.”21
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As opposed to Christianity, the concept of an extraterrestrial paradise or heaven was not developed much in Hebrew thought.19 The paradise of the Israelites—Eden—was originally placed on Earth at a given place in Mesopotamia20 and at a given time,
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The Hebrews consider the world to be real—not just a shadow reflection of a better world somewhere in the cloud of ideas, something the usual interpretation of history ascribes to Plato. The soul does not struggle against the body and is not its prisoner, as Augustine would write later.
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The land, the world, the body, and material reality are for Jews the paramount setting for divine history, the pinnacle of creation. This idea is the conditio sine qua non of the development of economics, something of an utterly earthly making,
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The mythology of the hero-king was strongly developed in that period, which Claire Lalouette summarizes into these basic characteristics: Beauty (a perfect face, on which it is “pleasant to look upon,” but also “beauty,” expressed in the Egyptian word nefer, not only means aesthetics, but contains moral qualities as well),
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THE HERO AND HIS UNDEIFICATION: THE DREAM NEVER SLEEPS The concept of the hero is more important than it might appear. It may be the remote origin of Keynes’s animal spirits, or the desire to follow a kind of internal archetype that a given individual accepts as his own and that society values.
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This internal animator of ours, our internal mover, this dream, never sleeps and it influences our behavior—including economic behavior—more than we want to realize.
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manliness and strength,28 knowledge and intelligence,29 wisdom and understanding, vigilance and performance, fame and renown (fame which overcomes enemies because “a thousand men would not be able to stand firmly in his presence”);30 the hero is a good shepherd (who takes care of his subordinates), is a copper-clad rampart, the shield of the land, and the defender of heroes.
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Each of us probably has a sort of “hero within”—a kind of internal role-model, template, an example that we (knowingly or not) follow. It is very important what kind of archetype it is, because its role is dominantly irrational and changes depending on time and the given civilization.
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The oldest was the so-called Trickster—a fraudster; then the culture bearer—Rabbit; the musclebound hero called Redhorn; and finally the most developed form of hero: the Twins.
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the Egyptian ruler, just as the Sumerian, was partly a god, or the son of a god.31
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Jacob defrauds his father Isaac and steals his brother Esau’s blessing of the firstborn. Moses murders an Egyptian. King David seduces the wife of his military commander and then has him killed. In his old age, King Solomon turns to pagan idols, and so on.
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Anthropology knows several archetypes of heroes. The Polish-born American anthropologist Paul Radin examined the myths of North American Indians and, for example, in his most influential book, The Trickster, he describes their four basic archetypes of heroes.
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The Torah’s heroes (if that term can be used at all) frequently make mistakes and their mistakes are carefully recorded in the Bible—maybe precisely so that none of them could be deified.32
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We do not have to go far for examples. Noah gets so drunk he becomes a disgrace; Lot lets his own daughters seduce him in a similar state of drunkenness. Abraham lies and (repeatedly) tries to sell his wife as a concubine.
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the Hebrew heroes correspond most to the Tricksters, the Culture Bearers, and the Twins. The divine muscleman, that dominant symbol we think of when we say hero, is absent here.
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To a certain extent it can be said that the Hebrews—and later Christianity—added another archetype, the archetype of the heroic Sufferer.35 Job
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Undeification, however, does not mean a call to pillage or desecration; man was put here to take care of nature (see the story of the Garden of Eden or the symbolism of the naming of the animals). This protection and care of nature is also related to the idea of progress
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For the heroes who moved our civilization to where it is today, the heroic archetypes of the cunning trickster, culture bearer, and sufferer are rather more appropriate.
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the Old Testament strongly emphasizes the undeification of nature.37 Nature is God’s creation, which speaks of divinity but is not the domain of moody gods
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This is very important for democratic capitalism, because the Jewish heroic archetype lays the groundwork much better for the development of the later phenomenon of the hero, which better suits life as we know it today. “The heroes laid down their arms and set about trading to become wealthy.”
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in an Old Testament context, the pharaoh was a mere man (whom one could disagree with, and who could be resisted!).
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RULERS ARE MERE MEN In a similar historical context, the Old Testament teachings carried out a similar desacralization of rulers, the so-called bearers of economic policy.
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Ultimately the entire idea of a political ruler stood against the Lord’s will, which is explicitly presented in the Torah. The Lord unequivocally preferred the judge as the highest form of rule—an
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The needs of future generations will have to be considered; after all humankind are the guardians of God’s world. Waste of natural resources, whether privately owned or nationally owned is forbidden.”39
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Politics lost its character of divine infallibility, and political issues were subject to questioning. Economic policy could become a subject of examination.
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44 God first creates with the word and then on individual days He divides light from darkness, water from dry land, day from night, and so forth—and He gives order to things.45 The world is created orderly— it is wisely, reasonably put together. The way of the world is put together at least partially46 decipherably by any other wise and reasonable being who honors rational rules.
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which for the methodology of science and economics is very important because disorder and chaos are difficult to examine scientifically.43 Faith in some kind of rational and logical order in a system (society, the economy) is a silent assumption of any (economic) examination.
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THE PRAISE OF ORDER AND WISDOM: MAN AS A PERFECTER OF CREATION The created world has an order of sorts, an order recognizable by us as people,
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From the very beginning, when God distances Himself from the entire idea, there is an anticipation that there is nothing holy, let alone divine, in politics. Rulers make mistakes, and it is possible to subject them to tough criticism—which frequently occurs indiscriminately through the prophets in the Old Testament.
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Hebrew culture laid the foundations for the scientific examination of the world.
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Examining the world is therefore an absolutely legitimate activity, and one that is even requested by God—it is a kind of participation in the Creator’s work.51 Man is called on to understand himself and his surroundings and to use his knowledge for good.
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I was there when he set heavens in place, when he marked out the horizon on the face of the deep (…) Then I was the craftsman at his side.47
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There are more urgings to gain wisdom in the Old Testament. “Wisdom calls aloud in the street (…): ‘How long will you simple ones love your simple ways?’”49 Or several chapters later: “Wisdom is supreme; therefore get wisdom. Though it cost all you have, get understanding.”50
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examination is not forbidden. The fact that order can be grasped by human reason is another unspoken assumption that serves as a cornerstone of any scientific examination.
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then, my sons, listen to me; blessed are those who keep my ways (…) Blessed is the man who listens to me, watching daily at my doors, waiting at my doorway. For whoever finds me finds life and receives favor from the Lord.
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the rational examination of nature has its roots, surprisingly, in religion.
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The Lord brought me forth as the first of his works, before his deeds of old. I was appointed from eternity, from the beginning, before the world began. When there were no oceans, I was given birth, when there were no springs abounding with water, before the mountains were settled in place,
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The Book of Proverbs emphasizes specifically several times that it was wisdom that was present at the creation of the world. Wisdom personified calls out:
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The last act, final stroke of the brush of creation, naming of the animals—this act is given to a human, it is not done by God, as one would expect. Man was given the task of completing the act of creation that the Lord began:
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MAN AS A FINISHER OF CREATION The creation of the world, as it is explained in Jewish teachings, is described in the Book of Genesis. Here God (i) creates, (ii) separates, and (iii) names [my emphasis]:
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Naming is a symbolic expression. In Jewish culture (and also in our culture to this day), the right to name meant sovereign rights and belonged, for example, to explorers (new places), inventors (new principles), or parents (children)—that is, to those who were there at the genesis, at the origin. This right was handed over by God to mankind.
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The Naming itself (the capital N is appropriate) traditionally belongs to the crowning act of the Creator and represents a kind of grand finale of creation, the last move of the brush to complete the picture—a signature of the master.
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Without naming, reality does not exist; it is created together with language. Wittgenstein tightly names this in his tractatus—the limits of our language are the limits of our world.53
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He invented (fictitiously and completely abstractly!) a framework that was generally accepted and soon “made into” reality. Marx invented similarly; he created the notion of class exploitation. Through his idea, the perception of history and reality was changed for a large part of the world for nearly an entire century.
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Reality is not a given; it is not passive. Perceiving reality and “facts” requires man’s active participation. It is man who must take the last step, an act (and we
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How does this relate to economics? Reality itself, our “objective” world, is cocreated, man himself participates in the creation; creation, which is somewhat constantly being re-created.
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Our scientific models put the finishing touches on reality, because (1) they interpret, (2) they give phenomena a name, (3) they enable us to classify the world and phenomena according to logical forms, and (4) through these models we de facto perceive reality.
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When man finds a new linguistic framework or analytical model, or stops using the old one, he molds or remolds reality. Models are only in our heads; they are not “in objective reality.” In this sense, Newton invented (not merely discovered!) gravity.
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A real-ization act on our part represents the creation of a construct, the imputation of sense and order (which is beautifully expressed by the biblical act of naming, or categorization, sorting, ordering).
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Keynes enters into the history of economic thought from the same intellectual cadence; his greatest contribution to economics was precisely the resurrection of the imperceptible—for example in the form of animal spirits or uncertainty. The economist Piero Mini even ascribes Keynes’s doubting and rebellious approach to his almost Talmudic education.63
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God connects man with the task of guarding and protecting the Garden of Eden, and thus man actually cocreates the cultural landscape. The Czech philosopher Zdeněk Neubauer also describes this: “Such is reality, and it is so deep that it willingly crystallizes into worlds. Therefore I profess that reality is a creation and not a place of occurrence for objectively given phenomena.”61
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in this viewpoint it is possible to see how Jewish thought is mystical—it admits the role of the incomprehensible. Therefore, through its groundedness, Jewish thought indulges mystery and defends itself against a mechanistic-causal explanation of the world: “The Jewish way of thinking, according to Veblen, emphasizes the spiritual, the miraculous, the intangible.
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The Jews believed the exact opposite. The world is created by a good God, and evil appears in it as a result of immoral human acts. Evil, therefore, is induced by man.66 History unwinds according to the morality of human acts.
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What’s more, history seems to be based on morals; morals seem to be the key determining factors of history. For the Hebrews, history proceeds according to how morally its actors behave.
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The Sumerians believed in dualism—good and evil deities exist, and the earth of people becomes their passive battlefield.
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GOOD AND EVIL IN US: A MORAL EXPLANATION OF WELL-BEING We have seen that in the Epic of Gilgamesh, good and evil are not yet addressed systematically on a moral level.
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This was not about moral-human evil, but rather a kind of natural evil. It is as if good and evil were not touched by morality at all. Evil simply occurred. Period.
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the epic, good and evil are not envisaged morally—they are not the result of an (a)moral act. Evil was not associated with free moral action or individual will.
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Hebrew thought, on the other hand, deals intensively with moral good and evil. A moral dimension touches the core of its stories.65
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discrepancy between savings and investment, and others are convinced of the monetary essence
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The entire history of the Jewish nation is interpreted and perceived in terms of morality. Morality has become, so to speak, a mover and shaker of Hebrew history.
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sunspots. The Hebrews came up with the idea that morals were behind good and bad years, behind the economic cycle. But we would be getting ahead of ourselves. Pharaoh’s Dream: Joseph and the First Business Cycle To
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It is the Pharaoh’s well-known dream of seven fat and seven lean cows, which he told to Joseph, the son of Jacob. Joseph interpreted the dream as a macroeconomic prediction of sorts: Seven years of abundance were to be followed by seven years of poverty, famine, and misery.
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Self-Contradicting Prophecy Here, let’s make several observations on this: Through taxation74 on the level of one-fifth of a crop75 in good years to save the crop and then open granaries in bad years, the prophecy was de facto prevented (prosperous years were limited and hunger averted—through a predecessor of fiscal stabilization).
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The Old Testament prophesies therefore were not any deterministic look into the future, but warnings and strategic variations of the possible, which demanded some kind of reaction. If the reaction was adequate, what was prophesied would frequently not occur at all.
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This principle stands directly against the self-fulfilling prophecy,80 the well-known concept of social science. Certain prophecies become self-fulfilling when expressed (and believed) while others become self-contradicting prophecies when pronounced (and believed).
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If the threat is anticipated, it is possible to totally or at least partially avoid it. Neither Joseph nor the pharaoh had the power to avoid bounty or crop failure (in this the dream interpretation was true and the appearance of the future mystical), but they avoided the impacts and implications of the prophecy (in this the interpretation of the dream was “false”)—famine did not ultimately occur in Egypt, and this was due to the application of reasonable and very intuitive economic policy.
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Let us further note that the first “macroeconomic forecast” appears in a dream.
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back to Torah: Later in this story we will notice that there is no reason offered as to why the cycle occurs (that will come later). Fat years will simply come, and then lean years after them.
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Moral Explanation of a Business Cycle That is fundamentally different from later Hebrew interpretations, when the Jewish nation tries to offer reasons why the nation fared well or poorly. And those reasons are moral.
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If you pay attention to these laws and are careful to follow them, then the Lord your God will keep his covenant of love with you, as he swore to your forefathers. He will love you and bless you and increase your numbers.
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Only in recent times have some currents of economics again become aware of the importance of morals and trust in the form of measuring the quality of institutions, the level of justice, business ethics, corruption, and so forth, and examining their influence on the economy,
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From today’s perspective, we can state that the moral dimension entirely disappeared from economic thought for a long time, especially due to the implementation of Mandeville’s concept of private vices that contrarily support the public welfare
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Without being timid, we can say this is the first documented attempt to explain the economic cycle. The economic cycle, the explanation of which is to this day a mystery to economists, is explained morally in the Old Testament.
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But how do we consolidate these two conflicting interpretations of the economic cycle: Can ethics be responsible for it or not? Can we influence reality around us through our acts?
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it is not within the scope of this book to answer that question; justice has been done to the question if it manages to sketch out the main contours of possible searches for answers.
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THE ECONOMICS OF GOOD AND EVIL: DOES GOOD PAY OFF? This is probably the most difficult moral problem we could ask.
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Kant, the most important modern thinker in the area of ethics, answers on the contrary that if we carry out a “moral” act on the basis of economic calculus (therefore we carry out an hedonistic consideration; see below) in the expectation of later recompense, its morality is lost. Recompense, according to the strict Kant, annuls ethics.
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Inquiring about the economics of good and evil, however, is not that easy. Where would Kant’s “moral dimension of ethics” go if ethics paid? If we do good for profit, the question of ethics becomes a mere question of rationality.
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Job’s friends try to show that he must have sinned in some way and, in doing so, deserved God’s punishment. They are absolutely unable to imagine a situation in which Job, as a righteous man, would suffer without (moral) cause. Nevertheless, Job insists that he deserves no punishment because he has committed no offense: “God has wronged me and drawn his net around me.”94
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But Job remains righteous, even though it does not pay to do so: Though he slay me, yet will I hope in him.95 And till I die, I will not deny my integrity I will maintain my righteousness and never let go of it; my conscience will not reproach me as long as I live.96
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He remains righteous, even if his only reward is death. What economic advantage could he have from that?
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morals cannot be considered in the economic dimension of productivity and calculus. The role of the Hebrews was to do good, whether it paid off or not. If good (outgoing) is rewarded by incoming goodness, it is a bonus,99 not a reason to do outgoing good. Good and reward do not correlate to each other.
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This reasoning takes on a dimension of its own in the Old Testament. Good (incoming) has already happened to us. We must do good (outgoing) out of gratitude for the good (incoming) shown to us in the past.
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So why do good? After all, suffering is the fate of many biblical figures. The answer can only be: For good itself. Good has the power to be its own reward. In this sense, goodness gets its reward, which may or may not take on a material dimension.
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the Hebrews offered an interesting compromise between the teachings of the Stoics and Epicureans. We will go into it in detail later, so only briefly
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constraint. It calls for bounded optimalization (with limits). A kind of symbiosis existed between the legitimate search for one’s own utility (or enjoyment of life) and maintaining rules, which are not negotiable and which are not subject to optimalization.
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In other words, clear (exogenously given) rules exist that must be observed and cannot be contravened. But within these borders it is absolutely possible, and even recommended, to increase utility.
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the mining of enjoyment must not come at the expense of exogenously given rules. “Judaism comes therefore to train or educate the unbounded desire … for wealth, so that market activities and patterns of consumption operate within a God-given morality.”102
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The Epicureans acted with the goal of maximizing utility without regard for rules (rules developed endogenously, from within the system, computed from that which increased utility—this was one of the main trumps of the Epicurean school; they did not need exogenously given norms, and argued that they could “calculate” ethics (what to do) for every given situation from the situation itself).
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The Stoics could not seek their enjoyment—or, by another name, utility. They could not in any way look back on it, and in no way could they count on it. They could only live according to rules (the greatest weakness of this school was to defend where exogenously the given rules came from and whether they are universal) and take a indifferent stand to the results of their actions.
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To Love the Law The Jews not only had to observe the law (perhaps the word covenant would be more appropriate), but they were to love it because it was good.
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Their relationship to the law was not supposed to be one of duty,105 but one of gratitude, love. Hebrews were to do good (outgoing), because goodness (incoming) has already been done to them.
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This is in stark contrast with today’s legal system, where, naturally, no mention of love or gratefulness exists. But God expects a full internalization of the commandments and their fulfillment with love, not as much duty. By no means was this on the basis of the cost-benefit analyses so widespread in economics today, which determines when it pays to break the law and when not to (calculated on the basis of probability of being caught and the amount of punishment vis-à-vis the possible gain).
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And now, O Israel, what does the Lord your God ask of you but to fear the Lord your God, to walk in all his ways, to love him, to serve the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul, and to observe the Lord’s commands and decrees that I am giving you today for your own good? To the Lord your God belong the heavens, even the highest heavens, the earth and everything in it. Yet the Lord set his affection on your forefathers and loved them….
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the principle of doing good (outgoing) on the basis of a priori demonstrated good (incoming) was also taken over by the New Testament. Atonement itself is based on an a priori principle; all our acts are preceded by good.
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The Hebrews, originally a nomadic tribe, preferred to be unrestrained and grew up in constant freedom of motion.
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Human laws, if they are in conflict with the responsibilities given by God, are subordinate to personal responsibility, and a Jew cannot simply join the majority, even if it is legally allowed. Ethics, the concept of good, is therefore always superior to all local laws, rules, and customs:
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THE SHACKLES OF THE CITY Owing to the Hebrew’s liberation from Egyptian slavery, freedom and responsibility become the key values of Jewish thought.
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Laws given by God are binding for Jews, and God is the absolute source of all values,
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The Hebrew ideal is represented by the paradise of the Garden of Eden, not a city.116 The despised city civilization or the tendency to see in it a sinful and shackling way of life appears in glimpses and allusions in many places in the Old Testament.
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The nomadic Jewish ethos is frequently derived from Abraham, who left the Chaldean city of Ur on the basis of a command:
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In addition, they were aware of a thin two-way line between owner and owned. We own material assets, but—to a certain extent—they own us and tie us down. Once we become used to a certain material
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This way of life had understandably immense economic impacts. First, such a society lived in much more connected relationships, where there was no doubt that everyone mutually depended on each other. Second, their frequent wanderings meant the inability to own more than they could carry; the gathering up of material assets did not have great weight—precisely because the physical weight (mass) of things was tied to one place.
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One of Moses’s greatest deeds was that he managed to explain to his nation once and for all that it is better to remain hungry and liberated than to be a slave with food “at no cost.”
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SOCIAL WELFARE: NOT TO ACT IN THE MANNER OF SODOM
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regulations is developed in the Old Testament, one we hardly find in any other nation of the time. In Hebrew teachings, aside from individual utility, indications of the concept of maximalizing utility societywide appear for the first time as embodied in the Talmudic principle of Kofin al midat S´dom, which can be translated as “one is compelled not to act in the manner of Sodom” and to take care of the weaker members of society.
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In a jubilee year, debts were to be forgiven,125 and Israelites who fell into slavery due to their indebtedness were to be set free.126
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Such provisions can be seen as the antimonopoly and social measures of the time. The economic system even then had a clear tendency to converge toward asset concentration, and therefore power as well. It would appear that these provisions were supposed to prevent this process
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Land at the time could be “sold,” and it was not sale, but rent. The price (rent) of real estate depended on how long there was until a forgiveness year. It was about the awareness that we may work the land, but in the last instance we are merely “aliens and strangers,” who have the land only rented to us for a fixed time. All land and riches came from the Lord.
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These provisions express a conviction that freedom and inheritance should not be permanently taken away from any Israelite. Last but not least, this system reminds us that no ownership lasts forever and that the fields we plow are not ours but the Lord’s.
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Glean Another social provision was the right to glean, which in Old Testament times ensured at least basic sustenance for the poorest. Anyone who owned a field had the responsibility not to harvest it to the last grain but to leave the remains in the field for the poor.
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Tithes and Early Social Net Every Israelite also had the responsibility of levying a tithe from their entire crop. They had to be aware from whom all ownership comes and, by doing so, express their thanks.
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“Since the community has an obligation to provide food, shelter, and basic economic goods for the needy, it has a moral right and duty to tax its members for this purpose. In line with this duty, it may have to regulate markets, prices and competition, to protect the interests of its weakest members.”135
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In Judaism, charity is not perceived as a sign of goodness; it is more of a responsibility. Such a society then has the right to regulate its economy in such a way that the responsibility of charity is carried out to its satisfaction.
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With a number of responsibilities, however, comes the difficulty of getting them into practice. Their fulfillment, then, in cases when it can be done, takes place gradually “in layers.” Charitable activities are classified in the Talmud according to several target groups with various priorities, classified according to, it could be said, rules of subsidiarity.
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Do not mistreat an alien or oppress him, for you were aliens in Egypt.140 As one can see, aside from widows and orphans, the Old Testament also includes immigrants in its area of social protection.141 The Israelites had to have the same rules apply for them as for themselves—they could not discriminate on the basis of their origin.
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ABSTRACT MONEY, FORBIDDEN INTEREST, AND OUR DEBT AGE If it appears to us that today’s era is based on money and debt, and our time will be written into history as the “Debt age,” then it will certainly be interesting to follow how this development occurred.
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Money is a social abstractum. It is a social agreement, an unwritten contract.
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The first money came in the form of clay tablets from Mesopotamia, on which debts were written. These debts were transferable, so the debts became currency. In the end, “It is no coincidence that in English the root of ‘credit’ is ‘credo,’ the Latin for ‘I believe.’”
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To a certain extent it could be said that credit, or trust, was the first currency. It can materialize, it can be embodied in coins, but what is certain is that “money is not metal,” even the rarest metal, “it is trust inscribed,”
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Inseparably, with the original credit (money) goes interest. For the Hebrews, the problem of interest was a social issue: “If you lend money to one of my people among you who is needy, do not be like a moneylender; charge him no interest.”
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there were also clearly set rules setting how far one could go in setting guarantees and the nonpayment of debts. No one should become indebted to the extent that they could lose the source of their livelihood:
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In the end, the term “bank” comes from the Italian banci, or the benches that Jewish lenders sat on.157
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Money is playing not only its classical roles (as a means of exchange, a holder of value, etc.) but also a much greater, stronger role: It can stimulate, drive (or slow down) the whole economy. Money plays a national economic role.
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In the course of history, however, the role of loans changed, and the rich borrowed especially for investment purposes,
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Today the position and significance of money and debt has gone so far and reached such a dominant position in society that operating with debts (fiscal policy) or interest or money supply (monetary policy) means that these can, to a certain extent, direct (or at least strongly influence) the whole economy and society.
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In such a case a ban on interest did not have great ethical significance. Thomas Aquinas, a medieval scholar (1225-1274), also considers similarly; in his time, the strict ban on lending with usurious interest was loosened, possibly due to him.
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As a form of energy, money can travel in three dimensions, vertically (those who have capital lend to those who do not) and horizontally (speed and freedom in horizontal or geographic motion has become the by-product—or driving force?—of globalization). But money (as opposed to people) can also travel through time.
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money is something like energy that can travel through time. And it is a very useful energy, but at the same time very dangerous as well. Wherever
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Aristotle condemned interest162 not only from a moral standpoint, but also for metaphysical reasons. Thomas Aquinas shared the same fear of interest and he too argued that time does not belong to us, and that is why we must not require interest.
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MONEY AS ENERGY: TIME TRAVEL AND GROSS DEBT PRODUCT (GDP)
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Due to this characteristic, we can energy-strip the future to the benefit of the present. Debt can transfer energy from the future to the present.163 On the other hand, saving can accumulate energy from the past and send it to the present.
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labor was not considered degrading in the Old Testament. On the contrary, the subjugation of nature is even a mission from God that originally belonged to man’s very first blessings.
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LABOR AND REST: THE SABBATH ECONOMY
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The Jews as well as Aristotle behaved very guardedly toward loans. The issue of interest/usury became one of the first economic debates. Without having an inkling of the future role of economic policy (fiscal and monetary), the ancient Hebrews may have unwittingly felt that they were discovering in interest a very powerful weapon, one that can be a good servant, but (literally) an enslaving master as well.
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It’s something like a dam. When we build one, we are preventing periods of drought and flooding in the valley; we are limiting nature’s whims and, to a large extent, avoiding its incalculable cycles. Using dams, we can regulate the flow of water to nearly a constant. With it we tame the river (and we can also gain
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But if we do not regulate the water wisely, it may happen that we would overfill the dam and it would break. For the cities lying in the valley, their end would be worse than if a dam were never there.
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If man lived in harmony with nature before, now, after the fall, he must fight; nature stands against him and he against it and the animals. From the Garden we have moved unto a (battle)field.
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Only after man’s fall does labor turn into a curse.168 It could even be said that this is actually the only curse, the curse of the unpleasantness of labor, that the Lord places on Adam.
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Both Plato and Aristotle consider labor to be necessary for survival, but that only the lower classes should devote themselves to it so that the elites would not have to be bothered with it and so that they could devote themselves to “purely spiritual matters—art, philosophy, and politics.”
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Work is also not only a source of pleasure but a social standing; It is considered an honor. “Do you see a man skilled in his work? He will serve before kings.”170 None of the surrounding cultures appreciate work as much. The idea of the dignity of labor is unique in the Hebrew tradition.
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Hebrew thinking is characterized by a strict separation of the sacred from the profane. In life, there are simply areas that are holy, and in which it is not allowed to economize, rationalize, or maximize efficiency.
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good example is the commandment on the Sabbath. No one at all could work on this day, not even the ones who were subordinate to an observant Jew:
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the message of the commandment on Saturday communicated that people were not primarily created for labor.
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Paradoxically, it is precisely this commandment out of all ten that is probably the most violated today.
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Aristotle even considers labor to be “a corrupted waste of time which only burdens people’s path to true honour.”
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we have days when we must not toil connected (at least lexically) with the word meaning emptiness: the English term “vacation” (or emptying), as with the French term, les vacances, or German die Freizeit, meaning open time, free time, but also…
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Translated into economic language: The meaning of utility is not to increase it permanently but to rest among existing gains. Why do we learn how to constantly increase gains but not how to…
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This dimension has disappeared from today’s economics. Economic effort has no goal at which it would be possible to rest. Today we only know growth for growth’s sake, and if our company or country prospers, that does not…
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Six-sevenths of time either be dissatisfied and reshape the world into your own image, man, but one-seventh you will rest and not change the creation. On the seventh day, enjoy creation and enjoy the work of your hands.
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the purpose of creation was not just creating but that it had an end, a goal. The process was just a process, not a purpose. The whole of Being was created so…
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Saturday was not established to increase efficiency. It was a real ontological break that followed the example of the Lord’s seventh day of creation. Just as the Lord did not rest due to tiredness or to regenerate strength; but because He was done. He was done with His work, so that He could enjoy it, to cherish in His creation.
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If we believe in rest at all today, it is for different reasons. It is the rest of the exhausted machine, the rest of the weak, and the rest of those who can’t handle the tempo. It’s no wonder that the word “rest…
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Related to this, we have studied the first mention of a business cycle with the pharaoh’s dream as well as seen a first attempt (that we may call…
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We have tried to show that the quest for a heaven on Earth (similar to the Jewish one) has, in its desacralized form, actually also been the same quest for many of the…
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We have also seen that the Hebrews tried to explain the business cycle with morality and ethics. For the Hebrews,…
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ancient Greek economic ethos, we will examine two extreme approaches to laws and rules. While the Stoics considered laws to be absolutely valid, and utility had infinitesimal meaning in their philosophy, the Epicureans, at least in the usual historical explanation, placed utility and pleasure in first place—rules were to be made based on the principle of utility.
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CONCLUSION: BETWEEN UTILITY AND PRINCIPLE The influence of Jewish thought on the development of market democracy cannot be overestimated. The key heritage for us was the lack of ascetic perception of the world, respect to law and private…
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We have tried to show how the Torah desacralized three important areas in our lives: the earthly ruler, nature,…
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What is the relationship between the good and evil that we do (outgoing) and the utility of disutility that we (expect to) get as a reward (incoming)? We have seen…
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The Hebrews never despised material wealth; on contrary, the Jewish faith puts great responsibility on property management. Also the idea of progress and the linear perception of time gives our (economic)…
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the Hebrews managed to find something of a happy compromise between both of these principles.
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will not be able to completely understand the development of the modern notion of economics without understanding the disputes between the Epicureans and the Stoics;
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poets actually went even further, and with their speech they shaped and established reality and truth. Honor, adventure, great deeds, and the acclaim connected with them played an important role in the establishment of the true, the real.
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those who are famous will be remembered by people. They become more real, part of the story, and they start to be “realized,” “made real” in the lives of other people. That which is stored in memory is real; that which is forgotten is as if it never existed.
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Today’s scientific truth is founded on the notion of exact and objective facts, but poetic truth stands on an interior (emotional) consonance with the story or poem. “It is not addressed first to the brain … [myth] talks directly to the feeling system.”
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“epic and tragic poets were widely assumed to be the central ethical thinkers and teachers of Greece; nobody thought of their work as less serious, less aimed at truth, than the speculative prose treatises of historians and philosophers.”5 Truth and reality were hidden in speech, stories, and narration.
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Ancient philosophy, just as science would later, tries to find constancy, constants, quantities, inalterabilities. Science seeks (creates?) order and neglects everything else as much as it can. In their own experiences, everyone knows that life is not like that,
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Just as scientists do today, artists drew images of the world that were representative, and therefore symbolic, picturelike, and simplifying (but thus also misleading), just like scientific models, which often do not strive to be “realistic.”
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general? In the end, poetry could be more sensitive to the truth than the philosophical method or, later, the scientific method. “Tragic poems, in virtue of their subject matter and their social function, are likely to confront and explore problems about human beings and luck that a philosophical text might be able to omit or avoid.”8
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Derek Chauvin Trial: 14 Jurors Are Seated To Hear Case Of George Floyd Killing : NPR - 0 views

www.npr.org/...r-case-of-george-floyd-killing

shared by anonymous on 22 Mar 21 - No Cached

A 14th juror was selected in former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin's murder trial on Monday, one week before opening arguments are scheduled to begin on March 29. The court initially called for 12 jurors and at least two alternates; it could now add additional jurors to the panel, in case anyone drops out.
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Chauvin, who is white, is charged with second-degree unintentional murder, third-degree murder and second-degree manslaughter in the killing of George Floyd, who was Black. Video recordings showed that Floyd was held facedown on the asphalt — and that Chauvin kept his knee on Floyd's neck for nearly nine minutes.The jury reflects a range of ethnicities, although slightly over half of the jurors have been described in court as white.
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The trial is expected to last at least four weeks. The two alternate jurors won't know of their status until the panel heads to the deliberation phase. Jury selection in the case has often moved more quickly than was predicted: when it began on March 9, the process was expected to last several weeks, as the judge, prosecutors and defense attorneys quizzed dozens of potential jurors about their lives and any opinions they held about Floyd's death in police custody last Memorial Day.
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The relatively fast pace endured despite the loss last week of two jurors who were struck from the panel after they said that because of Minneapolis' recent $27 million settlement with Floyd's family, they could no longer promise to be impartial.
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The jury reached 14 members days after Cahill denied the defense's motions to move the case to another venue or delay the proceedings – steps that Chauvin's attorney, Eric Nelson, called for because of the potential impact of the settlement news on the jury pool.
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The initial jury pool included 326 people; as of late last week, Cahill said that the court had questioned around 60 of them. The selection process continued on Monday, as the judge and the two sides of the case sought to ensure the jury is fair and impartial. As of around midday Monday, the defense had used 14 of its 18 challenges and the prosecutors had used 8 of their 10 challenges, Cahill said.
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In another ruling from Friday, Cahill ruled that only a portion of the evidence and details from an earlier police stop of Floyd would be allowed in the trial.Cahill noted similarities between Floyd's interaction with police on May 25, 2020, and the earlier police stop on May 6, 2019. In both instances, the judge said, there were signs that Floyd had ingested drugs after being approached by police officers. In the two cases, Cahill said, Floyd's physical behavior is "remarkably similar."
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But the judge also said Floyd's "emotional behavior" from that earlier encounter was not admissible. And he restricted how much of a police video recording from the 2019 arrest could be used in court.The only recordings from the 2019 incident that are relevant to the current case, he added, are segments that could be linked to the cause of Floyd's death and his medical condition.The case is being closely watched, with Floyd's death having inflamed widespread protests against racial inequality and police brutality.
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Pelosi and McConnell Begin 2020 in Standoff Over Trump Impeachment Trial - 0 views

www.msn.com/...ar-BBYxvFV

pelosi mcconnell impeachment trump

shared by johnsonel7 on 02 Jan 20 - No Cached

Pelosi has held up delivering to the Senate the two articles of impeachment adopted by the Democratic-majority House, saying she wants to see a “fair” process for the trial. Officials in Pelosi’s office said she and Schumer are in lockstep on what that means: trial procedures that would include documents and testimony from witnesses that were blocked by Trump during the House’s impeachment inquiry.
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“Neither Senator McConnell, nor any Republican senator, has articulated a single good reason why the trial shouldn’t have these witnesses or these documents,”
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For Schumer and Pelosi, withholding the impeachment articles and demanding more witnesses has given them a chance to raise questions about whether Trump’s trial in the Republican-controlled Senate can be fair. McConnell made clear he has no intention of being impartial — despite an impeachment oath that has traditionally required senators to deliver “impartial justice” — and said he’s closely coordinating with the White House.
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Republicans are arguing that Pelosi withholding the articles of impeachment contradicts the main message from Democrats during impeachment: that Trump is such a danger to national security and the next election that he must face swift consequences for his actions.
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Republicans scoff at the idea that Pelosi has any leverage over McConnell, arguing that the impeachment went ahead without waiting to see whether courts would compel more witnesses to testify in the House because Democrats set a political deadline. One GOP aide said that Pelosi’s attempt to dictate Senate process would only alienate moderate Republicans.
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Alito, Texas Abortion and the Shadow Docket: Déjà vu All Over Again? | Austin... - 0 views

verdict.justia.com/...-docket-deja-vu-all-over-again

us SCOTUS justice abortion

shared by clairemann on 12 Oct 21 - No Cached

On October 8, the Fifth Circuit summarily reinstated Texas’s “heartbeat” anti-abortion law, overturning district court Judge Robert Pitman’s careful, 113-page October 6 decision enjoining the onerous law. And so, the Supreme Court may soon have an opportunity to weigh in again, via its “emergency docket,” on the most restrictive abortion law in the nation. It authorizes “bounty-hunters” to inform on anyone helping a woman protect her right to control her body.
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. The Court’s legitimacy is bound up with its ability to convince litigants and citizens alike that its rulings are the result of a careful, deliberative, and fair process. Its increasing resort to the emergency docket, dubbed the “shadow docket” in 2015 by law school professor William Baude, calls those virtues into question.
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Critics rightly say that the Court’s use of emergency orders, issued without oral argument and full legal briefing, to decide issues with enormous substantive effect on the nation, may help its conservative members advance their agenda. But reconciling this development and the requirements of judicial legitimacy is no easy task.
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“Journalists may think we can dash off an opinion the way they dash off articles,” Alito snarked. “You can’t expect the E.M.T.s and the emergency rooms to do the same thing that a team of physicians and nurses will do when . . . time is not of the essence.”
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That begs the question of why the Court is now deciding more frequently that their EMT services are needed.
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In any event, Alito’s “blame the messenger” ignores what behavior psychologists have known for decades: When a message receives a favorable response, the messenger returns for more.
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Alito rejected critics’ claims that emergency orders suffer from opaqueness that full court opinions help avoid: “[F]air-minded readers can easily understand the grounds for our rulings.”
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What he didn’t address was the fact that the three orders he discussed all favored conservative litigants, a consistency that could lead “fair minded observers” to question whether the Court was impartially “calling balls and strikes.” In July, a Reuters analysis concluded that the Court’s emergency orders consistently favored religious groups and Trump’s administration.
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Findings like that may have contributed to Justice Amy Coney Barrett publicly declaring in September that “we’re not a bunch of partisan hacks.” (Reminiscent of Richard Nixon’s Watergate-era speech in which he said, “I am not a crook.”)
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That bromide does not mean, however, that judges should seek the limelight to offer their perspectives on Court business or doctrine. That practice carries enormous risk of destroying the public’s trust in their impartiality and nonpartisanship.
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Judge Jackson takes empathetic approach to impartiality: ANALYSIS - ABC News - 0 views

abcnews.go.com/...story

jackson politics us

shared by lilyrashkind on 26 Mar 22 - No Cached

Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson never uttered the word 'empathy' in nearly 19 hours of testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee this week, but she effectively made clear it's a hallmark of her style and an asset to judicial credibility
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Jackson also insisted it has no influence on her legal decisions."I am not importing my personal views or policy preferences," she told the committee. "The entire exercise is about trying to understand what those who created this policy or this law intended."
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What Judge Jackson and her supporters tout as a selling point, Republican critics call a major liability.
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Republican Sen. Thom Tillis of North Carolina told her, "it seems as though you're a very kind person and there's at least a level of empathy that enters into your treatment of a defendant.""Maybe beyond what some of us would be comfortable with with respect to administering justice," Tillis added.
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The partisan clash over empathy -- which some have dubbed the "Empathy Wars" -- has its roots in a campaign promise by Barack Obama more than 15 years ago, when the then presidential candidate made the quality a key criteria for a high court nominee.
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"My attempts to communicate directly with defendants is about public safety," Jackson told Tillis, who scrutinized her treatment of child porn offenders, "because most of the people who are incarcerated via the federal system, and even via the state system, will come out, will be a part of our communities again."
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"I just don't understand why after saying this and believing this, you could give this guy three months in prison," said Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Missouri, who spent the entirety of his time questioning Jackson's below-guidelines sentence in a child porn case involving an 18-year-old offender. "Do you have anything to add?""No, senator," Jackson shot back.
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Having empathy on the high court was once widely considered a vaunted quality. Justice Stephen Breyer, whom Jackson would succeed, called empathy "a crucial quality [to have] in a judge."Justice Anthony Kennedy, a Ronald Reagan appointee, said in 2013 that empathy requires "caution" but that cases are "stories about real people" and that judges must understand "real people are going to be bound by what you do."
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But other jurists take a broader view."Wisdom, as opposed to the more narrow empathy, is a foundational requirement throughout our legal system," said Sarah Isgur, a former Justice Department lawyer and ABC News legal analyst."A judicial philosophy may have empathy as one element of it, but it strives to treat similar situations alike by creating a framework to determine which cases are similar and which aren't," Isgur said. "Judge Jackson was never able to articulate a judicial philosophy and without one, empathy can actually be the antithesis of justice."
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"In my capacity as a justice, I would do what I've done for the past decade, which is to rule from a position of neutrality, to look carefully at the facts and the circumstances of every case, without any agendas, without any attempt to push the law in one direction or the other," Jackson said, "and to render rulings that I believe and that I hope that people would have
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Opinion | How to Force Justices Alito and Thomas to Recuse Themselves in the Jan. 6 Cas... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...thomas-recuse-trump-jan-6.html

Scotus impartiality constitution

shared by Javier E on 29 May 24 - No Cached

The U.S. Department of Justice — including the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, an appointed U.S. special counsel and the solicitor general, all of whom were involved in different ways in the criminal prosecutions underlying these cases and are opposing Mr. Trump’s constitutional and statutory claims — can petition the other seven justices to require Justices Alito and Thomas to recuse themselves not as a matter of grace but as a matter of law.
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The Justice Department and Attorney General Merrick Garland can invoke two powerful textual authorities for this motion: the Constitution of the United States, specifically the due process clause, and the federal statute mandating judicial disqualification for questionable impartiality, 28 U.S.C. Section 455.
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François Hollande's Apology Tour-and What Americans Should Learn From It | Th... - 0 views

www.tnr.com/...what-americans-should-learn-it

france history responsibility apology us

shared by Javier E on 23 Oct 12 - No Cached

Not only has France apologized for some past actions, it has also stopped boasting of others. in 2005, the government of Jacques Chirac quietly but firmly refused to mark in any but the most restrained way the bicentennial of the Battle of Austerlitz—arguably, the greatest French military victory of all time, carried out by Napoleon Bonaparte against Austria and Russia. Modern France, it was explained, had no business celebrating a bloodbath carried out by a repressive, undemocratic ruler as part of a campaign of naked imperial expansionism.
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in the past quarter-century, conservatives have successfully cast any attempt to discuss the country’s historical record impartially in the political realm as a species of heresy—“blaming America first,” as Jeanne Kirkpatrick put it as far back as 1984. A turning point of sorts came in 1994, when the Smithsonian Institution planned an exhibit of the aircraft that dropped the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima, accompanied by material that highlighted the human toll of the bombing,  inviting debate on its morality.  The outcry from conservatives and veterans groups was deafening, and few politicians dared to defend the Smithsonian, which eventually canceled the exhibit.
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It would be wrong to say that the French have moved away from sentiments of patriotism and national pride. But the country’s cultural and political elites now tend, overwhelmingly, to phrase their patriotism in terms of “ideals” and “values” to which, they readily admit, the country has often failed to live up.
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Both of France’s major political parties, Hollande’s Socialists and Sarkozy’s UMP, embrace this stance of “openness” to the world (as the political scientist Sophie Meunier phrases it). It only finds real opposition among the anti-capitalist radicals of the far left, and the reactionary nationalists of the far right. And openness to the world tends to prompt the rejection of narrowly chauvinist national pride, and a readiness to admit one’s own country’s faults and crimes.
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anyone who strikes an overly contentious nationalist pose in French politics risks association with the far-right National Front, whose founder, Jean-Marie Le Pen, has predictably denounced Hollande, declaring that only God has the authority to recognize French guilt or innocence.
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In France, in short, apologizing for your country can be good politics. It is in America where being a politician means never being able to say you’re sorry.
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Facebook Employees Pushed to Remove Trump's Posts as Hate Speech - WSJ - 0 views

www.wsj.com/...osts-as-hate-speech-1477075392

Facebook free speech hate speech politics

shared by Javier E on 23 Oct 16 - No Cached

The company insists it is a neutral platform for open debate. Yet it has strict rules around what users can post.
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The rules, which Facebook has tightened in recent years, ban discrimination toward people based on their race and religion. Facebook typically removes content that violates the rules.
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Legal experts say Facebook isn’t bound by the Federal Communications Commission’s equal-time rules, which require radio stations and broadcast networks, with exceptions, to devote the same airtime to political candidates.
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Facebook’s head of global policy management, Monika Bickert, later explained in an internal post that the company wouldn’t take down any of Mr. Trump’s posts because it strives to be impartial in the election season, according to people who saw the post.
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Roberts's Rules - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...5559

constitution law supreme court legal philosophy

shared by Javier E on 29 Jun 12 - No Cached

Roberts seemed frustrated by the degree to which the media focused on the handful of divisive cases rather than on the greater number of unanimous ones, and also by the degree to which some of his colleagues were acting more like law professors than members of a collegial Court.
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“If the Court in Marshall’s era had issued decisions in important cases the way this Court has over the past thirty years, we would not have a Supreme Court today of the sort that we have,” he said. “That suggests that what the Court’s been doing over the past thirty years has been eroding, to some extent, the capital that Marshall built up.” Roberts added, “I think the Court is also ripe for a similar refocus on functioning as an institution, because if it doesn’t it’s going to lose its credibility and legitimacy as an institution.”
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Roberts believes that Marshall’s temperament and worldview came from his experiences as a soldier at Valley Forge, where he developed a commitment to the success of the nation. “Some have speculated that the real root of Marshall’s ill feeling to Jefferson was that Jefferson was not at Valley Forge, was not in the fight, and had what Marshall might regard as a somewhat precious attachment to ideas for the sake of ideas, while Marshall was more personally invested in the success of the American experiment.
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Roberts said his decision to embrace Marshall’s vision was a reaction to “the personalization of judicial politics.”
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Roberts praised justices who were willing to put the good of the Court above their own ideological agendas. “A justice is not like a law professor, who might say, ‘This is my theory … and this is what I’m going to be faithful to and consistent with,’ and in twenty years will look back and say, ‘I had a consistent theory of the First Amendment as applied to a particular area,’”
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I think it’s bad, long-term, if people identify the rule of law with how individual justices vote.”
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Instead of nine justices moving in nine separate directions, Roberts said, “it would be good to have a commitment on the part of the Court to acting as a Court, rather than being more concerned about the consistency and coherency of an individual judicial record.”
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n Roberts’s view, the most successful chief justices help their colleagues speak with one voice. Unanimous, or nearly unanimous, decisions are hard to overturn and contribute to the stability of the law and the continuity of the Court; by contrast, closely divided, 5–4 decisions make it harder for the public to respect the Court as an impartial institution that transcends partisan politics.
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“It’s sobering to think of the seventeen chief justices; certainly a solid majority of them have to be characterized as failures,” Roberts said with a rueful smile. “The successful ones are hard to number.”
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“the chief’s ability to get the Court to do something is really quite restrained.
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Opposition Party Boycotting Bangladesh Election - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...bangladesh-election.html

shared by Maria Delzi on 05 Jan 14 - No Cached

As Bangladesh prepared for general elections on Sunday, a truck driver named Nur Islam was trying to haul a load of potatoes to Dhaka, the capital, along a route he knew would be targeted by protesters allied with the opposition.
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He took precautions, strapping on a helmet and leaving in the dead of night, but was still terrified after his truck was surrounded — not once, but twice — by young men hurling bricks.
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Street protests often accompany elections in Bangladesh, but political violence intensified in 2013, resulting in around 150 deaths, according to Human Rights Watch.
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The tension could rise to a new level on Sunday, when the country will go to the polls in a vote that is strikingly noncompetitive by Bangladeshi standards. The opposition has refused to participate, leaving more than half of the seats in Parliament uncontested.
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The country’s main opposition party, the Bangladesh National Party, called the boycott after the government refused to put in place an impartial caretaker government ahead of the elections, which has been customary in Bangladesh since 1996 and is seen as a guard against government manipulation. Protesters have set fire to vehicles and hurled bricks and homemade explosives, demanding that the government hold new elections on terms the opposition accepts.
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“Both parties are playing with the lives of common people,” Mr. Islam said.
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The violence increased in part when the government began prosecuting figures from Bangladesh’s 1971 war of independence for war crimes, handing down death sentences to several leaders of Jamaat-e-Islami, the country’s largest Islamic political party. The Awami League has also hardened its view of Begum Khaleda Zia, the Bangladesh National Party’s leader and a two-time prime minister, accusing her of links to Islamist militants.
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“We are just protecting her safety. In her house, she is very safe.” Asked what threat Mrs. Zia faced, he said: “Nobody knows. Some miscreants can just shoot at her.”
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A low turnout could pressure the government to begin preparing for fresh elections, something that happened after a similar opposition boycott in 1996. Gowher Rizvi, an adviser to Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, said it was “almost without doubt” that Mrs. Hasina would call new elections ahead of schedule, noting that an election “loses its luster” when a major party does not take part.
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“Is it one year? Is it nine months? Is it 15 months? I can’t tell you,” he said.
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Snowden Seeks to Return Home to U.S., His Lawyer Says - NYTimes.com - 0 views

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snowden politics Russia US

shared by qkirkpatrick on 05 Mar 15 - No Cached

Edward J. Snowden, the fugitive and former American intelligence contractor, would like to return to the United States after nearly two years in exile in Russia, according to his Russian lawyer.
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Mr. Snowden is seeking a guarantee of a legal and impartial trial, Mr. Kucherena said.
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Opinion | The Racism Inside Fire Departments - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...m-inside-fire-departments.html

racism fire hiring

shared by Javier E on 12 Sep 18 - No Cached

Despite a rich history of black firefighting heroes that goes back to the beginnings of a professionalized service in the early 19th century, firefighting in this country is stained by a tradition of exclusion. Post-segregation, discrimination was reinforced through deep-rooted nepotism and cronyism. For those whose great-grandfather, grandfather and father weren’t firefighters — and especially for applicants with the wrong color, gender or sexuality — training and testing became an impermeable barrier. Notoriously, white male recruits received special mentoring and reduced scrutiny by those in charge of hiring.
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problems are system-deep. To begin to solve them, local fire department leaders must step up their efforts to support and enforce inclusivity. We should prioritize hiring fire chiefs who are fully committed to dismantling nepotism and tackling those professional traditions that degrade opportunity. We need an impartial, standardized and professional process for testing at entry level and on promotional exams to inoculate against the effects of bias and favoritism. Fire departments must enforce workplace rules already in place.
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The Peter Strzok Hearing and the Death of Shame - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...565415

decency Politics culture morality justice fbi

shared by Javier E on 19 Jul 18 - No Cached

Decency and the sense of shame that comes from violating standards of decency depend upon a tacit consensus on what it means to do right by others.
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Decency is not justice; since the tacit consensus of the 1950s did not include full civil rights for African Americans, or for that matter virtually anyone who was not a straight white male, very decent folk all over the country lived with perfect complacency in a caste society
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Ted Poe, another Texan—another representative, that is, of the law and order capital of America—turned to Strzok and said, “You’re going to act on your bias. You’re going to ‘stop’ President Trump. How do we know that’s not rampant through the FBI?” Strzok rejoined, “A judge asks jurors, ‘Are you able to set aside your personal opinions and render a judgment based on the facts?’ and I and the men and women of the FBI every day take our personal beliefs and set them aside in vigorous pursuit of the truth wherever it lies.
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So yes, the social consensus of the 1950s depended on shrouding the most divisive issues in silence. Decency served as the nonpartisan virtue of that culture. Indeed, the supreme attribute of mid-century Hollywood films was the quiet, undemonstrative heroism of the decent man
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Think of almost any film starring Henry Fonda. Twelve Angry Men doesn’t focus on Fonda’s politics any more than Mr. Smith Goes to Washington reveals Jimmy Stewart’s, but in the fortitude with which they stand up to prejudice, vitriol, ignorance, laziness, and impatience we recognize the mark of the decent man. No less do we recognize the substantive moral qualities of tolerance and fair-mindedness they embody.
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In last week’s drama, it was the witness who stood up for the traditional American value of straight shooting, not to mention the moral authority of law enforcement. It was the United States Congress that played the rogue.
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There was something genuinely astonishing in the spectacle of Republican representatives trying to reduce the FBI to the status of a fifth column, as McCarthy had tried to do to the Army
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Yet it is only when behavior formerly seen as unexceptionable begins to become a source of shame that broader social change becomes possible. That is as true of sexual abuse today as it was of racism half a century ago.
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Peter Strzok stands for an FBI that, whatever its faults, serves the nation rather than a political master. G-men have become the Henry Fondas, the Jimmy Stewarts, of the present day—the true believers in an archaic code.
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I was foolish enough to write at the time that Comey’s testimony might serve to remind Americans of the value of neutral institutions and principles. No such luck: Comey’s plea for impartiality came to be seen on the right as proof of partiality
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The alternative explanation is that the collective sense of what constitutes decent behavior outweighs ideological affinity on the left, but not on the right. Elected Democrats lined up to denounce President Bill Clinton’s private behavior during the Monica Lewinsky scandal, though none deemed it worthy of impeachment. Donald Trump’s vastly more outrageous behavior has provoked far less opprobrium from his own party.
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Republicans aren’t less decent than Democrats; rather, they have come to see political struggle in such apocalyptic terms that no merely personal form of shameful behavior can compete with the political stakes.
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In 2008, the Democrats nominated, and the country elected, a young, lanky, even-keeled fellow who imagined that he could restore the tarnished ideal of national decency. That didn’t turn out the way things do in the movies; eight years of Barack Obama persuaded the country to elect the most shameless man who has ever occupied the White House
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After Strzok finished reciting the true-blue virtues that he and his fellow FBI agents try to live by, Poe leaned into the microphone and said, “And I don’t believe you.” That’s where we are today.
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The humbling of Britain - 0 views

www.newstatesman.com/...humbling-britain

brexit responsibility history uk

shared by Javier E on 10 Apr 19 - No Cached

The original sin was that of David Cameron
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The public was not clamouring for a referendum on EU membership. Cameron called it for the narrow purpose of uniting his party and fending off Ukip. He offered an ill-informed electorate a binary choice on an extraordinarily complex issue of profound constitutional importance without even the safeguard of a 60 per cent threshold for approval.
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It was one of the most foolish gambles ever taken by a British prime minister, and one that unleashed the charlatans, rogues and demagogues of the Leave campaign.
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Worst of all, having defeated Cameron’s hapless Remain campaign, the luminaries of Leave turned out to have no plan whatever for implementing their fairy-tale Brexit.
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Cameron may be the worst prime minister of modern times, but May runs him close. She is certainly the only one to pursue a goal that she knows to be immensely damaging to her country.
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The roll of ignominy does not end there. Next up is May’s de facto accomplice, Jeremy Corbyn. He is a covert Leaver masquerading as a Remainer, the opposition leader who refuses to lead, the head not so much of a government-in-waiting than of an “opposition in hiding” as one commentator put it.
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the deceptively innocuous-sounding European Research Group (ERG), a party within a party, the Tories’ very own Militant Tendency. Led by Jacob Rees-Mogg, with a snarl behind his smile, these right-wing zealots have zero interest in the “people” they profess to champion. They seek to turn Britain into the low-wage, low-regulation Singapore of Europe, which is certainly not what disgruntled blue-collar workers in Stoke or Sunderland voted for.
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The ERG has been shamefully aided and abetted by much of the British press – most notably the Telegraph, the Sun, the Express and the Daily Mail under its former editor, Paul Dacre.
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During and since the referendum campaign those papers have abandoned any pretence of impartiality, of seeking to enlighten their readers or of holding our government to account. They pump out propaganda worthy of a second-rate banana republic. They downplay Brexit’s rapidly escalating costs, savage its opponents, and accuse the EU of negotiating in bad faith
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Eisenhower vs. Warren: The Battle Over Brown - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...554045

warren eisenhower brown v board policy

shared by knudsenlu on 09 Mar 18 - No Cached

t a White House stag dinner in February 1954, President Dwight Eisenhower shocked the new chief justice of the United States. Earl Warren was Eisenhower’s first appointment to the Supreme Court and had been sworn in just four months earlier. Only two months into his tenure, Warren had presided over oral arguments in the blockbuster school-segregation case Brown v. Board of Education. As of the dinner, the case was still under advisement. Yet Eisenhower seated Warren near one of the attorneys who had argued the case for the southern states, John W. Davis, and went out of his way to praise Davis as a great man. That alone would have made for an awkward evening. What happened next made it fateful. Over coffee, Eisenhower took Warren by the arm and asked him to consider the perspective of white parents in the Deep South. “These are not bad people,” the president said. “All they are concerned about is to see that their sweet little girls are not required to sit in school alongside some big black bucks.”
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Warren had been a prosecutor and a governor, and was no choirboy; he had heard bigoted language before. Yet as the chief justice, he embodied the impartiality of the entire federal judiciary. He was a man who believed in fairness and dignity. The president’s words had shaken him.
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When the Court ruled on the remedies phase of Brown in 1955, a decision known as Brown II, the president was even less voluble. He said nothing about the Court’s delegation of supervisory duties to the district courts, or its famous directive that school districts should begin to desegregate “with all deliberate speed.” The following year, Eisenhower personally rewrote the Republican platform to read that the party “accepts” the original Brown decision, rather than “concurs” with it.
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If the stag dinner upended relations between Warren and Eisenhower, the Brown decision three months later ruptured those relations permanently. The Court decided the case on May 17, 1954, declaring that segregation in public schools was unconstitutional.
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William I. Hitchcock quotes the only African American on Eisenhower’s executive staff, E. Frederic Morrow, who reported with despair the broad sentiment that the administration “has completely abandoned the Negro in the South.”
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Warren’s role in the Brown decision is one of the great acts of American statesmanship. The popular California governor joined the Supreme Court at a moment of crisis. Brown had been argued once already, in 1952, but the justices had been divided and uncertain how to proceed.
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Eisenhower sang a loud and bitter tune about his chief justice. At one point Eisenhower even had to sheepishly apologize to Warren for press reports that had picked up his bad-mouthing. In an excellent chapter, Simon shows that Eisenhower’s regret may have had as much to do with communism as with race.
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Brown prompted a mighty backlash, but to Warren the decision was the constitutional tradition at work. He wrote that legal principles “should not be compromised and parceled out a little in one case, a little more in another, until eventually someone receives the full benefit.” More than 60 years after Brown, the full benefit remains elusive. If Warren and Eisenhower were alive today, they might ask not whether the Court went too far, but whether it failed to go far enough.
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Opinion | Trump Tries to Destroy, and Justice Roberts Tries to Save, What Makes America... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...trump-roberts-shutdown.html

trump threat American idea politics

shared by Javier E on 16 Jan 19 - No Cached

For me, the most disturbing thing about the Trump presidency is the way each week, like a steady drip of acid, Donald Trump tries to erode the thing that truly makes us great as a country and the envy of so many around the world — the independence and nonpartisan character of our courts, our military, our F.B.I., our Border Patrol and our whole federal bureaucracy.
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Why is this so important? Because America’s core governing institutions were not built to be “conservative” or “liberal.” They were built to take our deepest values and our highest ideals and animate them, promote them and protect them — to bring them to life and to scale them.
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They are the continuity that binds one generation of Americans to the next and the beacon for how we work together to build an ever more perfect union.
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At their best, these institutions have created the regulatory foundations and legal and security frameworks that have made America great — that have enabled innovation to be sparked, commerce to flourish and ideas to freely blossom
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You cannot exaggerate how unusual it is for our chief justice and retired senior military officers to challenge Trump’s excesses the way they have. They were bred to keep themselves and their institutions out of politics at all costs. But they understand the greater costs of what Trump is doing.
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I’ve spent four decades reporting from countries with weak institutions — like Russia, China, every Arab state, Turkey, Iran, Venezuela — where the arbitrary whims of the leader or his party are the basis of all decision-making, not the rule of law, built on independent institutions.
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The independent, nonpartisan quality of our institutions is one of the biggest reasons so many people want to immigrate to America and why some people are even ready to build rafts out of milk cartons to get here.
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biggest national security threat to our country today is from within (and it is only going to get worse in the next two years).
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That threat is from a president without any shame or respect for the impartiality of our core institutions, who is backed by a party without any spine and by a network, Fox, without any integrity.This is not a test. This is a real, live emergency for our democracy.
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The Wages of Guilt: Memories of War in Germany and Japan (Ian Buruma) - 0 views

DIIGO_FILE_HOME/7ui9/e8c30608a7379054d18fe4e9e2b1c397

Japan history revisionist memory remembrance WWII interwar germany DDR

shared by Javier E on 12 Aug 19 - No Cached

the main reason why Germans were more trusted by their neighbors was that they were learning, slowly and painfully, and not always fully, to trust themselves.
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elders, in government and the mass media, still voice opinions about the Japanese war that are unsettling, to say the least. Conservative politicians still pay their annual respects at a shrine where war criminals are officially remembered. Justifications and denials of war crimes are still heard. Too many Japanese in conspicuous places, including the prime minister’s office itself, have clearly not “coped” with the war.
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unlike Nazi Germany, Japan had no systematic program to destroy the life of every man, woman, and child of a people that, for ideological reasons, was deemed to have no right to exist.
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“We never knew,” a common reaction in the 1950s, had worn shamefully thin in the eyes of a younger generation by the 1960s. The extraordinary criminality of a deliberate genocide was so obvious that it left no room for argument.
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Right-wing nationalists like to cite the absence of a Japanese Holocaust as proof that Japanese have no reason to feel remorse about their war at all. It was, in their eyes, a war like any other; brutal, yes, just as wars fought by all great nations in history have been brutal. In fact, since the Pacific War was fought against Western imperialists, it was a justified—even noble—war of Asian liberation.
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in the late 1940s or 1950s, a time when most Germans were still trying hard not to remember. It is in fact extraordinary how honestly Japanese novelists and filmmakers dealt with the horrors of militarism in those early postwar years. Such honesty is much less evident now.
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Popular comic books, aimed at the young, extol the heroics of Japanese soldiers and kamikaze pilots, while the Chinese and their Western allies are depicted as treacherous and belligerent. In 2008, the chief of staff of the Japanese Air Self-Defense Force stated that Japan had been “tricked” into the war by China and the US. In 2013, Prime Minister Abe Shinzo publicly doubted whether Japan’s military aggression in China could even be called an invasion.
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The fact is that Japan is still haunted by historical issues that should have been settled decades ago. The reasons are political rather than cultural, and have to do with the pacifist constitution—written by American jurists in 1946—and with the imperial institution, absolved of war guilt by General Douglas MacArthur after the war for the sake of expediency.
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Japan, even under Allied occupation, continued to be governed by much the same bureaucratic and political elite, albeit under a new, more democratic constitution,
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a number of conservatives felt humiliated by what they rightly saw as an infringement of their national sovereignty. Henceforth, to them, everything from the Allied Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal to the denunciations of Japan’s war record by left-wing teachers and intellectuals would be seen in this light.
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The more “progressive” Japanese used the history of wartime atrocities as a warning against turning away from pacifism, the more defensive right-wing politicians and commentators became about the Japanese war.
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Views of history, in other words, were politicized—and polarized—from the beginning.
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To take the sting out of this confrontation between constitutional pacifists and revisionists, which had led to much political turmoil in the 1950s, mainstream conservatives made a deliberate attempt to distract people’s attention from war and politics by concentrating on economic growth.
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For several decades, the chauvinistic right wing, with its reactionary views on everything from high school education to the emperor’s status, was kept in check by the sometimes equally dogmatic Japanese left. Marxism was the prevailing ideology of the teachers union and academics.
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the influence of Marxism waned after the collapse of the Soviet empire in the early 1990s, and the brutal records of Chairman Mao and Pol Pot became widely known.
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Marginalized in the de facto one-party LDP state and discredited by its own dogmatism, the Japanese left did not just wane, it collapsed. This gave a great boost to the war-justifying right-wing nationalists,
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Japanese young, perhaps out of boredom with nothing but materialistic goals, perhaps out of frustration with being made to feel guilty, perhaps out of sheer ignorance, or most probably out of a combination of all three, are not unreceptive to these patriotic blandishments.
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Anxiety about the rise of China, whose rulers have a habit of using Japan’s historical crimes as a form of political blackmail, has boosted a prickly national pride, even at the expense of facing the truth about the past.
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By 1996, the LDP was back in power, the constitutional issue had not been resolved, and historical debates continue to be loaded with political ideology. In fact, they are not really debates at all, but exercises in propaganda, tilted toward the reactionary side.
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My instinct—call it a prejudice, if you prefer—before embarking on this venture was that people from distinct cultures still react quite similarly to similar circumstances.
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The Japanese and the Germans, on the whole, did not behave in the same ways—but then the circumstances, both wartime and postwar, were quite different in the two Germanies and Japan. They still are.
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Our comic-book prejudices turned into an attitude of moral outrage. This made life easier in a way. It was comforting to know that a border divided us from a nation that personified evil. They were bad, so we must be good. To grow up after the war in a country that had suffered German occupation was to know that one was on the side of the angels.
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The question that obsessed us was not how we would have acquitted ourselves in uniform, going over the top, running into machine-gun fire or mustard gas, but whether we would have joined the resistance, whether we would have cracked under torture, whether we would have hidden Jews and risked deportation ourselves. Our particular shadow was not war, but occupation.
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the frightened man who betrayed to save his life, who looked the other way, who grasped the wrong horn of a hideous moral dilemma, interested me more than the hero. This is no doubt partly because I fear I would be much like that frightened man myself. And partly because, to me, failure is more typical of the human condition than heroism.
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I was curious to learn how Japanese saw the war, how they remembered it, what they imagined it to have been like, how they saw themselves in view of their past. What I heard and read was often surprising to a European:
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this led me to the related subject of modern Japanese nationalism. I became fascinated by the writings of various emperor worshippers, historical revisionists, and romantic seekers after the unique essence of Japaneseness.
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Bataan, the sacking of Manila, the massacres in Singapore, these were barely mentioned. But the suffering of the Japanese, in China, Manchuria, the Philippines, and especially in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, was remembered vividly, as was the imprisonment of Japanese soldiers in Siberia after the war. The Japanese have two days of remembrance: August 6, when Hiroshima was bombed, and August 15, the date of the Japanese surrender.
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The curious thing was that much of what attracted Japanese to Germany before the war—Prussian authoritarianism, romantic nationalism, pseudo-scientific racialism—had lingered in Japan while becoming distinctly unfashionable in Germany. Why?
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the two peoples saw their own purported virtues reflected in each other: the warrior spirit, racial purity, self-sacrifice, discipline, and so on. After the war, West Germans tried hard to discard this image of themselves. This was less true of the Japanese.
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Which meant that any residual feelings of nostalgia for the old partnership in Japan were likely to be met with embarrassment in Germany.
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I have concentrated on the war against the Jews in the case of Germany, since it was that parallel war, rather than, say, the U-boat battles in the Atlantic, or even the battle of Stalingrad, that left the most sensitive scar on the collective memory of (West) Germany.
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I have emphasized the war in China and the bombing of Hiroshima, for these episodes, more than others, have lodged themselves, often in highly symbolic ways, in Japanese public life.
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Do Germans perhaps have more reason to mourn? Is it because Japan has an Asian “shame culture,” to quote Ruth Benedict’s phrase, and Germany a Christian “guilt culture”?
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why the collective German memory should appear to be so different from the Japanese. Is it cultural? Is it political? Is the explanation to be found in postwar history, or in the history of the war itself?
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the two peoples still have anything in common after the war, it is a residual distrust of themselves.
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when Michael sees thousands of German peace demonstrators, he does not see thousands of gentle people who have learned their lesson from the past; he sees “100 percent German Protestant rigorism, aggressive, intolerant, hard.”
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To be betroffen implies a sense of guilt, a sense of shame, or even embarrassment. To be betroffen is to be speechless. But it also implies an idea of moral purity. To be betroffen is one way to “master the past,” to show contriteness, to confess, and to be absolved and purified.
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In their famous book, written in the sixties, entitled The Inability to Mourn, Alexander and Margarethe Mitscherlich analyzed the moral anesthesia that afflicted postwar Germans who would not face their past. They were numbed by defeat; their memories appeared to be blocked. They would or could not do their labor, and confess. They appeared to have completely forgotten that they had glorified a leader who caused the death of millions.
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There is something religious about the act of being betroffen, something close to Pietism,
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heart of Pietism was the moral renovation of the individual, achieved by passing through the anguish of contrition into the overwhelming realization of the assurance of God’s grace.” Pietism served as an antidote to the secular and rational ideas of the French Enlightenment.
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It began in the seventeenth century with the works of Philipp Jakob Spener. He wanted to reform the Church and bring the Gospel into daily life, as it were, by stressing good works and individual spiritual labor.
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German television is rich in earnest discussion programs where people sit at round tables and debate the issues of the day. The audience sits at smaller tables, sipping drinks as the featured guests hold forth. The tone is generally serious, but sometimes the arguments get heated. It is easy to laugh at the solemnity of these programs, but there is much to admire about them. It is partly through these talk shows that a large number of Germans have become accustomed to political debate.
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There was a real dilemma: at least two generations had been educated to renounce war and never again to send German soldiers to the front, educated, in other words, to want Germany to be a larger version of Switzerland. But they had also been taught to feel responsible for the fate of Israel, and to be citizens of a Western nation, firmly embedded in a family of allied Western nations. The question was whether they really could be both.
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the Gulf War showed that German pacifism could not be dismissed simply as anti-Americanism or a rebellion against Adenauer’s West.
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the West German mistrust of East Germans—the East Germans whose soldiers still marched in goose step, whose petit bourgeois style smacked of the thirties, whose system of government, though built on a pedestal of antifascism, contained so many disturbing remnants of the Nazi past; the East Germans, in short, who had been living in “Asia.”
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Michael, the Israeli, compared the encounter of Westerners (“Wessies”) with Easterners (“Ossies”) with the unveiling of the portrait of Dorian Gray: the Wessies saw their own image and they didn’t like what they saw.
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he added: “I also happen to think Japanese and Germans are racists.”
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Germany for its Nazi inheritance and its sellout to the United States. But now that Germany had been reunified, with its specters of “Auschwitz” and its additional hordes of narrow-minded Ossies, Adenauer was deemed to have been right after
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The picture was of Kiel in 1945, a city in ruins. He saw me looking at it and said: “It’s true that whoever is being bombed is entitled to some sympathy from us.”
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“My personal political philosophy and maybe even my political ambition has to do with an element of distrust for the people I represent, people whose parents and grandparents made Hitler and the persecution of the Jews possible.”
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in the seventies he had tried to nullify verdicts given in Nazi courts—without success until well into the eighties. One of the problems was that the Nazi judiciary itself was never purged. This continuity was broken only by time.
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To bury Germany in the bosom of its Western allies, such as NATO and the EC, was to bury the distrust of Germans. Or so it was hoped. As Europeans they could feel normal, Western, civilized. Germany; the old “land in the middle,” the Central European colossus, the power that fretted over its identity and was haunted by its past, had become a Western nation.
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It is a miracle, really, how quickly the Germans in the Federal Republic became civilized. We are truly part of the West now. We have internalized democracy. But the Germans of the former GDR, they are still stuck in a premodern age. They are the ugly Germans, very much like the West Germans after the war, the people I grew up with. They are not yet civilized.”
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“I like the Germans very much, but I think they are a dangerous people. I don’t know why—perhaps it is race, or culture, or history. Whatever. But we Japanese are the same: we swing from one extreme to the other. As peoples, we Japanese, like the Germans, have strong collective discipline. When our energies are channeled in the right direction, this is fine, but when they are misused, terrible things happen.”
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to be put in the same category as the Japanese—even to be compared—bothered many Germans. (Again, unlike the Japanese, who made the comparison often.) Germans I met often stressed how different they were from the Japanese,
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To some West Germans, now so “civilized,” so free, so individualistic, so, well, Western, the Japanese, with their group discipline, their deference to authority, their military attitude toward work, might appear too close for comfort to a self-image only just, and perhaps only barely, overcome.
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To what extent the behavior of nations, like that of individual people, is determined by history, culture, or character is a question that exercises many Japanese, almost obsessively.
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not much sign of betroffenheit on Japanese television during the Gulf War. Nor did one see retired generals explain tactics and strategy. Instead, there were experts from journalism and academe talking in a detached manner about a faraway war which was often presented as a cultural or religious conflict between West and Middle East. The history of Muslim-Christian-Jewish animosity was much discussed. And the American character was analyzed at length to understand the behavior of George Bush and General Schwarzkopf.
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In the words of one Albrecht Fürst von Urach, a Nazi propagandist, Japanese emperor worship was “the most unique fusion in the world of state form, state consciousness, and religious fanaticism.” Fanaticism was, of course, a positive word in the Nazi lexicon.
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the identity question nags in almost any discussion about Japan and the outside world. It
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It was a respectable view, but also one founded on a national myth of betrayal. Japan, according to the myth, had become the unique moral nation of peace, betrayed by the victors who had sat in judgment of Japan’s war crimes; betrayed in Vietnam, in Afghanistan, in Nicaragua; betrayed by the arms race, betrayed by the Cold War; Japan had been victimized not only by the “gratuitous,” perhaps even “racist,” nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but by all subsequent military actions taken by the superpowers,
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When the Prime Minister of Japan, Shidehara Kijuro, protested in 1946 to General MacArthur that it was all very well saying that Japan should assume moral leadership in renouncing war, but that in the real world no country would follow this example, MacArthur replied: “Even if no country follows you, Japan will lose nothing. It is those who do not support this who are in the wrong.” For a long time most Japanese continued to take this view.
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What is so convenient in the cases of Germany and Japan is that pacifism happens to be a high-minded way to dull the pain of historical guilt. Or, conversely, if one wallows in it, pacifism turns national guilt into a virtue, almost a mark of superiority, when compared to the complacency of other nations.
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The denial of historical discrimination is not just a way to evade guilt. It is intrinsic to pacifism. To even try to distinguish between wars, to accept that some wars are justified, is already an immoral position.
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That Kamei discussed this common paranoia in such odd, Volkish terms could mean several things: that some of the worst European myths got stuck in Japan, that the history of the Holocaust had no impact, or that Japan is in some respects a deeply provincial place. I think all three explanations apply.
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“the problem with the U.S.-Japan relationship is difficult. A racial problem, really. Yankees are friendly people, frank people. But, you know, it’s hard. You see, we have to be friendly …”
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Like Oda, indeed like many people of the left, Kamei thought in racial terms. He used the word jinshu, literally race. He did not even use the more usual minzoku, which corresponds, in the parlance of Japanese right-wingers, to Volk, or the more neutral kokumin, meaning the citizens of a state.
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many Germans in the liberal democratic West have tried to deal honestly with their nation’s terrible past, the Japanese, being different, have been unable to do so. It is true that the Japanese, compared with the West Germans, have paid less attention to the suffering they inflicted on others, and shown a greater inclination to shift the blame. And liberal democracy, whatever it may look like on paper, has not been the success in Japan that it was in the German Federal Republic. Cultural differences might account for this. But one can look at these matters in a different, more political way. In his book The War Against the West, published in London in 1938, the Hungarian scholar Aurel Kolnai followed the Greeks in his definition of the West: “For the ancient Greeks ‘the West’ (or ‘Europe’) meant society with a free constitution and self-government under recognized rules, where ‘law is king,’ whereas the ‘East’ (or ‘Asia’) signified theocratic societies under godlike rulers whom their subjects serve ‘like slaves.’
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According to this definition, both Hitler’s Germany and prewar Japan were of the East.
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There was a great irony here: in their zeal to make Japan part of the West, General MacArthur and his advisers made it impossible for Japan to do so in spirit. For a forced, impotent accomplice is not really an accomplice at all.
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In recent years, Japan has often been called an economic giant and a political dwarf. But this has less to do with a traditional Japanese mentality—isolationism, pacifism, shyness with foreigners, or whatnot—than with the particular political circumstances after the war that the United States helped to create.
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when the Cold War prompted the Americans to make the Japanese subvert their constitution by creating an army which was not supposed to exist, the worst of all worlds appeared: sovereignty was not restored, distrust remained, and resentment mounted.
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Kamei’s hawks are angry with the Americans for emasculating Japan; Oda’s doves hate the Americans for emasculating the “peace constitution.” Both sides dislike being forced accomplices, and both feel victimized, which is one reason Japanese have a harder time than Germans in coming to terms with their wartime past.
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As far as the war against the Jews is concerned, one might go back to 1933, when Hitler came to power. Or at the latest to 1935, when the race laws were promulgated in Nuremberg. Or perhaps those photographs of burning synagogues on the night of November 9, 1938, truly marked the first stage of the Holocaust.
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There is the famous picture of German soldiers lifting the barrier on the Polish border in 1939, but was that really the beginning? Or did it actually start with the advance into the Rhineland in 1936, or was it the annexation of the Sudetenland, or Austria, or Czechoslovakia?
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IT IS DIFFICULT TO SAY when the war actually began for the Germans and the Japanese. I cannot think of a single image that fixed the beginning of either war in the public mind.
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Possibly to avoid these confusions, many Germans prefer to talk about the Hitlerzeit (Hitler era) instead of “the war.”
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only Japanese of a liberal disposition call World War II the Pacific War. People who stick to the idea that Japan was fighting a war to liberate Asia from Bolshevism and white colonialism call it the Great East Asian War (Daitowa Senso), as in the Great East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere.
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The German equivalent, I suppose, would be the picture of Soviet soldiers raising their flag on the roof of the gutted Reichstag in Berlin.
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People of this opinion separate the world war of 1941–45 from the war in China, which they still insist on calling the China Incident.
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Liberals and leftists, on the other hand, tend to splice these wars together and call them the Fifteen-Year War (1931–45).
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images marking the end are more obvious.
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argued that the struggle against Western imperialism actually began in 1853, with the arrival in Japan of Commodore Perry’s ships, and spoke of the Hundred-Year War.
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These are among the great clichés of postwar Japan: shorthand for national defeat, suffering, and humiliation.
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The Germans called it Zusammenbruch (the collapse) or Stunde Null (Zero Hour): everything seemed to have come to an end, everything had to start all over. The Japanese called it haisen (defeat) or shusen (termination of the war).
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kokka (nation, state) and minzoku (race, people) are not quite of the same order as Sonderbehandlung (special treatment) or Einsatzgruppe (special action squad). The jargon of Japanese imperialism was racist and overblown, but it did not carry the stench of death camps.
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The German people are spiritually starved, Adenauer told him. “The imagination has to be provided for.” This was no simple matter, especially in the German language, which had been so thoroughly infected by the jargon of mass murder.
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All they had been told to believe in, the Germans and the Japanese, everything from the Führerprinzip to the emperor cult, from the samurai spirit to the Herrenvolk, from Lebensraum to the whole world under one (Japanese) roof, all that lay in ruins
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How to purge this language from what a famous German philologist called the Lingua Tertii Imperii? “… the language is no longer lived,” wrote George Steiner in 1958, “it is merely spoken.”
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out of defeat and ruin a new school of literature (and cinema) did arise. It is known in Germany as Trümmerliteratur (literature of the ruins). Japanese writers who came of age among the ruins called themselves the yakeato seidai (burnt-out generation). Much literature of the late forties and fifties was darkened by nihilism and despair.
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It was as though Germany—Sonderweg or no Sonderweg—needed only to be purged of Nazism, while Japan’s entire cultural tradition had to be overhauled.
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In Germany there was a tradition to fall back on. In the Soviet sector, the left-wing culture of the Weimar Republic was actively revived. In the Western sectors, writers escaped the rats and the ruins by dreaming of Goethe. His name was often invoked to prove that Germany, too, belonged to the humanist, enlightened strain of European civilization.
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the Americans (and many Japanese leftists) distrusted anything associated with “feudalism,” which they took to include much of Japan’s premodern past. Feudalism was the enemy of democracy. So not only did the American censors, in their effort to teach the Japanese democracy, forbid sword-fight films and samurai dramas, but at one point ninety-eight Kabuki plays were banned too.
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yet, what is remarkable about much of the literature of the period, or more precisely, of the literature about that time, since much of it was written later, is the deep strain of romanticism, even nostalgia. This colors personal memories of people who grew up just after the war as well.
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If the mushroom cloud and the imperial radio speech are the clichés of defeat, the scene of an American soldier (usually black) raping a Japanese girl (always young, always innocent), usually in a pristine rice field (innocent, pastoral Japan), is a stock image in postwar movies about the occupation.
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To Ango, then, as to other writers, the ruins offered hope. At last the Japanese, without “the fake kimono” of traditions and ideals, were reduced to basic human needs; at last they could feel real love, real pain; at last they would be honest. There was no room, among the ruins, for hypocrisy.
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Böll was able to be precise about the end of the Zusammenbruch and the beginning of bourgeois hypocrisy and moral amnesia. It came on June 20, 1948, the day of the currency reform, the day that Ludwig Erhard, picked by the Americans as Economics Director in the U.S.-British occupation zone, gave birth to the Deutsche Mark. The DM, from then on, would be the new symbol of West German national pride;
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the amnesia, and definitely the identification with the West, was helped further along by the Cold War. West Germany now found itself on the same side as the Western allies. Their common enemy was the “Asiatic” Soviet empire. Fewer questions needed to be asked.
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Indeed, to some people the Cold War simply confirmed what they had known all along: Germany always had been on the right side, if only our American friends had realized it earlier.
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The process of willed forgetfulness culminated in the manic effort of reconstruction, in the great rush to prosperity.
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“Prosperity for All” was probably the best that could have happened to the Germans of the Federal Republic. It took the seed of resentment (and thus future extremism) out of defeat. And the integration of West Germany into a Western alliance was a good thing too.
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The “inability to mourn,” the German disassociation from the piles of corpses strewn all over Central and Eastern Europe, so that the Third Reich, as the Mitscherlichs put it, “faded like a dream,” made it easier to identify with the Americans, the victors, the West.
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Yet the disgust felt by Böll and others for a people getting fat (“flabby” is the usual term, denoting sloth and decadence) and forgetting about its murderous past was understandable.
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The Brückners were the price Germany had to pay for the revival of its fortunes. Indeed, they were often instrumental in it. They were the apparatchik who functioned in any system, the small, efficient fish who voted for Christian conservatives in the West and became Communists in the East.
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Staudte was clearly troubled by this, as were many Germans, but he offered no easy answers. Perhaps it was better this way: flabby democrats do less harm than vengeful old Nazis.
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the forgetful, prosperous, capitalist Federal Republic of Germany was in many more or less hidden ways a continuation of Hitler’s Reich. This perfectly suited the propagandists of the GDR, who would produce from time to time lists of names of former Nazis who were prospering in the West. These lists were often surprisingly accurate.
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In a famous film, half fiction, half documentary, made by a number of German writers and filmmakers (including Böll) in 1977, the continuity was made explicit. The film, called Germany in Autumn (Deutschland in Herbst),
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Rainer Werner Fassbinder was one of the participants in this film. A year later he made The Marriage of Maria Braun.
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To lifelong “antifascists” who had always believed that the Federal Republic was the heir to Nazi Germany, unification seemed—so they said—almost like a restoration of 1933. The irony was that many Wessies saw their new Eastern compatriots as embarrassing reminders of the same unfortunate past.
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Rarely was the word “Auschwitz” heard more often than during the time of unification, partly as an always salutary reminder that Germans must not forget, but partly as an expression of pique that the illusion of a better, antifascist, anticapitalist, idealistic Germany, born in the ruins of 1945, and continued catastrophically for forty years in the East, had now been dashed forever.
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Ludwig Erhard’s almost exact counterpart in Japan was Ikeda Hayato, Minister of Finance from 1949 and Prime Minister from 1960 to 1964. His version of Erhard’s “Prosperity for AH” was the Double Your Incomes policy, which promised to make the Japanese twice as rich in ten years. Japan had an average growth rate of 11 percent during the 1960s.
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It explains, at any rate, why the unification of the two Germanys was considered a defeat by antifascists on both sides of the former border.
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Very few wartime bureaucrats had been purged. Most ministries remained intact. Instead it was the Communists, who had welcomed the Americans as liberators, who were purged after 1949, the year China was “lost.”
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so the time of ruins was seen by people on the left as a time of missed chances and betrayal. Far from achieving a pacifist utopia of popular solidarity, they ended up with a country driven by materialism, conservatism, and selective historical amnesia.
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the “red purges” of 1949 and 1950 and the return to power of men whose democratic credentials were not much better helped to turn many potential Japanese friends of the United States into enemies. For the Americans were seen as promoters of the right-wing revival and the crackdown on the left.
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For exactly twelve years Germany was in the hands of a criminal regime, a bunch of political gangsters who had started a movement. Removing this regime was half the battle.
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It is easier to change political institutions and hope that habits and prejudices will follow. This, however, was more easily done in Germany than in Japan.
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There had not been a cultural break either in Japan. There were no exiled writers and artists who could return to haunt the consciences of those who had stayed.
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There was no Japanese Thomas Mann or Alfred Döblin. In Japan, everyone had stayed.
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In Japan there was never a clear break between a fascist and a prefascist past. In fact, Japan was never really a fascist state at all. There was no fascist or National Socialist ruling party, and no Führer either. The closest thing to it would have been the emperor, and whatever else he may have been, he was not a fascist dictator.
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whereas after the war Germany lost its Nazi leaders, Japan lost only its admirals and generals.
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Japan was effectively occupied only by the Americans. West Germany was part of NATO and the European Community, and the GDR was in the Soviet empire. Japan’s only formal alliance is with the United States, through a security treaty that many Japanese have opposed.
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But the systematic subservience of Japan meant that the country never really grew up. There is a Japanese fixation on America, an obsession which goes deeper, I believe, than German anti-Americanism,
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Yet nothing had stayed entirely the same in Japan. The trouble was that virtually all the changes were made on American orders. This was, of course, the victor’s prerogative, and many changes were beneficial.
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like in fiction. American Hijiki, a novella by Nosaka Akiyuki, is, to my mind, a masterpiece in the short history of Japanese Trümmerliteratur.
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Older Japanese do, however, remember the occupation, the first foreign army occupation in their national history. But it was, for the Japanese, a very unusual army. Whereas the Japanese armies in Asia had brought little but death, rape, and destruction, this one came with Glenn Miller music, chewing gum, and lessons in democracy. These blessings left a legacy of gratitude, rivalry, and shame.
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did these films teach the Japanese democracy? Oshima thinks not. Instead, he believes, Japan learned the values of “progress” and “development.” Japan wanted to be just as rich as America—no, even richer:
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think it is a romantic assumption, based less on history than on myth; a religious notion, expressed less through scholarship than through monuments, memorials, and historical sites turned into sacred grounds.
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The past, wrote the West German historian Christian Meier, is in our bones. “For a nation to appropriate its history,” he argued, “is to look at it through the eyes of identity.” What we have “internalized,” he concluded, is Auschwitz.
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Auschwitz is such a place, a sacred symbol of identity for Jews, Poles, and perhaps even Germans. The question is what or whom Germans are supposed to identify with.
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The idea that visiting the relics of history brings the past closer is usually an illusion. The opposite is more often true.
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To visit the site of suffering, any description of which cannot adequately express the horror, is upsetting, not because one gets closer to knowing what it was actually like to be a victim, but because such visits stir up emotions one cannot trust. It is tempting to take on the warm moral glow of identification—so easily done and so presumptuous—with the victims:
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Were the crimes of Auschwitz, then, part of the German “identity”? Was genocide a product of some ghastly flaw in German culture, the key to which might be found in the sentimental proverbs, the cruel fairy tales, the tight leather shorts?
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yet the imagination is the only way to identify with the past. Only in the imagination—not through statistics, documents, or even photographs—do people come alive as individuals, do stories emerge, instead of History.
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nature. It is all right to let the witnesses speak, in the courtroom, in the museums, on videotape (Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah has been shown many times on German television), but it is not all right for German artists to use their imagination.
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the reluctance in German fiction to look Auschwitz in the face, the almost universal refusal to deal with the Final Solution outside the shrine, the museum, or the schoolroom, suggests a fear of committing sacrilege.
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beneath the fear of bad taste or sacrilege may lie a deeper problem. To imagine people in the past as people of flesh and blood, not as hammy devils in silk capes, is to humanize them. To humanize is not necessarily to excuse or to sympathize, but it does demolish the barriers of abstraction between us and them. We could, under certain circumstances, have been them.
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the flight into religious abstraction was to be all too common among Germans of the Nazi generation, as well as their children; not, as is so often the case with Jews, to lend mystique to a new identity, as a patriotic Zionist, but on the contrary to escape from being the heir to a peculiarly German crime, to get away from having to “internalize” Auschwitz, or indeed from being German at all.
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a Hollywood soap opera, a work of skillful pop, which penetrated the German imagination in a way nothing had before. Holocaust was first shown in Germany in January 1979. It was seen by 20 million people, about half the adult population of the Federal Republic; 58 percent wanted it to be repeated; 12,000 letters, telegrams, and postcards were sent to the broadcasting stations; 5,200 called the stations by telephone after the first showing; 72.5 percent were positive, 7.3 percent negative.
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“After Holocaust,” wrote a West German woman to her local television station, “I feel deep contempt for those beasts of the Third Reich. I am twenty-nine years old and a mother of three children. When I think of the many mothers and children sent to the gas chambers, I have to cry. (Even today the Jews are not left in peace. We Germans have the duty to work every day for peace in Israel.) I bow to the victims of the Nazis, and I am ashamed to be a German.”
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Auschwitz was a German crime, to be sure. “Death is a master from Germany.” But it was a different Germany. To insist on viewing history through the “eyes of identity,” to repeat the historian Christian Meier’s phrase, is to resist the idea of change.
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Is there no alternative to these opposing views? I believe there is.
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The novelist Martin Walser, who was a child during the war, believes, like Meier, that Auschwitz binds the German people, as does the language of Goethe. When a Frenchman or an American sees pictures of Auschwitz, “he doesn’t have to think: We human beings! He can think: Those Germans! Can we think: Those Nazis! I for one cannot …”
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Adorno, a German Jew who wished to save high German culture, on whose legacy the Nazis left their bloody finger marks, resisted the idea that Auschwitz was a German crime. To him it was a matter of modern pathology, the sickness of the “authoritarian personality,” of the dehumanized SS guards, those inhumane cogs in a vast industrial wheel.
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To the majority of Japanese, Hiroshima is the supreme symbol of the Pacific War. All the suffering of the Japanese people is encapsulated in that almost sacred word: Hiroshima. But it is more than a symbol of national martyrdom; Hiroshima is a symbol of absolute evil, often compared to Auschwitz.
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has the atmosphere of a religious center. It has martyrs, but no single god. It has prayers, and it has a ready-made myth about the fall of man. Hiroshima, says a booklet entitled Hiroshima Peace Reader, published by the Hiroshima Peace Culture Foundation, “is no longer merely a Japanese city. It has become recognized throughout the world as a Mecca of world peace.”
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They were not enshrined in the Japanese park, and later attempts by local Koreans to have the monument moved into Peace Park failed. There could only be one cenotaph, said the Hiroshima municipal authorities. And the cenotaph did not include Koreans.
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What is interesting about Hiroshima—the Mecca rather than the modern Japanese city, which is prosperous and rather dull—is the tension between its universal aspirations and its status as the exclusive site of Japanese victimhood.
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it is an opinion widely held by Japanese nationalists. The right always has been concerned with the debilitating effects on the Japanese identity of war guilt imposed by American propaganda.
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The Japanese, in contrast, were duped by the Americans into believing that the traces of Japanese suffering should be swept away by the immediate reconstruction of Hiroshima. As a result, the postwar Japanese lack an identity and their racial virility has been sapped by American propaganda about Japanese war guilt.
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Hiroshima, Uno wrote, should have been left as it was, in ruins, just as Auschwitz, so he claims, was deliberately preserved by the Jews. By reminding the world of their martyrdom, he said, the Jews have kept their racial identity intact and restored their virility.
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But the idea that the bomb was a racist experiment is less plausible, since the bomb was developed for use against Nazi Germany.
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There is another view, however, held by leftists and liberals, who would not dream of defending the “Fifteen-Year War.” In this view, the A-bomb was a kind of divine punishment for Japanese militarism. And having learned their lesson through this unique suffering, having been purified through hellfire and purgatory, so to speak, the Japanese people have earned the right, indeed have the sacred duty, to sit in judgment of others, specifically the United States, whenever they show signs of sinning against the “Hiroshima spirit.”
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The left has its own variation of Japanese martyrdom, in which Hiroshima plays a central role. It is widely believed, for instance, that countless Japanese civilians fell victim to either a wicked military experiment or to the first strike in the Cold War, or both.
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However, right-wing nationalists care less about Hiroshima than about the idée fixe that the “Great East Asian War” was to a large extent justified.
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This is at the heart of what is known as Peace Education, which has been much encouraged by the leftist Japan Teachers’ Union and has been regarded with suspicion by the conservative government. Peace Education has traditionally meant pacifism, anti-Americanism, and a strong sympathy for Communist states, especially China.
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The A-bomb, in this version, was dropped to scare the Soviets away from invading Japan. This at least is an arguable position.
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left-wing pacifism in Japan has something in common with the romantic nationalism usually associated with the right: it shares the right’s resentment about being robbed by the Americans of what might be called a collective memory.
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The romantic pacifists believe that the United States, to hide its own guilt and to rekindle Japanese militarism in aid of the Cold War, tried to wipe out the memory of Hiroshima.
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few events in World War II have been described, analyzed, lamented, reenacted, re-created, depicted, and exhibited so much and so often as the bombing of Hiroshima
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The problem with Nagasaki was not just that Hiroshima came first but also that Nagasaki had more military targets than Hiroshima. The Mitsubishi factories in Nagasaki produced the bulk of Japanese armaments. There was also something else, which is not often mentioned: the Nagasaki bomb exploded right over the area where outcasts and Christians lived. And unlike in Hiroshima, much of the rest of the city was spared the worst.
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yet, despite these diatribes, the myth of Hiroshima and its pacifist cult is based less on American wickedness than on the image of martyred innocence and visions of the apocalypse.
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The comparison between Hiroshima and Auschwitz is based on this notion; the idea, namely, that Hiroshima, like the Holocaust, was not part of the war, not even connected with it, but “something that occurs at the end of the world
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still I wonder whether it is really so different from the position of many Germans who wish to “internalize” Auschwitz, who see Auschwitz “through the eyes of identity.”
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the Japanese to take two routes at once, a national one, as unique victims of the A-bomb, and a universal one, as the apostles of the Hiroshima spirit. This, then, is how Japanese pacifists, engaged in Peace Education, define the Japanese identity.
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the case for Hiroshima is at least open to debate. The A-bomb might have saved lives; it might have shortened the war. But such arguments are incompatible with the Hiroshima spirit.
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In either case, nationality has come to be based less on citizenship than on history, morality, and a religious spirit.
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The problem with this quasi-religious view of history is that it makes it hard to discuss past events in anything but nonsecular terms. Visions of absolute evil are unique, and they are beyond human explanation or even comprehension. To explain is hubristic and amoral.
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in the history of Japan’s foreign wars, the city of Hiroshima is far from innocent. When Japan went to war with China in 1894, the troops set off for the battlefronts from Hiroshima, and the Meiji emperor moved his headquarters there. The city grew wealthy as a result. It grew even wealthier when Japan went to war with Russia eleven years later, and Hiroshima once again became the center of military operations. As the Hiroshima Peace Reader puts it with admirable conciseness, “Hiroshima, secure in its position as a military city, became more populous and prosperous as wars and incidents occurred throughout the Meiji and Taisho periods.” At the time of the bombing, Hiroshima was the base of the Second General Headquarters of the Imperial Army (the First was in Tokyo). In short, the city was swarming with soldiers. One of the few literary masterpieces to emerge
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when a local group of peace activists petitioned the city of Hiroshima in 1987 to incorporate the history of Japanese aggression into the Peace Memorial Museum, the request was turned down. The petition for an “Aggressors’ Corner” was prompted by junior high school students from Osaka, who had embarrassed Peace Museum officials by asking for an explanation about Japanese responsibility for the war.
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Yukoku Ishinkai (Society for Lament and National Restoration), thought the bombing had saved Japan from total destruction. But he insisted that Japan could not be held solely responsible for the war. The war, he said, had simply been part of the “flow of history.”
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They also demanded an official recognition of the fact that some of the Korean victims of the bomb had been slave laborers. (Osaka, like Kyoto and Hiroshima, still has a large Korean population.) Both requests were denied. So a group called Peace Link was formed, from local people, many of whom were Christians, antinuclear activists, or involved with discriminated-against minorities.
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The history of the war, or indeed any history, is indeed not what the Hiroshima spirit is about. This is why Auschwitz is the only comparison that is officially condoned. Anything else is too controversial, too much part of the “flow of history.”
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“You see, this museum was not really intended to be a museum. It was built by survivors as a place of prayer for the victims and for world peace. Mankind must build a better world. That is why Hiroshima must persist. We must go back to the basic roots. We must think of human solidarity and world peace. Otherwise we just end up arguing about history.”
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Only when a young Japanese history professor named Yoshimi Yoshiaki dug up a report in American archives in the 1980s did it become known that the Japanese had stored 15,000 tons of chemical weapons on and near the island and that a 200-kilogram container of mustard gas was buried under Hiroshima.
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what was the largest toxic gas factory in the Japanese Empire. More than 5,000 people worked there during the war, many of them women and schoolchildren. About 1,600 died of exposure to hydrocyanic acid gas, nausea gas, and lewisite. Some were damaged for life. Official Chinese sources claim that more than 80,000 Chinese fell victim to gases produced at the factory. The army was so secretive about the place that the island simply disappeared from Japanese maps.
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in 1988, through the efforts of survivors, the small museum was built, “to pass on,” in the words of the museum guide, “the historical truth to future generations.”
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Surviving workers from the factory, many of whom suffered from chronic lung diseases, asked for official recognition of their plight in the 1950s. But the government turned them down. If the government had compensated the workers, it would have been an official admission that the Japanese Army had engaged in an illegal enterprise. When a brief mention of chemical warfare crept into Japanese school textbooks, the Ministry of Education swiftly took it out.
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I asked him about the purpose of the museum. He said: “Before shouting ‘no more war,’ I want people to see what it was really like. To simply look at the past from the point of view of the victim is to encourage hatred.”
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“Look,” he said, “when you fight another man, and hit him and kick him, he will hit and kick back. One side will win. How will this be remembered? Do we recall that we were kicked, or that we started the kicking ourselves? Without considering this question, we cannot have peace.”
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The fact that Japanese had buried poison gas under Hiroshima did not lessen the horror of the A-bomb. But it put Peace Park, with all its shrines, in a more historical perspective. It took the past away from God and put it in the fallible hands of man.
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What did he think of the Peace Museum in Hiroshima? “At the Hiroshima museum it is easy to feel victimized,” he said. “But we must realize that we were aggressors too. We were educated to fight for our country. We made toxic gas for our country. We lived to fight the war. To win the war was our only goal.”
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Nanking, as the capital of the Nationalist government, was the greatest prize in the attempted conquest of China. Its fall was greeted in Japan with banner headlines and nationwide celebration. For six weeks Japanese Army officers allowed their men to run amok. The figures are imprecise, but tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands (the Chinese say 300,000) of Chinese soldiers and civilians, many of them refugees from other towns, were killed. And thousands of women between the ages of about nine and seventy-five were raped, mutilated, and often murdered.
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Was it a deliberate policy to terrorize the Chinese into submission? The complicity of the officers suggests there was something to this. But it might also have been a kind of payoff to the Japanese troops for slogging through China in the freezing winter without decent pay or rations. Or was it largely a matter of a peasant army running out of control? Or just the inevitable consequence of war, as many Japanese maintain?
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inevitable cruelty of war. An atrocity is a willful act of criminal brutality, an act that violates the law as well as any code of human decency. It isn’t that the Japanese lack such codes or are morally incapable of grasping the concept. But “atrocity,” like “human rights,” is part of a modern terminology which came from the West, along with “feminism,” say, or “war crimes.” To right-wing nationalists it has a leftist ring, something subversive, something almost anti-Japanese.
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During the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal, Nanking had the same resonance as Auschwitz had in Nuremberg. And being a symbol, the Nanking Massacre is as vulnerable to mythology and manipulation as Auschwitz and Hiroshima.
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Mori’s attitude also raises doubts about Ruth Benedict’s distinction between Christian “guilt culture” and Confucian “shame culture.”
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In her opinion, a “society that inculcates absolute standards of morality and relies on man’s developing a conscience is a guilt culture by definition …” But in “a culture where shame is a major sanction, people are chagrined about acts which we expect people to feel guilty about.” However, this “chagrin cannot be relieved, as guilt can be, by confession and atonement …”
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memory was admitted at all, the Mitscherlichs wrote about Germans in the 1950s, “it was only in order to balance one’s own guilt against that of others. Many horrors had been unavoidable, it was claimed, because they had been dictated by crimes committed by the adversary.” This was precisely what many Japanese claimed, and still do claim. And it is why Mori insists on making his pupils view the past from the perspective of the aggressors.
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Two young Japanese officers, Lieutenant N. and Lieutenant M., were on their way to Nanking and decided to test their swordsmanship: the first to cut off one hundred Chinese heads would be the winner. And thus they slashed their way through Chinese ranks, taking scalps in true samurai style. Lieutenant M. got 106, and Lieutenant N. bagged 105.
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The story made a snappy headline in a major Tokyo newspaper: “Who Will Get There First! Two Lieutenants Already Claimed 80.” In the Nanking museum is a newspaper photograph of the two friends, glowing with youthful high spirits. Lieutenant N. boasted in the report that he had cut the necks off 56 men without even denting the blade of his ancestral sword.
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I was told by a Japanese veteran who had fought in Nanking that such stories were commonly made up or at least exaggerated by Japanese reporters, who were ordered to entertain the home front with tales of heroism.
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Honda Katsuichi, a famous Asahi Shimbun reporter, was told the story in Nanking. He wrote it up in a series of articles, later collected in a book entitled A Journey to China, published in 1981.
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the whole thing developed into the Nankin Ronso, or Nanking Debate. In 1984, an anti-Honda book came out, by Tanaka Masaaki, entitled The Fabrication of the “Nanking Massacre.”
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back in Japan, Lieutenant M. began to revise his story. Speaking at his old high school, he said that in fact he had beheaded only four or five men in actual combat. As for the rest … “After we occupied the city, I stood facing a ditch, and told the Chinese prisoners to step forward. Since Chinese soldiers are stupid, they shuffled over to the ditch, one by one, and I cleanly cut off their heads.”
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The nationalist intellectuals are called goyo gakusha by their critics. It is a difficult term to translate, but the implied meaning is “official scholars,” who do the government’s bidding.
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the debate on the Japanese war is conducted almost entirely outside Japanese universities, by journalists, amateur historians, political columnists, civil rights activists, and so forth. This means that the zanier theories of the likes of Tanaka…
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The other reason was that modern history was not considered academically respectable. It was too fluid, too political, too controversial. Until 1955, there was not one modern historian on the staff of Tokyo University. History stopped around the middle of the nineteenth century. And even now, modern…
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In any case, so the argument invariably ends, Hiroshima, having been planned in cold blood, was a far worse crime. “Unlike in Europe or China,” writes Tanaka, “you won’t find one instance of planned, systematic murder in the entire history of Japan.” This is because the Japanese…
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One reason is that there are very few modern historians in Japan. Until the end of the war, it would have been dangerously subversive, even blasphemous, for a critical scholar to write about modern…
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they have considerable influence on public opinion, as television commentators, lecturers, and contributors to popular magazines. Virtually none of them are professional historians.
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Tanaka and others have pointed out that it is physically impossible for one man to cut off a hundred heads with one blade, and that for the same reason Japanese troops could never have…
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Besides, wrote Tanaka, none of the Japanese newspapers reported any massacre at the time, so why did it suddenly come up…
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He admits that a few innocent people got killed in the cross fire, but these deaths were incidental. Some soldiers were doubtless a bit rough, but…
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even he defends an argument that all the apologists make too: “On the battlefield men face the ultimate extremes of human existence, life or death. Extreme conduct, although still ethically…
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atrocities carried out far from the battlefield dangers and imperatives and according to a rational plan were acts of evil barbarism. The Auschwitz gas chambers of our ‘ally’ Germany and the atomic bombing of our…
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The point that it was not systematic was made by leftist opponents of the official scholars too. The historian Ienaga Saburo, for example, wrote that the Nanking Massacre, whose scale and horror he does not deny, “may have been a reaction to the fierce Chinese resistance after the Shanghai fighting.” Ienaga’s…
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The nationalist right takes the opposite view. To restore the true identity of Japan, the emperor must be reinstated as a religious head of state, and Article Nine must be revised to make Japan a legitimate military power again. For this reason, the Nanking Massacre, or any other example of extreme Japanese aggression, has to be ignored, softened, or denied.
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the question remains whether the raping and killing of thousands of women, and the massacre of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, of other unarmed people, in the course of six weeks, can still be called extreme conduct in the heat of battle. The question is pertinent, particularly when such extreme violence is justified by an ideology which teaches the aggressors that killing an inferior race is in accordance with the will of their divine emperor.
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The politics behind the symbol are so divided and so deeply entrenched that it hinders a rational historical debate about what actually happened in 1937. The more one side insists on Japanese guilt, the more the other insists on denying it.
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The Nanking Massacre, for leftists and many liberals too, is the main symbol of Japanese militarism, supported by the imperial (and imperialist) cult. Which is why it is a keystone of postwar pacifism. Article Nine of the constitution is necessary to avoid another Nanking Massacre.
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The Japanese, he said, should see their history through their own eyes, for “if we rely on the information of aliens and alien countries, who use history for the sake of propaganda, then we are in danger of losing the sense of our own history.” Yet another variation of seeing history through the eyes of identity.
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their emotions were often quite at odds with the idea of “shame culture” versus “guilt culture.” Even where the word for shame, hazukashii, was used, its meaning was impossible to distinguish from the Western notion of guilt.
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wasn’t so bad in itself. But then they killed them. You see, rape was against military regulations, so we had to destroy the evidence. While the women were fucked, they were considered human, but when we killed them, they were just pigs. We felt no shame about it, no guilt. If we had, we couldn’t have done it.
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“Whenever we would enter a village, the first thing we’d do was steal food, then we’d take the women and rape them, and finally we’d kill all the men, women, and children to make sure they couldn’t slip away and tell the Chinese troops where we were. Otherwise we wouldn’t have been able to sleep at night.”
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Clearly, then, the Nanking Massacre had been the culmination of countless massacres on a smaller scale. But it had been mass murder without a genocidal ideology. It was barbaric, but to Azuma and his comrades, barbarism was part of war.
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“Sexual desire is human,” he said. “Since I suffered from a venereal disease, I never actually did it with Chinese women. But I did peep at their private parts. We’d always order them to drop their trousers. They never wore any underwear, you know. But the others did it with any woman that crossed our path.
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He did have friends, however, who took part in the killings. One of them, Masuda Rokusuke, killed five hundred men by the Yangtze River with his machine gun. Azuma visited his friend in the hospital just before he died in the late 1980s. Masuda was worried about going to hell. Azuma tried to reassure him that he was only following orders. But Masuda remained convinced that he was going to hell.
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“One of the worst moments I can remember was the killing of an old man and his grandson. The child was bayoneted and the grandfather started to suck the boy’s blood, as though to conserve his grandson’s life a bit longer. We watched a while and then killed both. Again, I felt no guilt, but I was bothered by this kind of thing. I felt confused. So I decided to keep a diary. I thought it might help me think straight.”
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What about his old comrades? I asked. How did they discuss the war? “Oh,” said Azuma, “we wouldn’t talk about it much. When we did, it was to justify it. The Chinese resisted us, so we had to do what we did, and so on. None of us felt any remorse. And I include myself.”
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got more and more agitated. “They turned the emperor into a living god, a false idol, like the Ayatollah in Iran or like Kim II Sung. Because we believed in the divine emperor, we were prepared to do anything, anything at all, kill, rape, anything. But I know he fucked his wife every night, just like we do …” He paused and lowered his voice. “But you know we cannot say this in Japan, even today. It is impossible in this country to tell the truth.”
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My first instinct was to applaud West German education. Things had come a long way since 1968. There had been no school classes at Nuremberg, or even at the Auschwitz trial in Frankfurt from 1963 till 1965. Good for the teacher, I thought. Let them hear what was done. But I began to have doubts.
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Just as belief belongs in church, surely history education belongs in school. When the court of law is used for history lessons, then the risk of show trials cannot be far off. It may be that show trials can be good politics—though I have my doubts about this too. But good politics don’t necessarily serve the truth.
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There is a story about the young Richard when he was in Nuremberg at the time of the war crimes trials. He is said to have turned to a friend and to have remarked, in his best Wehrmacht officer style, that they should storm the court and release the prisoners. The friend, rather astonished, asked why on earth they should do such a thing. “So that we can try them ourselves” was Weiszäcker’s alleged response.
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There was also concern that international law might not apply to many of the alleged crimes. If revenge was the point, why drag the law into it? Why not take a political decision to punish? This was what Becker, in his office, called the Italian solution: “You kill as many people as you can in the first six weeks, and then you forget about it: not very legal, but for the purposes of purification, well …”
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Becker was not against holding trials as such. But he believed that existing German laws should have been applied, instead of retroactive laws about crimes against peace (preparing, planning, or waging an aggressive war).
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It was to avoid a travesty of the legal process that the British had been in favor of simply executing the Nazi leaders without a trial. The British were afraid that a long trial might change public opinion. The trial, in the words of one British diplomat, might be seen as a “put-up job.”
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The question is how to achieve justice without distorting the law, and how to stage a trial by victors over the vanquished without distorting history. A possibility would have been to make victors’ justice explicit, by letting military courts try the former enemies.
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This would have avoided much hypocrisy and done less damage to the due process of law in civilian life. But if the intention was to teach Germans a history lesson, a military court would have run into the same problems as a civilian one.
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Due process or revenge. This problem had preoccupied the ancient Greek tragedians. To break the cycle of vendetta, Orestes had to be tried by the Athens court for the murder of his mother. Without a formal trial, the vengeful Furies would continue to haunt the living.
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The aspect of revenge might have been avoided had the trial been held by German judges. There was a precedent for this, but it was not a happy one. German courts had been allowed to try alleged war criminals after World War I. Despite strong evidence against them, virtually all were acquitted, and the foreign delegates were abused by local mobs. Besides, Wetzka was right: German judges had collaborated with the Nazi regime; they could hardly be expected to be impartial. So it was left to the victors to see that justice was done.
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When the American chief prosecutor in Nuremberg, Robert H. Jackson, was asked by the British judge, Lord Justice Lawrence, what he thought the purpose of the trials should be, Jackson answered that they were to prove to the world that the German conduct of the war had been unjustified and illegal, and to demonstrate to the German people that this conduct deserved severe punishment and to prepare them for
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What becomes clear from this kind of language is that law, politics, and religion became confused: Nuremberg became a morality play, in which Göring, Kaltenbrunner, Keitel, and the others were cast in the leading roles. It was a play that claimed to deliver justice, truth, and the defeat of evil.
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The Nuremberg trials were to be a history lesson, then, as well as a symbolic punishment of the German people—a moral history lesson cloaked in all the ceremonial trappings of due legal process. They were the closest that man, or at least the men belonging to the victorious powers, could come to dispensing divine justice. This was certainly the way some German writers felt about it. Some welcomed it
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We now have this law on our books, the prosecutor said: “It will be used against the German aggressor this time. But the four powers, who are conducting this trial in the name of twenty-three nations, know this law and declare: Tomorrow we shall be judged before history by the same yardstick by which we judge these defendants today.”
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“We had seen through the amorality of the Nazis, and wanted to rid ourselves of it. It was from the moral seriousness of the American prosecution that we wished to learn sensible political thinking. “And we did learn. “And we allowed ourselves to apply this thinking to the present time. For example, we will use it now to take quite literally the morality of those American prosecutors. Oradour and Lidice—today they are cities in South Vietnam” (Italics in the original text.)
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The play ends with a statement by the American prosecutor on crimes against peace
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(It was decided in 1979, after the shock of the Holocaust TV series, to abolish the statute of limitations for crimes against humanity.)
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after Nuremberg, most Germans were tired of war crimes. And until the mid-1950s German courts were permitted to deal only with crimes committed by Germans against other Germans. It took the bracing example of the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem to jolt German complacency—that, and the fact that crimes committed before 1946 would no longer be subject to prosecution after 1965.
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Trying the vanquished for conventional war crimes was never convincing, since the victors could be accused of the same. Tu quoque could be invoked, in private if not in the Nuremberg court, when memories of Dresden and Soviet atrocities were still fresh. But Auschwitz had no equivalent. That was part of another war, or, better, it was not really a war at all; it was mass murder pure and simple, not for reasons of strategy or tactics, but of ideology alone.
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Whether you are a conservative who wants Germany to be a “normal” nation or a liberal/leftist engaging in the “labor of mourning,” the key event of World War II is Auschwitz, not the Blitzkrieg, not Dresden, not even the war on the eastern front. This was the one history lesson of Nuremberg that stuck. As Hellmut Becker said, despite his skepticism about Nuremberg: “It was most important that the German population realized that crimes against humanity had taken place and that during the trials it became clear how they had taken place.”
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In his famous essay on German guilt, Die Schuldfrage (The Question of German Guilt), written in 1946, Karl Jaspers distinguished four categories of guilt: criminal guilt, for breaking the law; political guilt, for being part of a criminal political system; moral guilt, for personal acts of criminal behavior; and metaphysical guilt, for failing in one’s responsibility to maintain the standards of civilized humanity. Obviously these categories overlap.
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The great advantage, in his view, of a war crimes trial was its limitation. By allowing the accused to defend themselves with arguments, by laying down the rules of due process, the victors limited their own powers.
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In any event, the trial distanced the German people even further from their former leaders. It was a comfortable distance, and few people had any desire to bridge it. This might be why the Nazi leaders are hardly ever featured in German plays, films, or novels.
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And: “For us Germans this trial has the advantage that it distinguishes between the particular crimes of the leaders and that it does not condemn the Germans collectively.”
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Serious conservative intellectuals, such as Hermann Lübbe, argued that too many accusations would have blocked West Germany’s way to becoming a stable, prosperous society. Not that Lübbe was an apologist for the Third Reich. Far from it: the legitimacy of the Federal Republic, in his opinion, lay in its complete rejection of the Nazi state.
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their reaction was often one of indignation. “Why me?” they would say. “I just did my duty. I just followed orders like every decent German. Why must I be punished?”
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“that these criminals were so like all of us at any point between 1918 and 1945 that we were interchangeable, and that particular circumstances caused them to take a different course, which resulted in this trial, these matters could not be properly discussed in the courtroom.” The terrible acts of individuals are lifted from their historical context. History is reduced to criminal pathology and legal argument.
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they will not do as history lessons, nor do they bring us closer to that elusive thing that Walser seeks, a German identity.
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The GDR had its own ways of using courts of law to deal with the Nazi past. They were in many respects the opposite of West German ways. The targets tended to be the very people that West German justice had ignored.
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Thorough purges took place in the judiciary, the bureaucracy, and industry. About 200,000 people—four-fifths of the Nazi judges and prosecutors—lost their jobs. War crimes trials were held too; until 1947 by the Soviets, after that in German courts.
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There were two more before 1957, and none after that. All in all, about 30,000 people had been tried and 500 executed. In the Federal Republic the number was about 91,000, and none were executed, as the death penalty was abolished by the 1949 constitution.
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East German methods were both ruthless and expedient, and the official conclusion to the process was that the GDR no longer had to bear the burden of guilt. As state propaganda ceaselessly pointed out, the guilty were all in the West. There the fascists still sat as judges and ran the industries that produced the economic boom, the Wirtschaftswunder.
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society. Although some of his critics, mostly on the old left, in both former Germanys, called him a grand inquisitor, few doubted the pastor’s good intentions. His arguments for trials were moral, judicial, and historical. He set out his views in a book entitled The Stasi Documents. Echoes of an earlier past rang through almost every page. “We can
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Germany of the guilty, the people who felt betroffen by their own “inability to mourn,” the nation that staged the Auschwitz and Majdanek trials, that Germany was now said to stand in judgment over the other Germany—the Germany of the old antifascists, the Germany that had suffered under two dictatorships, the Germany of uniformed marches, goose-stepping drills, and a secret police network, vast beyond even the Gestapo’s dreams.
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It is almost a form of subversion to defend a person who stands accused in court. So the idea of holding political and military leaders legally accountable for their actions was even stranger in Japan than it was in Germany. And yet, the shadows thrown by the Tokyo trial have been longer and darker in Japan than those of the Nuremberg trial in Germany.
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never was—unlike, say, the railway station or the government ministry—a central institution of the modern Japanese state. The law was not a means to protect the people from arbitrary rule; it was, rather, a way for the state to exercise more control over the people. Even today, there are relatively few lawyers in Japan.
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Japanese school textbooks are the product of so many compromises that they hardly reflect any opinion at all. As with all controversial matters in Japan, the more painful, the less said. In a standard history textbook for middle school students, published in the 1980s, mention of the Tokyo trial takes up less than half a page. All it says is that the trial…
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As long as the British and the Americans continued to be oppressors in Asia, wrote a revisionist historian named Hasegawa Michiko, who was born in 1945, “confrontation with Japan was inevitable. We did not fight for Japan alone. Our aim was to fight a Greater East Asia War. For this reason the war between Japan and China and Japan’s oppression of…
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West German textbooks describe the Nuremberg trial in far more detail. And they make a clear distinction between the retroactive law on crimes against peace and the…
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Nationalist revisionists talk about “the Tokyo Trial View of History,” as though the conclusions of the tribunal had been nothing but rabid anti-Japanese propaganda. The tribunal has been called a lynch mob, and Japanese leftists are blamed for undermining the morale of generations of Japanese by passing on the Tokyo Trial View of History in school textbooks and liberal publications. The Tokyo Trial…
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When Hellmut Becker said that few Germans wished to criticize the procedures of the Nuremberg trial because the criminality of the defendants was so plain to see, he was talking about crimes against humanity—more precisely, about the Holocaust. And it was…
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The knowledge compiled by the doctors of Unit 731—of freezing experiments, injection of deadly diseases, vivisections, among other things—was considered so valuable by the Americans in 1945 that the doctors…
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those aspects of the war that were most revolting and furthest removed from actual combat, such as the medical experiments on human guinea pigs (known as “logs”) carried out by Unit 731 in…
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There never were any Japanese war crimes trials, nor is there a Japanese Ludwigsburg. This is partly because there was no exact equivalent of the Holocaust. Even though the behavior of Japanese troops was often barbarous, and the psychological consequences of State Shinto and emperor worship were frequently as hysterical as Nazism, Japanese atrocities were part of a…
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This difference between (West) German and Japanese textbooks is not just a matter of detail; it shows a gap in perception. To the Japanese, crimes against humanity are not associated with an equivalent to the…
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on what grounds would Japanese courts have prosecuted their own former leaders? Hata’s answer: “For starting a war which they knew they would lose.” Hata used the example of General Galtieri and his colleagues in Argentina after losing the Falklands War. In short, they would have been tried for losing the war, and the intense suffering they inflicted on their own people. This is as though German courts in 1918 had put General Hindenburg or General Ludendorff on trial.
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it shows yet again the fundamental difference between the Japanese war, in memory and, I should say, in fact, and the German experience. The Germans fought a war too, but the one for which they tried their own people, the Bogers and the Schwammbergers, was a war they could not lose, unless defeat meant that some of the enemies survived.
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Just as German leftists did in the case of Nuremberg, Kobayashi used the trial to turn the tables against the judges. But not necessarily to mitigate Japanese guilt. Rather, it was his intention to show how the victors had betrayed the pacifism they themselves had imposed on Japan.
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the Japanese left has a different view of the Tokyo trial than the revisionist right. It is comparable to the way the German left looks upon Nuremberg. This was perfectly, if somewhat long-windedly, expressed in Kobayashi Masaki’s documentary film Tokyo Trial, released in 1983. Kobayashi is anything but an apologist for the Japanese war. His most famous film, The Human Condition, released in 1959, took a highly critical view of the war.
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Yoshimoto’s memory was both fair and devastating, for it pointed straight at the reason for the trial’s failure. The rigging of a political trial—the “absurd ritual”—undermined the value of that European idea of law.
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Yoshimoto went on to say something no revisionist would ever mention: “I also remember my fresh sense of wonder at this first encounter with the European idea of law, which was so different from the summary justice in our Asiatic courts. Instead of getting your head chopped off without a proper trial, the accused were able to defend themselves, and the careful judgment appeared to follow a public procedure.”
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Yoshimoto Takaaki, philosopher of the 1960s New Left. Yet he wrote in 1986 that “from our point of view as contemporaries and witnesses, the trial was partly plotted from the very start. It was an absurd ritual before slaughtering the sacrificial lamb.”
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This, from all accounts, was the way it looked to most Japanese, even if they had little sympathy for most of the “lambs.” In 1948, after three years of American occupation censorship and boosterism, people listened to the radio broadcast of the verdicts with a sad but fatalist shrug: this is what you can expect when you lose the war.
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Some of the information even surprised the defendants. General Itagaki Seishiro, a particularly ruthless figure, who was in command of prison camps in Southeast Asia and whose troops had massacred countless Chinese civilians, wrote in his diary: “I am learning of matters I had not known and recalling things I had forgotten.”
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hindsight, one can only conclude that instead of helping the Japanese to understand and accept their past, the trial left them with an attitude of cynicism and resentment.
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After it was over, the Nippon Times pointed out the flaws of the trial, but added that “the Japanese people must ponder over why it is that there has been such a discrepancy between what they thought and what the rest of the world accepted almost as common knowledge. This is at the root of the tragedy which Japan brought upon herself.”
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Political trials produce politicized histories. This is what the revisionists mean when they talk about the Tokyo Trial View of History. And they are right, even if their own conclusions are not.
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Frederick Mignone, one of the prosecutors, said a trifle histrionically that “in Japan and in the Orient in general, the trial is one of the most important phases of the occupation. It has received wide coverage in the Japanese press and revealed for the first time to millions of Japanese the scheming, duplicity, and insatiable desire for power of her entrenched militaristic leaders, writing a much-needed history of events which otherwise would not have been written.” It was indeed much-needed, since so little was known.
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The president of the Tokyo tribunal, Sir William Webb, thought “the crimes of the German accused were far more heinous, varied and extensive than those of the Japanese accused.” Put in another way, nearly all the defendants at Nuremberg, convicted of crimes against peace, were also found guilty of crimes against humanity. But half the Japanese defendants received life sentences for political crimes only.
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the question of responsibility is always a tricky affair in Japan, where formal responsibility is easier to identify than actual guilt. Not only were there many men, such as the hero of Kinoshita’s play, who took the blame for what their superiors had done—a common practice in Japan, in criminal gangs as well as in politics or business corporations—but the men at the top were often not at all in control of their unscrupulous subordinates.
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“These men were not the hoodlums who were the powerful part of the group which stood before the tribunal at Nuremberg, dregs of a criminal environment, thoroughly schooled in the ways of crime and knowing no other methods but those of crime. These men were supposed to be the elite of the nation, the honest and trusted leaders to whom the fate of the nation had been confidently entrusted
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many people were wrongly accused of the wrong things for the wrong reasons. This is why there was such sympathy in Japan for the men branded by foreigners as war criminals, particularly the so-called Class B and Class C criminals, the men who followed orders, or gave them at a lower level: field commanders, camp guards, and so on.
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“The Japanese people are of the opinion that the actual goal of the war crimes tribunals was never realized, since the judgments were reached by the victors alone and had the character of revenge. The [Japanese] war criminal is not conscious of having committed a crime, for he regards his deeds as acts of war, committed out of patriotism.”
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Yamashita Tomoyuki. Terrible atrocities were committed under his command in the Philippines. The sacking of Manila in 1945 was about as brutal as the Nanking Massacre. So to depict him in the movie as a peaceful gentleman, while portraying the American prosecutor in Manila as one of the main villains, might seem an odd way to view the past.
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The Shrine ranks highest. It is the supreme symbol of authority, shouldered (like a shrine on festival days) by the Officials.
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The political theorist Maruyama Masao called the prewar Japanese government a “system of irresponsibilities.” He identified three types of political personalities: the portable Shrine, the Official, and the Outlaw.
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those who carry it, the Officials, are the ones with actual power. But the Officials—bureaucrats, politicians, admirals and generals—are often manipulated by the lowest-ranking Outlaws, the military mavericks, the hotheaded officers in the field, the mad nationalists, and other agents of violence.
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But it was not entirely wrong, for the trial was rigged. Yamashita had no doubt been a tough soldier, but in this case he had been so far removed from the troops who ran amok in Manila that he could hardly have known what was going on. Yet the American prosecutor openly talked about his desire to hang “Japs.”
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When the system spins out of control, as it did during the 1930s, events are forced by violent Outlaws, reacted to by nervous Officials, and justified by the sacred status of the Shrines.
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Here we come to the nub of the problem, which the Tokyo trial refused to deal with, the role of the Shrine in whose name every single war crime was committed, Emperor Hirohito,
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The historian Ienaga Saburo tells a story about a Japanese schoolchild in the 1930s who was squeamish about having to dissect a live frog. The teacher rapped him hard on the head with his knuckles and said: “Why are you crying about one lousy frog? When you grow up you’ll have to kill a hundred, two hundred Chinks.”
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the lethal consequences of the emperor-worshipping system of irresponsibilities did emerge during the Tokyo trial. The savagery of Japanese troops was legitimized, if not driven, by an ideology that did not include a Final Solution but was as racialist as Hitler’s National Socialism. The Japanese were the Asian Herrenvolk, descended from the gods.
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A veteran of the war in China said in a television interview that he was able to kill Chinese without qualms only because he didn’t regard them as human.
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For to keep the emperor in place (he could at least have been made to resign), Hirohito’s past had to be freed from any blemish; the symbol had to be, so to speak, cleansed from what had been done in its name.
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The same was true of the Japanese imperial institution, no matter who sat on the throne, a ruthless war criminal or a gentle marine biologist.
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the chaplain at Sugamo prison, questioned Japanese camp commandants about their reasons for mistreating POWs. This is how he summed up their answers: “They had a belief that any enemy of the emperor could not be right, so the more brutally they treated their prisoners, the more loyal to their emperor they were being.”
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The Mitscherlichs described Hitler as “an object on which Germans depended, to which they transferred responsibility, and he was thus an internal object. As such, he represented and revived the ideas of omnipotence that we all cherish about ourselves from infancy.
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The fear after 1945 was that without the emperor Japan would be impossible to govern. In fact, MacArthur behaved like a traditional Japanese strongman (and was admired for doing so by many Japanese), using the imperial symbol to enhance his own power. As a result, he hurt the chances of a working Japanese democracy and seriously distorted history.
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Aristides George Lazarus, the defense counsel of one of the generals on trial, was asked to arrange that “the military defendants, and their witnesses, would go out of their way during their testimony to include the fact that Hirohito was only a benign presence when military actions or programs were discussed at meetings that, by protocol, he had to attend.” No doubt the other counsel were given similar instructions. Only once during the trial
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Adam Schiff's remarks will be essential reading and viewing for years to come - The Was... - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...-matter-not-senate-republicans

right truth impeachment speech Founding culture crisis politics gop

shared by Javier E on 24 Jan 20 - No Cached

“Here right matters. ... If right doesn’t matter, it doesn’t matter how good the Constitution is," Schiff declared. "It doesn’t matter how brilliant the Framers were. It doesn’t matter how good or bad our advocacy in this trial is. It doesn’t matter how well-written the oath of impartiality is. If right doesn’t matter, we’re lost. If the truth doesn’t matter, we’re lost. The Framers couldn’t protect us from ourselves if right and truth don’t matter. And you know that what he did was not right.”
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Perhaps Schiff’s call to our better angels will provide the emotional lift and inspiration to banish Trump from the Oval Office in the November election. Whether they do or not, Schiff’s words will serve as a message in the bottle — a love letter to democracy and truth for future generations.
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When historians look back on this dreadful time, at a president devoid of humanity an decency and a party overtaken with cultish reverence for evil, they might ask: “Didn’t they know better? Couldn’t they see right through him?”
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...3 more annotations...
The answer will be that most everyone saw Trump for what he was — a danger, a pathological liar, a self-serving demagogue with authoritarian aspirations. However, too few were willing to say it, and more important, to do something about it.
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“The truth about how massive moral crimes occur is both unsettling and comforting. It’s unsettling to accept how many people participated in appalling moral crimes but comforting to realize that we don’t have to be heroes to avoid genocides,” she wrote. “We just have to make sure not to help them along.”
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She argued: “Heroism is not morally obligatory, not teachable and not what we must demand of citizens in order to avoid catastrophic crimes against humanity. What we must emphasize is the cruelty and destructiveness of hate and the perils of collaborating with it.”
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Susan Collins will vote to acquit Trump, saying he's "learned" from impeachment - CBS News - 0 views

www.cbsnews.com/...g-hes-learned-from-impeachment

politics US history trump

shared by blythewallick on 06 Feb 20 - No Cached

Washington — Republican Senator Susan Collins announced Tuesday she will vote to acquit President Trump in his Senate trial, telling CBS News she believes the president has learned a "pretty big lesson" from impeachment and will be "much more cautious" about seeking foreign assistance in the future.
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The Senate plans to vote Wednesday on whether to convict Mr. Trump on two articles of impeachment: abuse of power and obstruction of Congress. Collins and Senator Mitt Romney were the only two Republicans who voted last week to allow witnesses in the impeachment trial, an effort that ultimately failed.
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"I'm voting to acquit. Because I do not believe that the behavior alleged reaches the high bar in the Constitution for overturning an election, and removing a duly elected president," Collins said.
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...1 more annotation...
"I'm sure there are going to be people unhappy with me in Maine. All I can do is apply the constitutional standard. And that's my job," Collins said. "My job is not to weigh the political consequences, but to do impartial justice to live up to the oath that I took."
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