Posts Tagged ‘THE DISCOURSES’
ABC NEWS, AL QAEDA, ALTERNET, AMERICABLOG, AP, BABY BOOMER RESISTANCE, BARACK OBAMA, BBC, BLOOMBERG, BRUSSELS, BUZZFEED, CBS NEWS, CIA, CNN, CROOKS AND LIARS, DAILY KOS, DONALD TRUMP, EDUARDO "TED" CRUZ, FBI, FIVETHIRTYEIGHT, GUANTANAMO, HARPER’S MAGAZINE, HUFFINGTON POST, ISLAM, ISLAMIC STATE OF IRAQ AND SYRIA (ISIS), MEDIA MATTERS, MOTHER JONES, MOVEON, MSNBC, NBC NEWS, NEW REPUBLIC, NEWSDAY, NEWSWEEK, NEWT GINGRICH, NICCOLO MACHIAVELLI, NPR, PARIS, PBS NEWSHOUR, PENTAGON, POLITICO, POLITICUSUSA, RAW STORY, REUTERS, RICK SANTORUM, RUDLOPH GIULIANI, RUDOLPH GIULIANI, SALON, SAN BERNADINO, SEATTLE TIMES, SLATE, SUPREME COURT, TALKING POINTS MEMO, TERRORISM, THE ATLANTIC, THE CHICAGO SUN-TIMES, THE CHICAGO TRIBUNE, THE DAILY BEAST, THE DAILY BLOG, THE DISCOURSES, THE GUARDIAN, THE HILL, THE HUFFINGTON POST, THE INTERCEPT, THE LOS ANGELES TIMES, THE NATION, THE NEW REPUBLIC, THE NEW YORK TIMES, THE NEW YORKER, THE VILLAGE VOICE, THE WASHINGTON POST, THINKPROGRESS, TIME, TORTURE, TRUTHDIG, TRUTHOUT, TWO POLITICAL JUNKIES, U.S. NEWS & WORLD REPORT, UPI, USA TODAY, WATERBOARDING, X
In Bureaucracy, History, Law, Law Enforcement, Military, Politics, Social commentary on June 26, 2024 at 12:11 am
Donald Trump made a return to waterboarding terrorism suspects a prime issue in his campaign for the 2016 Republican Presidential nomination.
And a March 30, 2016 Reuters/lpsos poll showed that nearly two-thirds of Americans believed that the use of torture could be justified to force suspected terrorists to talk.
A growing fear by Americans of Islamic terrorism had been ignited by a series of deadly Islamic terrorist attacks in Europe and the United States.
Frightening a prisoner in Iraq
In fact, however, torture, generally, and waterboarding in particular, have proven worthless at obtaining reliable information.
Victims will say anything they think their captors want to hear to stop the agony.
Yoshia Chee, a Special Forces veteran of Vietnam, recalled his use of torture against suspected Vietcong:
“One of the favorite things was popping one of their eyeballs out with a spoon….
“If I had one of my eyeballs hanging out, I’d say I killed Kennedy. I’d agree to anything in the whole world.
“We would do that, and they still wouldn’t talk….You rarely got anything out of them. Just more hatred. More reason to fight back.”
Click here: Strange Ground: An Oral History Of Americans In Vietnam, 1945-1975: Harry Maurer: 9780306808395: Amazon.com: Books
During the George W. Bush Presidency, the CIA relied on harsh physical punishments—beatings, humiliations and waterboarding—to convince suspects to talk. These were euphemistically referred to as “enhanced interrogation techniques.”
Upon assuming the Presidency in 2009, Barack Obama ordered an immediate halt to such methods. Since then, Republicans generally and their Presidential aspirants in particular have harshly criticized Obama’s decision.
Like Trump, they claimed that Obama had endangered American security in the name of Political Correctness. In turn, Obama argued that the use of torture produces unreliable information and inflames Muslim hatred of America.
Meanwhile, the FBI applied its traditional “kill them with kindness” approach to interrogation. And agents found this yielded far greater results.
For one thing, most Al Qaeda members relished appearing before grand juries.
Unlike organized crime members, they were talkative—and even tried to proselytize to the jury members. They were proud of what they had done—and wanted to talk.
“This is what the FBI does,” said Mike Rolince, an FBI expert on counter-terrorism. “Nearly 100% of the terrorists we’ve taken into custody have confessed. The CIA wasn’t trained. They don’t do interrogations.”
According to The Threat Matrix: The FBI at War in the Age of Global Terror (2011) jihadists had been taught to expect severe torture at the hands of American interrogators.
Writes Author Garrett M. Graff:
“Often, in the FBI’s experience, their best cooperation came when detainees realized they weren’t going to get tortured, that the United States wasn’t the Great Satan. Interrogators were figuring out…that not playing into Al Qaeda’s propaganda could produce victories.”
And the FBI isn’t alone in believing that acts of simple humanity can turn even sworn enemies into allies.
No less an authority on “real-politick” than Niccolo Machiavelli reached the same conclusion more than 500 years ago.
In his small and notorious book, The Prince, he writes about the methods a ruler must use to gain power. But in his larger and lesser-known masterwork, The Discourses, he outlines the ways that liberty can be maintained in a republic.
Niccolo Machiavelli
For Machiavelli, only a well-protected state can hope for peace and prosperity. Toward that end, he wrote at length about the best ways to succeed militarily. And in war, humanity can prevail at least as often as inhumanity.
Consider the following example from The Discourses:
Camillus [a Roman general] was besieging the city of the Faliscians, and had surrounded it….A teacher charged with the education of the children of some of the noblest families of that city [to ingratiate himself] with Camillus and the Romans, led these children…into the Roman camp.
And presenting them to Camillus [the teacher] said to him: “By means of these children as hostages, you will be able to compel the city to surrender.”
Camillus not only declined the offer but had the teacher stripped and his hands tied behind his back….[Then Camillus] had a rod put into the hands of each of the children…[and] directed them to whip [the teacher] all the way back to the city.
Upon learning this fact, the citizens of Faliscia were so much touched by the humanity and integrity of Camillus, that they surrendered the place to him without any further defense.
This example shows that an act of humanity and benevolence will at all times have more influence over the minds of men than violence and ferocity.
It also proves that provinces and cities which no armies…could conquer, have yielded to an act of humanity, benevolence, chastity or generosity.
This truth should be remembered whenever Right-wingers brag about their patriotism and willingness to “get tough“ with America’s enemies.
Many—like Newt Gingrich, Rudolph Giuliani, Rick Santorum, Eduardo “Ted” Cruz and Donald Trump—strenuously avoided military service. These “chickenhawks” talk tough and are always ready to send others into battle—but keep themselves well out of harm’s way.
Such men are not merely contemptible; they are dangerous.
ABC NEWS, ABRAHAM LINCOLN, ALTERNET, AMERICABLOG, ANDREW JACKSON, AP, BABY BOOMER RESISTANCE, BARACK OBAMA, BBC, BLOOMBERG NEWS, BUZZFEED, CBS NEWS, CIVIL WAR, CNN, CROOKS AND LIARS, DAILY KOZ, DONALD TRUMP, FIVETHIRTYEIGHT, HARDBALL, HARPER’S MAGAZINE, HUFFINGTON POST, JANUARY 6 INSURRECTION, JOE BIDEN, JOHN C. CALHOUN, MARCHING THROUGH GEORGIA, MEDIA MATTERS, MOTHER JONES, MOVEON, MSNBC, NBC NEWS, NEW REPUBLIC, NEWSDAY, NEWSWEEK, NICCOLO MACHIAVELLI, NPR, PBS NEWSHOUR, POLITICO, POLITICUSUSA, RAW STORY, REPUBLICAN PARTY, REUTERS, ROBERT E. LEE, SALON, SEATTLE TIMES, SECCESSION, SLATE, TALKING POINTS MEMO, THE ATLANTIC, THE CHICAGO SUN-TIMES, THE CHICAGO TRIBUNE, THE DAILY BEAST, THE DAILY BLOG, THE DISCOURSES, THE GUARDIAN, THE HILL, THE HUFFINGTON POST, THE LOS ANGELES TIMES, THE NATION, THE NEW REPUBLIC, THE NEW YORK TIMES, THE NEW YORKER, THE VILLAGE VOICE, THE WALL STREET JOURNAL, THE WASHINGTON POST, THINKPROGRESS, TIME, TREASON, TRUTHDIG, TRUTHOUT, TWO POLITICAL JUNKIES, U.S. NEWS & WORLD REPORT, ULYSSES S. GRANT, UPI, USA TODAY, WILLIAM TECUMSEH SHERMAN, WONKETTE, X
In Bureaucracy, History, Law, Law Enforcement, Military, Politics, Social commentary on June 14, 2024 at 12:11 am
When Andrew Jackson, seventh President of the United States from 1829 to 1837, was close to death, he asked his doctor: “What act of my administration will be most severely condemned by future Americans?”
“Perhaps the removal of the bank deposits,” said the doctor—referring to Jackson’s withdrawal of U.S. Government monies from the first Bank of the United States.
That act had destroyed the bank, which Jackson had believed was a source of political corruption.
“Oh, no!” said Jackson.
Andrew Jackson
Then, his eyes blazing, Jackson raged: “I can tell you. Posterity will condemn me more because I was persuaded not to hang John C. Calhoun as a traitor than for any other act in my life!”
John C. Calhoun had once been Vice President under Jackson and later a United States Senator from South Carolina. His fiery rhetoric and radical theories of “nullification” played a major part in bringing on the Civil War (1861-1865).
John C. Calhoun
Calhoun was an outspoken proponent of slavery, which he declared to be a “positive good” rather than a “necessary evil.” He supported states’ rights and nullification—by which states could declare null and void federal laws they deemed unconstitutional.
Over time, Southern states’ threats of “nullification” turned to threats of “secession” from the Union—and then civil war.
The resulting carnage destroyed at least 750,000 lives. More Americans died in that war than have been killed in all the major wars fought by the United States since.
When it ended, America was reinvented as a new, unified nation—and one where slavery was now banned by the 13th Amendment to the United States Constitution.
Equally important, the Federal Government had now set a precedent for using overwhelming military power to force states to remain in the Union.
But in 2012, within days of Barack Obama’s decisive winning of another four years as President, residents across the country filed secession petitions to the Obama administration’s “We the People” program.
States whose residents filed secession petitions included:
Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Nevada, North Carolina, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Virginia, Washington (state), West Virginia, Wisconsin and Wyoming.
Abraham Lincoln dedicated his Presidency—and sacrificed his life—to ensure the preservation of a truly United States.
And Robert E. Lee—the defeated South’s greatest general—spent the last five years of his life trying to put the Civil War behind him and persuade his fellow Southerners to accept their place in the Union.
But today avowed racists, Fascists and other champions of treason are working hard to destroy that union—and unleash a second Civil War.
On January 6, 2021, they illegally attacked the United States Capitol Building to halt the counting of Electoral College votes of the 2020 Presidential election. Their goal: Pressure Congress to overturn the election of former Vice President Joseph Biden’s in favor of President Donald Trump.
Not one of the Senators or Representatives who supported this treason has been indicted, let alone convicted.
And most importantly, the man who incited that treason—former President Donald Trump—has not been tried for it. He continues to spread the Big Lie that the election was “stolen” from him.
And most of his 74 million voters stand ready to commit additional acts of violence to “restore” him to office.
President Joseph Biden should follow Andrew Jackson’s example—before treasonous acts become the order of the day.
He should warn Stormtrumpers and Right-wing militia leaders that the United States Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines stand ready to squelch further outbreaks of treason. And that he will send modern-day counterparts of Union General William Tecumseh Sherman to wherever they are needed.
Sherman’s March through Georgia
Sherman cut a swath of destruction through Georgia during his now-famous “March to the Sea.” In a letter to his commanding general, Ulysses S. Grant, he expressed his formula for dealing with domestic terrorists:
“They cannot be made to love us, but they may be made to fear us. We cannot change the hearts of those people of the South.
“But we can make war so terrible that they will realize the fact that….they are still mortal and should exhaust all peaceful remedies before they fly to war.”
And Sherman’s counsel is backed up by none other than Niccolo Machiavelli, the father of modern political science.
In his masterwork, The Discouorses, he outlines the consequences of allowing lawbreakers to go unpunished:
“…Having established rewards for good actions and penalties for evil ones, and having rewarded a citizen for conduct who afterwards commits a wrong, he should be chastised for that without regard to his previous merits….
“For if a citizen who has rendered some eminent service to the state should add to the reputation and influence which he has thereby acquired the confident audacity of being able to commit any wrong without fear of punishment, he will in a little while become so insolent and overbearing as to put an end to all power of the law.”
ABC NEWS, ADOLF HITLER, ALTERNET, AMERICABLOG, AP, ASSASSINATION, BABY BOOMER RESISTANCE, BUZZFEED, CBS NEWS, CNN, CONSPIRACIES, CROOKS AND LIARS, DAILY KOS, DAILY KOZ, DAY OF THE JACKAL, DONALD TRUMP, DRUDGE RETORT, FIVETHIRTYEIGHT, FREDERICK FORSYTHE, GAIUS CASSIUS, HARPER’S MAGAZINE, JULIUS CAESAR, LINCOLN MEMORIAL, MAR-A-LAGO, MARCUS BRUTUS, MARK ANTHONY, MEDIA MATTERS, MOTHER JONES, MOVEON, MSNBC, NBC NEWS, NEWSWEEK, NICCOLO MACHIAVELLI, NPR, PBS NEWSHOUR, PLOTS, POLITICO, POLITICUSUSA, RAW STORY, REUTERS, RICHARD M. NIXON, SALON, SEATTLE TIMES, Secret Service, SLATE, TALKING POINTS MEMO, THE ATLANTIC, THE CHICAGO SUN-TIMES, THE CHICAGO TRIBUNE, THE DAILY BEAST, THE DAILY BLOG, THE DISCOURSES, THE GUARDIAN, THE HILL, THE HUFFINGTON POST, THE LOS ANGELES TIMES, THE NATION, THE NEW REPUBLIC, THE NEW YORK TIMES, THE VILLAGE VOICE, THE WALL STREET JOURNAL, THE WASHINGTON POST, THINKPROGRESS, TIME, TRUTHDIG, TRUTHOUT, TWO POLITICAL JUNKIES, U.S. NEWS & WORLD REPORT, UPI, USA TODAY, VIETNAM WAR, WHITE HOUSE STAFFER, WONKETTE, X
In Bureaucracy, History, Law Enforcement, Military, Politics, Social commentary on May 30, 2024 at 12:12 am
More than 500 years ago, Niccolo Machiavelli, the Florentine statesman, authored The Discourses on Livy, a work of political history and philosophy. In it, he outlined how citizens of a republic can maintain their freedoms.
One of the longest chapters—Book Three, Chapter Six—covers “Of Conspiracies.” In it, those who wish to conspire against a ruler will find highly useful advice.
And so will those who wish to foil such a conspiracy.
For conspirators, there are three ways their efforts can be foiled.
- Discovery through denunciation;
- Discovery through incautiousness;
- Discovery through writings.
The first has already been covered. Now for the second and third.
Discovery through Writings: You may talk freely with anyone man about everything, for unless you have committed yourself in writing, the “Yes” of one man is worth as much as the “No” of another.
Thus, you should guard most carefully against writing, as against a dangerous rock, for nothing will convict you quicker than your own handwriting.
You may escape, then, from the accusation of a single individual, unless you are convicted by some writing or other pledge, which you should be careful never to give.
If you are denounced, there are means of escaping punishment:
- By denying the accusation and claiming that the person making it hates you; or
- Claiming that your accuser was tortured or coerced into giving false testimony against you.
But the most prudent course is to not tell your intentions to anyone, and to carry out the attempt yourself.
Even if you’re not discovered before you carry out your attack, there are still two dangers facing a conspirator:
Dangers in Execution: These result from:
- An unexpected change in the routine of the intended target;
- The lack of courage among the conspirators; or
- An error on their part, such as leaving some of those alive whom the conspirators intended to kill.
Adolf Hitler, who claimed to have a sixth-sense for danger, was famous for changing his routine at the last minute.
On November 9, 1939, this instinct saved his life. He had been scheduled to give a long speech at a Munich beer hall before the “Old Fighters” of his storm troopers.
But that evening he cut short his speech and left the beer hall. Forty-five minutes later, a bomb exploded inside a pillar—before which Hitler had been speaking.
Conspirators can also be doomed by their good intentions.
In 44 B.C., Gaius Cassius, Marcus Brutus and other Roman senators decided to assassinate Julius Caesar, whose dictatorial ambitions they feared.
Cassius also intended to murder Mark Anthony, Caesar’s strongest ally. But Brutus objected, fearing the plotters would look like butchers, not saviors. Even worse, he allowed Anthony to deliver a eulogy at Caesar’s funeral.
This proved so inflammatory that the mourners rioted, driving the conspirators out of Rome. Soon afterward, they were defeated in a battle with the legions of Anthony and Octavian Caesar—and forced to commit suicide to avoid capture and execution.
Machiavelli closes his chapter “Of Conspiracies” with advice to rulers on how they should act when they find a conspiracy has been formed against them.
If they discover that a conspiracy exists against them, they must, before punishing its authors, strive to learn its nature and extent. And they must measure the danger posed by the conspirators against their own strength.
And if they find it powerful and alarming, they must not expose it until they have amassed sufficient force to crush it. Otherwise, they will only speed their own destruction. They should try to pretend ignorance of it. If the conspirators find themselves discovered, they will be forced by necessity to act without consideration.
Niccolo Machiavelli
The foregoing was taken from Book Three, Chapter Six, of Machiavelli’s masterwork, The Discourses on Livy, which was published posthumously in 1531. But elsewhere in this volume, he notes how important it is for rulers to make themselves loved—or at least respected—by their fellow citizens:
Note how much more praise those Emperors merited who, after Rome became an empire, conformed to her laws like good princes, than those who took the opposite course.
Titus, Nerva, Trajan, Hadrian, Antoninus and Marcus Auelius did not require the Praetorians nor the multitudinous legions to defend them, because they were protected by their own good conduct, the good will of the people, and by the love of the Senate.
On the other hand, neither the Eastern nor the Western armies saved Caligula, Nero, Vitellius and so many other wicked Emperors from the enemies which their bad conduct and evil lives had raised up against them.
In his better-known work, The Prince, he warns rulers who—like Donald Trump–are inclined to rule by fear:
A prince should make himself feared in such a way that if he does not gain love, he at any rate avoids hatred: for fear and the absence of hatred may well go together.
Donald Trump
By Machiavelli’s standards, Trump has made himself the perfect target for a conspiracy.
“When a prince becomes universally hated, it is likely that he’s harmed some individuals—who thus seek revenge. This desire is increased by seeing that the prince is widely loathed.”
ABC NEWS, ADOLF HITLER, ALTERNET, AMERICABLOG, AP, ASSASSINATION, BABY BOOMER RESISTANCE, BUZZFEED, CBS NEWS, CNN, CONSPIRACIES, CROOKS AND LIARS, DAILY KOS, DAILY KOZ, DAY OF THE JACKAL, DONALD TRUMP, FIVETHIRTYEIGHT, FREDERICK FORSYTHE, GAIUS CASSIUS, HARPER’S MAGAZINE, JULIUS CAESAR, LINCOLN MEMORIAL, MAR-A-LAGO, MARCUS BRUTUS, MARK ANTHONY, MEDIA MATTERS, MOTHER JONES, MOVEON, MSNBC, NBC NEWS, NEWSWEEK, NICCOLO MACHIAVELLI, NPR, PBS NEWSHOUR, PLOTS, POLITICO, POLITICUSUSA, RAW STORY, REUTERS, RICHARD M. NIXON, SALON, SEATTLE TIMES, Secret Service, SLATE, TALKING POINTS MEMO, THE ATLANTIC, THE CHICAGO SUN-TIMES, THE CHICAGO TRIBUNE, THE DAILY BEAST, THE DAILY BLOG, THE DISCOURSES, THE GUARDIAN, THE HILL, THE HUFFINGTON POST, THE LOS ANGELES TIMES, THE NATION, THE NEW REPUBLIC, THE NEW YORK TIMES, THE VILLAGE VOICE, THE WALL STREET JOURNAL, THE WASHINGTON POST, THINKPROGRESS, TIME, TRUTHDIG, TRUTHOUT, TWO POLITICAL JUNKIES, U.S. NEWS & WORLD REPORT, UPI, USA TODAY, VIETNAM WAR, WONKETTE, X
In Bureaucracy, History, Law Enforcement, Military, Politics, Social commentary on May 29, 2024 at 12:10 am
More than 500 years ago, Niccolo Machiavelli, the father of modern political science, offered sound advice for would-be conspirators—and for rulers seeking to thwart conspiracies.
He did so in The Discourses on Livy, a work of political history and philosophy. In it, he outlined how citizens of a republic can maintain their freedoms.
One of the longest chapters—Book Three, Chapter Six—covers “Of Conspiracies.” In it, those who wish to conspire against a ruler will find highly useful advice. And so will those who might well become the targets of conspiracies—such as President Donald J. Trump.
Niccolo Machiavellil
The most dangerous time for a ruler comes when he is universally hated.
Niccolo Machiavelli: When a prince becomes universally hated, it is likely that he’s harmed some individuals—who thus seek revenge. This desire is increased by seeing the prince is widely loathed.
A prince, then, should avoid incurring such universal hatred….
By doing this, he protects himself from such vengeance-seekers. There are two reasons for this:
(1) Men rarely risk danger to avenge a wrong; and
(2) Even if they want to avenge a wrong, they know they will face almost universal condemnation because the prince is held in such high esteem.
Machiavelli draws a distinction between plots and conspiracies.
A plot may be formed by a single individual or by many. The first isn’t a conspiracy, since that would involve at least two participants.
A single plotter avoids the danger faced by two or more conspirators:
Since no one knows his intention, he can’t be betrayed by an accomplice.
Anyone may form a plot, whether he is prominent or insignificant, because everyone is at some time allowed to speak to the prince. And he can use this opportunity to satisfy his desire for revenge.
On the other hand, says Machiavelli, the dangers of assassination by a trusted intimate are slight.
Few people dare to assault a prince. Of those who do, few or none escapes being killed in the attempt, or immediately afterward. As a result, only a small number of people are willing to incur such certain death.
Those who take part in a conspiracy against a ruler are “the great men of the state, or those on terms of familiar intercourse with the prince.”
These are men who have access to him. Julius Caesar, for example, was stabbed to death by members of the Roman Senate, who feared his assuming dictatorial powers.
And Adolf Hitler was conspired against by colonels and generals of the German Army. He was in fact holding a war conference when a briefcase bomb exploded, killing three officers and a stenographer, but leaving Hitler only slightly injured.
Adolf Hitler
There are three ways a conspiracy can be foiled:
- Discovery through denunciation;
- Discovery through incautiousness;
- Discovery through writings.
Discovery through Denunciation: This occurs through treachery or lack of prudence among one or more conspirators.
Treachery is so common that you can safely tell your plans to only your most trusted friends who are willing to risk their lives for your sake. You may find that you have only one or two of these.
But as you are bring more people into the conspiracy, the chances of discovery greatly increase. It’s impossible to find many who can be completely trusted: For their devotion to you must be greater than their sense of danger and fear of punishment.
Discovery through Carelessness: This happens when one of the conspirators speaks incautiously, so that a third person overhears it Or it may occur from thoughtlessness, when a conspirator tells the secret to his wife or child, or to some other indiscreet person.
When a conspiracy has more than three or four members, its discovery is almost certain, either through treason, imprudence or carelessness.
If more than one conspirator is arrested, the whole plot is discovered, for it will be impossible for any two to agree perfectly as to all their statements.
If only one is arrested, he may—through courage and stubbornness—be able to conceal the names of his accomplices. But then the others, to remain safe, must not panic and flee, since this is certain to be discovered.
If one of them becomes fearful—whether it’s the one who was arrested or is still at liberty—discovery of the conspiracy is certain.
The best way to avoid such detection is to confide your project to your intended fellow conspirators at the moment of execution—and not sooner.
A classic example of this occurred in ancient Persia. According to the Greek historian Herodotus: A group of nobles assembled to discuss overthrowing a usurper to the throne. The last one to arrive was Darius.
When one of the conspirators asked, “When should we strike?” Darius replied: “We must either go now at this very moment and carry it into execution, or I shall go and denounce you all. For I will not give any of you time to denounce me.”
At that, they went directly to the palace, assassinated the usurper and proclaimed Darius their new king.
ABC NEWS, ADOLF HITLER, ADVICE, ALTERNET, AMERICABLOG, AP, BABY BOOMER RESISTANCE, BAY OF PIGS, BBC, BENITO MUSSOLINI, BLOOMBERG NEWS, BUZZFEED, CAESARE BORGIA, CBS NEWS, CNN, CORPORATIONS, CROOKS AND LIARS, CUBA, DAILY KOS, DAILY KOZ, FIDEL CASTRO, FIVETHIRTYEIGHT, FLORENCE, HARPER’S MAGAZINE, HUFFINGTON POST, JOHN F. KENNEDY, JOSEPH STALIN, KING PERSEUS OF MACEDON, MEDIA MATTERS, MOTHER JONES, MOVEON, MSNBC, NAZI-SOVIET "NON-AGGRESSION PACT", NBC NEWS, NEW REPUBLIC, NEWSDAY, NEWSWEEK, NICCOLO MACHIAVELLI, NPR, PBS NEWSHOUR, POLITICO, POLITICS, POLITICUSUSA, POPE JULIUS 11, RAW STORY, REUTERS, SALON, SEATTLE TIMES, SLATE, TALKING POINTS MEMO, THE ATLANTIC, THE CHICAGO SUN-TIMES, THE CHICAGO TRIBUNE, THE DAILY BEAST, THE DAILY BLOG, THE DISCOURSES, THE GUARDIAN, THE HILL, THE HUFFINGTON POST, THE INTERCEPT, THE LOS ANGELES TIMES, THE NATION, THE NEW REPUBLIC, THE NEW YORK TIMES, THE NEW YORKER, THE PRINCE, THE SS, THE VILLAGE VOICE, THE WASHINGTON POST, THINKPROGRESS, THIRD REICH, TIME, TRUTHDIG, TRUTHOUT, TWITTER, U.S. NEWS & WORLD REPORT, UKRAINE, UPI, USA TODAY, VLADIMIR PUTIN, VOLODYMYR ZELENSKY, WEHRMACHT, WORLD WAR 11
In Bureaucracy, Business, History, Military, Politics, Social commentary on May 24, 2024 at 12:10 am
Ask the average person, “What do you think of Niccolo Machiavelli?” and he’s likely to say: “The devil.”
In fact, “The Old Nick” became an English term used to describe Satan and slander Machiavelli at the same time.
Niccolo Machiavelli
The truth, however, is more complex. Machiavelli was a passionate Republican, who spent most of his adult life in the service of his beloved city-state, Florence.
The years he spent as a diplomat were tumultuous ones for Italy—with men like Pope Julius II and Caesare Borgia vying for power and plunging Italy into one bloodbath after another.
Florence, for all its wealth, lacked a strong army, and thus lay at the mercy of powerful enemies, such as Borgia. Machiavelli often had to use his wits to keep them at bay.
Machiavelli is best-known for his writing of The Prince, a pamphlet on the arts of gaining and holding power. Its admirers have included Benito Mussolini and Joseph Stalin.
But his longer and more thoughtful work is The Discourses, in which he offers advice on how to maintain liberty within a republic. Among its admirers were many of the men who framed the Constitution of the United States.
Most people believe that Machiavelli advocated evil for its own sake.
Not so. Rather, he recognized that sometimes there is no perfect—or perfectly good—solution to a problem.
Sometimes it’s necessary to take stern—even brutal—action to stop an evil (such as a riot) before it becomes widespread:
“A man who wishes to make a profession of goodness in everything must inevitably come to grief among so many who are not good. And therefore it is necessary for a prince, who wishes to maintain himself, to learn how not to be good, and to use this knowledge and not use it, according to the necessity of the case.”
His counsel remains as relevant today as it did during his lifetime (1469 – 1527). This is especially true for politicians—and students of political science.
But plenty of ordinary citizens can also benefit from the advice he has to offer—such as those in business who are asked to give advice to more powerful superiors.
Machiavelli warns there is danger in urging rulers to take a particular course of action: “For men only judge of matters by the result, all the blame of failure is charged upon him who first advised it, while in case of success he receives commendations. But the reward never equals the punishment.”
This puts would-be counselors in a difficult position: “If they do not advise what seems to them for the good of the republic or the prince, regardless of the consequences to themselves, then they fail to do their duty.
“And if they do advise it, then it is at the risk of their position and their lives, for all men are blind in thus, that they judge of good or evil counsels only by the results.”
Thus, Machiavelli warns that an adviser should “take things moderately, and not to undertake to advocate any enterprise with too much zeal, but to give one’s advice calmly and modestly.”
The person who asked for the advice may follow it, or not, as of his own choice, and not because he was led or forced into it by the adviser.
Above all, the adviser must avoid the danger of urging a course of action that runs “contrary to the wishes of the many.
“For the danger arises when your advice has caused the many to be contravened. In that case, when the result is unfortunate, they all concur in your destruction.”
Or, as President John F. Kennedy famously said after the disastrous invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs in April, 1961: “Victory has a hundred fathers and defeat is an orphan.”
John F. Kennedy
By “not advocating any enterprise with too much zeal,” the adviser gains two advantages:
“The first is, you avoid all danger.
“And the second consists in the great credit which you will have if, after having modestly advised a certain course, your counsel is rejected, and the adoption of a different course results unfortunately.”
Finally, the time to give advice is before a catastrophe occurs, not after. Machiavelli gives a vivid example of what can happen if this rule is ignored.
King Perseus of Macedon had gone to war with Paulus Aemilius—and suffered a humiliating defeat. Fleeing the battlefield with a handful of his men, he later bewailed the disaster that had overtaken him.
Suddenly, one of his lieutenants began to lecture Perseus on the many errors he had committed, which had led to his ruin.
“Traitor,” raged the king, turning upon him, “you have waited until now to tell me all this, when there is no longer any time to remedy it—” And Perseus slew him with his own hands.
Niccolo Machiavelli sums up the lesson as this:
“Thus was this man punished for having been silent when he should have spoken, and for having spoken when he should have been silent.”
Be careful that you don’t make the same mistake.
2016 PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION, 2020 PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION, ABC NEWS, ACAM SCHIFF, ADOLF HITLER, ALTERNET, AMERICABLOG, AP, BABY BOOMER RESISTANCE, BBC, BLOOMBERG NEWS, BRETT CROZIER, BUZZFEED, CBS NEWS, CHARLES PIERCE, CHRIS KREBS, CNN, CONVERSATION WITH AN AMERICAN WRITER (POEM), CORONAVIRUS, CROOKS AND LIARS, CYBERSECURITY AND INFRASTRUCTURE SECURITY AGENCY, DAILY KOS, DEPARTMENT OF HOMELAND SECURITY, DEPARTMENT OF STATE, DIMITRI SHOSTAKOVICH, DONALD TRUMP, DRUDGE REPORT, ESQUIRE MAGAZINE, FBI, FIVETHIRTYEIGHT, FOX NEWS NETWORK, GREAT TERROR, HARPER’S MAGAZINE, HOUSE INTELLIGENCE COMMITTEE, HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES, HUFFINGTON POST, JOSEPH BIDEN, JOSEPH STALIN, MARIA YOVANOVICH, MEDIA MATTERS, MICROSOFT, MIKHAIL TUKHACHEVESKY, MOTHER JONES, MOVEON, MSNBC, NAZI GERMANY, NBC NEWS, NEW REPUBLIC, NEWSDAY, NEWSWEEK, NICCOLO MACHIAVELLI, NIKITA KHRUSHCHEV, NIKOLAI ZHILAYEV, NPR, PBS NEWSHOUR, POLITICO, POLITICUSUSA, RAW STORY, REUTERS, RUDY GIULIANI, SALON, SEATTLE TIMES, SLATE, SOVIET UNION, TALKING POINTS MEMO, THE ATLANTIC, THE CHICAGO SUN-TIMES, THE CHICAGO TRIBUNE, THE DAILY BEAST, THE DAILY BLOG, THE DISCOURSES, THE GUARDIAN, THE HILL, THE HUFFINGTON POST, THE LOS ANGELES TIMES, THE NATION, THE NEW REPUBLIC, THE NEW YORK TIMES, THE NEW YORKER, THE VILLAGE VOICE, THE WALL STREET JOURNAL, THE WASHINGTON POST, THINKPROGRESS, THOMAS MODLY, TIME, TRUTHDIG, TRUTHOUT, TWITTER, TWO POLITICAL JUNKIES, U.S. NEWS & WORLD REPORT, UKRAINE, UPI, USA TODAY, WEHRMACHT, WONKETTE, WORLD WAR ii, YEVGENEY YEVTUSHENKO
In Bureaucracy, History, Law, Law Enforcement, Military, Politics, Social commentary on March 21, 2024 at 12:10 am
Next hero: Marie Yovanovitch, the former United States ambassador to Ukraine (2016 – 2019). She had joined the Foreign Service in 1986, and served as ambassador to Kyrgyzstan (2005 – 2008) and Armenia (2008 – 2011).
In May 2019, on President Donald Trump’s orders, the State Department recalled Yovanovitch as ambassador to Ukraine. She had earned respect from the national security community for her efforts to encourage Ukraine to tackle corruption.
But she had been criticized by Right-wing media outlets—notably Fox News Network-–and by Trump’s personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani.
Marie Yovanovitch
CNN reported that Yovanovitch stopped Giuliani from interviewing witnesses in his search for politically damaging information against former Vice President Joe Biden, whose son, Hunter, had had business dealings in Ukraine.
On October 11, 2019, she appeared before the House Intelligence Committee, chaired by Representative Adam Schiff (D-CA). She did so in defiance of orders by the White House and State Department to not attend.
“She was a hero even before she hit the hearing room,” wrote Charles Pierce for Esquire magazine.
“She told them to stuff their directives, she would answer a congressional subpoena like a citizen is supposed to do. And she didn’t sneak in through the basement. She walked into the Capitol through the front doors, and she didn’t do so to fck around.”
Testifying for nearly 10 hours, Yovanovitch said that Trump had removed her from her post owing to “unfounded and false claims” and “a concerted campaign against me.”
She believed that associates of Trump’s personal lawyer, Giuliani, might have thought “that their personal financial ambitions were stymied by our anti-corruption policy in Ukraine.”
And she warned that the State Department was being “attacked and hollowed out from within. State Department leadership, with Congress, needs to take action now to defend this great institution, and its thousands of loyal and effective employees.”
Another victim on Trump’s hate-list was Chis Krebs.
During the 2016 Presidential race, Russian propaganda had played a major role in convincing millions of Americans to vote for Donald Trump. Social media platforms—especially Facebook and Twitter—were flooded with genuinely fake news to sow discord among Americans and create a pathway for Trump’s election.
And where Internet trolls left off, Russian computer hackers took over.
Trump didn’t win a majority of the popular vote. But he got enough help from Russian President Vladimir Putin to triumph in the Electoral College.
So notorious was the role played by Russian trolls and hackers in winning Trump the 2016 election that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) was determined to prevent a repetition in 2020.
And point man for this was Chris Krebs.
Born in Atlanta, Georgia, in 1977, Krebs had received a B.A. in environmental sciences from the University of Virginia in 1999, and a J.D. from the George Mason University School of Law in 2007.
Chris Krebs
Krebs had served as Senior Advisor to the Assistant Secretary of Homeland Security for Infrastructure Protection, and later worked in the private sector as Director for Cybersecurity Policy for Microsoft.
Now he was director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency at DHS.
In preparation for the 2020 Presidential election, Krebs launched a massive effort to counter lies spread by Russians—and Americans—on social media platforms. Among his duties:
- Sharing Intelligence from agencies such as the CIA and National Security Agency with local officials about foreign efforts at election interference.
- Ensuring that domestic voting equipment was secure.
- Attacking domestic misinformation head-on.
As a result, Krebs was widely praised for revamping the department’s cybersecurity efforts and increasing coordination with state and local governments.
By all accounts—except Trump’s—the November 3, 2020 election went very smoothly.
As a result of the vast increase in election security, Trump not only failed to win the popular vote again but couldn’t get the help he expected from Putin.
On November 17, Trump fired Chris Krebs.
The reason: Krebs had not only countered Russian propaganda lies—he had dared to counter Trump’s as well. For example: He rejected Trump’s claims of widespread voter fraud: There “is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised.”
In a November 17 story on the CNN website, CNN reporters Kaitlan Collins and Paul LeBlanc bluntly concluded:
“[Krebs’] dismissal underscores the lengths Trump is willing to go to punish those who don’t adopt his conspiratorial view of the election.
“Since CNN and other outlets called the race for President-elect Joe Biden, Trump has refused to accept the results, instead pushing baseless conspiracies that his second term is being stolen.”
Yet, by depriving Trump of Russian help, Krebs ensured a victory for democracy.
On January 6, the House and Senate counted the Electoral Votes—and pronounced Joseph Biden the winner—bringing an end to Trump’s reign of criminality and treason.
In his 1960 poem, “Conversation With an American Writer,” the Russian poet, Yevgeney Yevtushenko spoke for those Russians who had maintained their integrity in the face of Stalinist terror:
“You have courage,” they tell me.
It’s not true. I was never courageous.
I simply felt it unbecoming
to stoop to the cowardice of my colleagues.
Unfortunately, the same cannot be said of Republicans in the United States Senate and House of Representatives in the face of Trump terror.
2016 PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION, 2020 PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION, ABC NEWS, ACAM SCHIFF, ADOLF HITLER, ALTERNET, AMERICABLOG, AP, BABY BOOMER RESISTANCE, BBC, BLOOMBERG NEWS, BRETT CROZIER, BUZZFEED, CBS NEWS, CHARLES PIERCE, CHRIS KREBS, CNN, CONVERSATION WITH AN AMERICAN WRITER (POEM), CORONAVIRUS, CROOKS AND LIARS, CYBERSECURITY AND INFRASTRUCTURE SECURITY AGENCY, DAILY KOS, DEPARTMENT OF HOMELAND SECURITY, DEPARTMENT OF STATE, DIMITRI SHOSTAKOVICH, DONALD TRUMP, DRUDGE REPORT, ESQUIRE MAGAZINE, FBI, FIVETHIRTYEIGHT, FOX NEWS NETWORK, GREAT TERROR, HARPER’S MAGAZINE, HOUSE INTELLIGENCE COMMITTEE, HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES, HUFFINGTON POST, JOSEPH BIDEN, JOSEPH STALIN, MARIA YOVANOVICH, MEDIA MATTERS, MICROSOFT, MIKHAIL TUKHACHEVESKY, MOTHER JONES, MOVEON, MSNBC, NAZI GERMANY, NBC NEWS, NEW REPUBLIC, NEWSDAY, NEWSWEEK, NICCOLO MACHIAVELLI, NIKITA KHRUSHCHEV, NIKOLAI ZHILAYEV, NPR, PBS NEWSHOUR, POLITICO, POLITICUSUSA, RAW STORY, REUTERS, RUDY GIULIANI, SALON, SEATTLE TIMES, SLATE, SOVIET UNION, TALKING POINTS MEMO, THE ATLANTIC, THE CHICAGO SUN-TIMES, THE CHICAGO TRIBUNE, THE DAILY BEAST, THE DAILY BLOG, THE DISCOURSES, THE GUARDIAN, THE HILL, THE HUFFINGTON POST, THE LOS ANGELES TIMES, THE NATION, THE NEW REPUBLIC, THE NEW YORK TIMES, THE NEW YORKER, THE VILLAGE VOICE, THE WALL STREET JOURNAL, THE WASHINGTON POST, THINKPROGRESS, THOMAS MODLY, TIME, TRUTHDIG, TRUTHOUT, TWITTER, TWO POLITICAL JUNKIES, U.S. NEWS & WORLD REPORT, UKRAINE, UPI, USA TODAY, WEHRMACHT, WONKETTE, WORLD WAR ii, YEVGENEY YEVTUSHENKO
In Bureaucracy, History, Law, Law Enforcement, Military, Politics, Social commentary on March 20, 2024 at 12:16 am
Next up: Nikolai Sergeyvich Zhilayev (pronounced Zill-lay-ev) was a Russian musicologist and the teacher of several 20th-century Russian composers.
Among these: Dimitri Shostakovich (September 25, 1906 – August 9, 1975)
Among his friends—to his ultimate misfortune—was Mikhail Nikolayevich Tukhachevsky, the former military hero now falsely condemned and executed as a traitor by Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin.
In 1938, Zhilayev (November 18, 1881 – January 20, 1938) also became a casualty of what has become known as The Great Terror.
In his posthumously-published memoirs, Testimony, Shostakovich, his pupil and friend, described how Zhilayev faced his end with a calmness that awed even the NKVD (the predecessor to the KGB) secret police sent to arrest him.
Dimitri Shostakovich
“He had a large picture of Tukhachevsky in his room, and after the announcement that Tukhachevsky had been shot as a traitor to the homeland, Zhilayev did not take the picture down.
“I don’t know if I can explain how heroic a deed that was….As soon as the next poor soul was declared an enemy of the people, everyone destroyed in a panic everything connected with that person….
“And naturally, photographs flew into the fire first, because if someone informed on you, reported that you had a picture of an enemy of the people, it meant certain death.
“Zhilayev wasn’t afraid. When they came for him, Tukhachevsky’s prominently hung portrait amazed even the executioners.”
“What, it’s still up?” one of the secret police asked.
“The time will come,” Zhilayev replied, “when they’ll erect a monument to him.”
As, in fact, has happened.
Meanwhile, Stalin has been universally condemned as one of history’s greatest tyrants.
Third hero: Brett Crozier, the former commanding officer of the aircraft carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt.
Graduating from the United States Naval Academy at Annapolis in 1992, he received his Master’s Degree in National Security and Strategic Studies from the Naval War College in 2007.
From 2017 to 2018 he commanded the USS Blue Ridge. In November, 2019, he was given command of the nuclear aircraft carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt.
On March 24, 2020, reports circulated that three members of the crew had tested positive for COVID-19. The next day the number of stricken sailors increased to eight. A few days later, it was “dozens.” The sailors reportedly became ill at sea, two weeks after a port call at Danang, Vietnam.
The initial cases were airlifted to a military hospital. The Roosevelt was ordered to Guam. After the ship docked on March 27, 2020, all 5,000 aboard were ordered to be tested for the virus. But only about 100 stricken sailors were allowed to leave the ship. The rest remained on board.
On March 30, Crozier emailed a four-page internal letter to multiple Naval officials, pleading to have the majority of the crew evacuated and quarantined on shore. Given the crowded sleeping quarters and narrow passageways of the vessel, Crozier wrote that it was impossible to follow social distancing and quarantine procedures:
“This will require a political solution but it is the right thing to do. We are not at war. Sailors do not need to die. If we do not act now, we are failing to properly take care of our most trusted asset—our Sailors….
“This is a necessary risk. Keeping over 4,000 young men and women on board the TR is an unnecessary risk and breaks faith with those Sailors entrusted to our care.”
Brett Crozier
Crozier sent his letter via a non-secure, unclassified email to 20 to 30 recipients, as well as the captain’s immediate chain of command. He reportedly believed that his immediate supervisor would not allow him to send it.
And his superior later confirmed that he would not have allowed Crozier to send it.
On March 31, someone leaked the letter to the San Francisco Chronicle, which published it.
On April 1, the Navy ordered the aircraft carrier evacuated. A skeleton crew of 400 remained aboard to maintain the nuclear reactor, the fire-fighting equipment, and the ship’s galley.
On April 2, Crozier was relieved of command by acting United States Secretary of the Navy Thomas Modly.
By that time, about 114 crew members—out of a total of around 4,000—reportedly tested positive for COVID-19.
As Crozier disembarked, sailors loudly saluted him with a standing ovation: “Cap-tain Cro-zier!”
Modly claimed that Crozier’s letter “raised alarm bells unnecessarily. It undermines our efforts and the chain of command’s efforts to address this problem, and creates a panic and this perception that the Navy’s not on the job, that the government’s not on the job, and it’s just not true.”
Actually, the Trump administration had frittered away January and February, with President Donald Trump giving multiple—and misleading—press conferences. In these, he played down the dangers of COVID-19, saying that “we’re on top of it”—even as the virus spread across the country.
“It was a betrayal. And I can tell you one other thing: because he did that he put it in the public’s forum and it is now a big controversy in Washington, DC,” continued Modly. [Italics added]
This was the United States Navy under Donald Trump—who threw “betrayal” and “treason” at anyone who dared reveal the truth about institutional crimes and failures.
2016 PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION, 2020 PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION, ABC NEWS, ACAM SCHIFF, ADOLF HITLER, ALTERNET, AMERICABLOG, AP, BABY BOOMER RESISTANCE, BBC, BLOOMBERG NEWS, BRETT CROZIER, BUZZFEED, CBS NEWS, CHARLES PIERCE, CHRIS KREBS, CNN, CONVERSATION WITH AN AMERICAN WRITER (POEM), CORONAVIRUS, CROOKS AND LIARS, CYBERSECURITY AND INFRASTRUCTURE SECURITY AGENCY, DAILY KOS, DEPARTMENT OF HOMELAND SECURITY, DEPARTMENT OF STATE, DIMITRI SHOSTAKOVICH, DONALD TRUMP, DRUDGE REPORT, ESQUIRE MAGAZINE, FBI, FIVETHIRTYEIGHT, FOX NEWS NETWORK, GREAT TERROR, HARPER’S MAGAZINE, HOUSE INTELLIGENCE COMMITTEE, HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES, HUFFINGTON POST, JOSEPH BIDEN, JOSEPH STALIN, MARIA YOVANOVICH, MEDIA MATTERS, MICROSOFT, MIKHAIL TUKHACHEVESKY, MOTHER JONES, MOVEON, MSNBC, NAZI GERMANY, NBC NEWS, NEW REPUBLIC, NEWSDAY, NEWSWEEK, NICCOLO MACHIAVELLI, NIKITA KHRUSHCHEV, NIKOLAI ZHILAYEV, NPR, PBS NEWSHOUR, POLITICO, POLITICUSUSA, RAW STORY, REUTERS, RUDY GIULIANI, SALON, SEATTLE TIMES, SLATE, SOVIET UNION, TALKING POINTS MEMO, THE ATLANTIC, THE CHICAGO SUN-TIMES, THE CHICAGO TRIBUNE, THE DAILY BEAST, THE DAILY BLOG, THE DISCOURSES, THE GUARDIAN, THE HILL, THE HUFFINGTON POST, THE LOS ANGELES TIMES, THE NATION, THE NEW REPUBLIC, THE NEW YORK TIMES, THE NEW YORKER, THE VILLAGE VOICE, THE WALL STREET JOURNAL, THE WASHINGTON POST, THINKPROGRESS, THOMAS MODLY, TIME, TRUTHDIG, TRUTHOUT, TWITTER, TWO POLITICAL JUNKIES, U.S. NEWS & WORLD REPORT, UKRAINE, UPI, USA TODAY, WEHRMACHT, WONKETTE, WORLD WAR ii, YEVGENEY YEVTUSHENKO
In Bureaucracy, History, Military, Politics, Social commentary on March 19, 2024 at 12:23 am
…A truly great man is ever the same under all circumstances. And if his fortune varies, exalting him at one moment and oppressing him at another, he himself never varies, but always preserves a firm courage, which is so closely interwoven with his character that everyone can readily see that the fickleness of fortune has no power over him.
The conduct of weak men is very different. Made vain and intoxicated by good fortune, they attribute their success to merits which they do not possess. And this makes them odious and insupportable to all around them. And when they have afterwards to meet a reverse of fortune, they quickly fall into the other extreme, and become abject and vile.
—Niccolo Machiavelli, The Discourses
Four heroes, three villains.
Two of the heroes are Russians; three are Americans.
The villains: One Russian (actually, Georgian); two American.
First up—in order of disappearance: Mikhail Nikolayevich Tukhachevsky (pronounced too-ka-chev-sky).
Tukhachevsky (February 4, 1893 – June 12, 1937) was a major Soviet military leader and theoretician from 1918 to 1937.
He commanded the Soviet Western Front during the Russian-Polish War (1920-21) and served as Chief of Staff of the Red Army (1925-1928).
He fought to modernize Soviet armament, as well as develop airborne, aviation and mechanized forces. Almost singlehandedly, he created the theory of deep operations for Soviet forces.
Mikhail Tukhachevsky
All of these innovations would reap huge dividends when the Soviet Union faced the lethal fury of Adolf Hitler’s Wehrmacht.
In 1936, Tukhachevsky warned Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin that Nazi Germany might attack without warning—and ignite a long and murderous war.
Stalin—the son of a Georgian cobbler—resented Tukhachevsky’s coming from a noble family. A monumental egomaniac, he also hated that Tukhachevesky’s fame rivaled his own.
Warned of the approaching German danger, Stalin shouted: “What are you trying to do—frighten Soviet authority?”
Joseph Stalin
The attack that Tukhachevsky warned against came five years later—on June 22, 1941, leaving at least 26 million Russians dead.
But Tukhachevsky wasn’t alive to command a defense.
The 1930s were a frightening and dangerous time to be alive in the Soviet Union. In 1934, Stalin, seeing imaginary enemies everywhere, ordered a series of purges that lasted right up to the German invasion.
An example of Stalin’s paranoia occurred one day while the dictator walked through the Kremlin corridors with Admiral Ivan Isakov. Officers of the NKVD (the predecessor to the KGB) stood guard at every corner.
“Every time I walk down the corridors,” said Stalin, “I think: Which one of them is it? If it’s this one, he will shoot me in the back. But if I turn the corner, the next one can shoot me in the face.”
In 1937-38, the Red Army fell prey to Stalin’s paranoia.
Its victims included:
- Three of five marshals (five-star generals);
- Thirteen of 15 army commanders (three- and four-star generals);
- Fifty of 57 army corps commanders; and
- One hundred fifty-four out of 186 division commanders.
And heading the list of those marked for death was Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevsky.
Arrested on May 22, 1937, he was interrogated and tortured. As a result, he “confessed” to being a German agent plotting to overthrow Stalin and seize power.
On his confession, which survives in the archives, his bloodstains can clearly be seen.
On June 11, 1937, the Soviet Supreme Court convened a special military tribunal to try Tukhachevsky and eight generals for treason.
It was a sham: The accused were denied defense attorneys, and could not appeal the verdict—-which was foregone: Death.
Within hours of the verdict, Tukhachevsky was summoned from his cell and shot once in the back of the head.
In a Russian version of poetic justice, five of the eight generals who served as Tukhachevsky’s judges were themselves later condemned and executed as traitors.
From 1937 until 1956, Tukhachevsky was officially declared a traitor and fifth-columnist.
Then, on February 25, 1957, Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev delivered his bombshell “Secret Speech” to the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.
In this, he denounced Stalin (who had died in 1953) as a ruthless tyrant responsible for the slaughter of millions of innocent men, women and children. He condemned Stalin for creating a “personality cult” around himself, and for so weakening the Red Army that Nazi Germany was able to easily overrun half of the Soviet Union from 1941 to 1943.
On January 31, 1957, Tukhachevsky and his co-defendants were declared innocent of all charges and were “rehabilitated.”
Today, he is once again—rightly—considered a Russian hero and military genius. And Stalin is universally—and rightly—seen as a blood-stained tyrant.
Postage stamp honoring Mikhail Tukhachevsky
Next hero: Nikolai Sergeyvich Zhilayev (pronounced Zill-lay-ev)
Zhilayev (November 18, 1881 – January 20, 1938) was a Russian musicologist and the teacher of several 20th-century Russian composers. Among these: Dimitri Shostakovich.
Zhilayev, a member of the Russian Academy of Art-Sciences, taught at the Moscow Conservatory. Among his friends—to his ultimate misfortune—was Mikhail Tukhachevsky.
In 1938, he, too, became a casualty of what has become known as The Great Terror.
In his posthumously-published memoirs, Testimony, Shostakovich, his pupil and friend, described how Zhilayev faced his end with a calmness that awed even the NKVD secret police sent to arrest him.
2016 PRESIDENTIAL CAMPAIGN, 2020 PRESIDENTIAL CAMPAIGN, ABC NEWS, ADOLF HITLER, ALTERNET, ANCIENT GREECE, ANCIENT ROME, AP, BERNIE SANDERS, BUZZFEED, CATASTROPHE, CBS NEWS, CHINA, CNN, CONSUMER PROTECTION, CORPORATE TAXES, CORRUPTION, CROOKS AND LIARS, DAILY KOZ, DEMOCRATIC PARTY, DONALD TRUMP, EXECUTIVE PAYWATCH, FORBES, FUNDRAISING, HILLARY CLINTON, INCOME INEQUALITY, IVAN THE TERRIBLE, JOE BIDEN, JOSEPH STALIN, LEON TROTSKY, MOTHER JONES, MOVEON, MSNBC, NAZI GERMANY, NBC NEWS, NEWSWEEK, NICCOLO MACHIAVELLI, NPR, PBS NEWSHOUR, POLITICO, RAW STORY, REUTERS, ROBERT PAYNE, SALON, SEATTLE TIMES, SLATE, SPARTACUS, THE ATLANTIC, THE CHICAGO SUN-TIMES, THE CHICAGO TRIBUNE, THE CORRUPT SOCIETY (BOOK), THE DAILY BEAST, THE DISCOURSES, THE FRENCH REVOLUTION, THE GREAT LEVELER (BOOK), THE GUARDIAN, THE HILL, THE HUFFINGTON POST, THE LOS ANGELES TIMES, THE NATION, THE NEW YORK TIMES, THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION, THE WASHINGTON POST, TIME, U.S. NEWS & WORLD REPORT, UPI, USA TODAY, VIOLENCE, Vladimir Lenin, WALL STREET, WALTER SCHEIDEL, WATERGATE, WEALTH GAP, WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, WINSTON CHURCHILL, X
In Bureaucracy, Business, History, Law, Politics, Social commentary on March 8, 2024 at 12:12 am
The gap between rich and poor in the United States has never been greater.
A May 1, 2018 article in Forbes—which bills itself as “The Capitalist Tool”—vividly documents this truth.
“In the 1950s, a typical CEO made 20 times the salary of his or her average worker. Last year, [2017] CEO pay at an S&P 500 Index firm soared to an average of 361 times more than the average rank-and-file worker, or pay of $13,940,000 a year, according to an AFL-CIO’s Executive Paywatch news release today.”
Since 1978, the CEO pay among America’s 300 biggest companies has gone up 1,460%, while the typical worker’s pay grew by just 18%
This would not have been news to Niccolo Machiavelli, the father of modern political science. In his masterwork, The Discourses, he observed the human condition as that of constant struggle:
Niccolo Machiavelli
It was a saying of ancient writers, that men afflict themselves in evil, and become weary of the good, and that both these dispositions produce the same effects.
For when men are no longer obliged to fight from necessity, they fight from ambition, which passion is so powerful in the hearts of men that it never leaves them, no matter to what height they may rise.
The reason for this is that nature has created men so that they desire everything, but are unable to attain it. Desire being thus always greater than the faculty of acquiring, discontent with what they have and dissatisfaction with themselves result from it.
This causes the changes in their fortunes—for as some men desire to have more, while others fear to lose what they have, enmities and war are the consequences. And this brings about the ruin of one province and the elevation of another.
Author Walter Scheidel, Dickason Professor in the Humanities, Professor of Classics and History at Stanford University, has also given this subject a great deal of thought. And, like Machiavelli, he has reached some highly disturbing conclusions.
Walter Scheidel
World Economic Forum [CC BY-SA 2.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)%5D
He gave voice to these in his 2017 book, The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality from the Stone Age to the Twenty-First Century. His thesis: Only violence and catastrophes have consistently reduced inequality throughout history.
According to the book’s jacket blurb: “Are mass violence and catastrophes the only forces that can seriously decrease economic inequality? To judge by thousands of years of history, the answer is yes.
“Tracing the global history of inequality from the Stone Age to today, Walter Scheidel shows that inequality never dies peacefully. Inequality declines when carnage and disaster strike and increases when peace and stability return.
“The Great Leveler is the first book to chart the crucial role of violent shocks in reducing inequality over the full sweep of human history around the world.
“Ever since humans began to farm, herd livestock, and pass on their assets to future generations, economic inequality has been a defining feature of civilization. Over thousands of years, only violent events have significantly lessened inequality.
“The ‘Four Horsemen’ of leveling—-mass-mobilization warfare, transformative revolutions, state collapse, and catastrophic plagues—have repeatedly destroyed the fortunes of the rich.
“Scheidel identifies and examines these processes, from the crises of the earliest civilizations to the cataclysmic world wars and communist revolutions of the twentieth century.
“Today, the violence that reduced inequality in the past seems to have diminished, and that is a good thing. But it casts serious doubt on the prospects for a more equal future.”
Revolutionaries have known the truth of Scheidel’s findings from the gladiators’ revolt of Spartacus (73-71 B.C.) to the French Revolution (1789 – 1799) to the overthrow of the Czarist Romanov dynasty (1917).
But American politicians serenely ignore that truth. They depend on the mega-rich for millions of dollars in “campaign contributions”—which pay for self-glorifying ads on TV.
Thus, in 2016, American voters had a “choice” between two “love-the-rich” Presidential candidates: Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. The result was that millions stayed home or voted in protest for third-party candidates who had no chance of winning.
In his 1975 book, The Corrupt Society: From Ancient Greece to Modern-day America, British historian Robert Payne warned that the predatory rich would not change their behavior: “Nor is there any likelihood that the rich will plow back their money into services to ensure the general good.
“They have rarely demonstrated social responsibility, and they are much more likely to hold on to their wealth at all costs than to renounce any part of it.
“Like the tyrant who lives in a world wholly remote from the world of the people, shielded and protected from all possible influences, the rich are usually the last to observe the social pressures rising from below, and when these social pressures reach flashpoint, it is too late to call in the police or the army.
“The tyrant dies; the police and the army go over to the revolutionaries; and the new government dispossesses the rich by decree. A single authoritative sentence suffices to expunge all private wealth and restore it to the service of the nation.”
2020 PRESIDENTIAL CAMPAIGN, ABC NEWS, ADOLF HITLER, ALTERNET, ANCIENT GREECE, ANCIENT ROME, AP, BERNIE SANDERS, BUZZFEED, CBS NEWS, CHINA, CNN, CONSUMER PROTECTION, CORPORATE TAXES, CORRUPTION, CROOKS AND LIARS, DAILY KOZ, DEMOCRATIC PARTY, FUNDRAISING, INCOME INEQUALITY, IVAN THE TERRIBLE, JOE BIDEN, JOSEPH STALIN, LEON TROTSKY, MOTHER JONES, MOVEON, MSNBC, NAZI GERMANY, NBC NEWS, NEWSWEEK, NICCOLO MACHIAVELLI, NPR, PBS NEWSHOUR, POLITICO, RAW STORY, REUTERS, ROBERT PAYNE, SALON, SEATTLE TIMES, SLATE, THE ATLANTIC, THE CHICAGO SUN-TIMES, THE CHICAGO TRIBUNE, THE DAILY BEAST, THE DISCOURSES, THE GREAT LEVELER, THE GUARDIAN, THE HILL, THE HUFFINGTON POST, THE LOS ANGELES TIMES, THE NATION, THE NEW YORK TIMES, THE WASHINGTON POST, TIME, U.S. NEWS & WORLD REPORT, UPI, USA TODAY, Vladimir Lenin, WALL STREET, WALTER SCHEIDEL, WATERGATE, WEALTH GAP, WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, WINSTON CHURCHILL, X
In Bureaucracy, Business, History, Law, Politics, Social commentary on March 7, 2024 at 12:11 am
Americans are used to Presidential candidates telling lies (euphemistically known as “campaign promises”) to get elected.
But when a candidate actually (and usually accidentally) tells the truth, the results can be electrifying.
A pointed example:
On June 18, 2019, Democratic Presidential candidate and front-runner Joe Biden addressed a roomful of donors in New York. Money is, after all, the lifeblood of all political campaigns, and Biden wanted to guarantee he got more of it than any of his 23 Democratic rivals.
So the former vice president had a message he felt sure would appeal to his well-heeled audience of billionaires: Don’t worry, if I’m elected, your standard of living won’t change.
Joe Biden
Addressing the 100 or so guests at a fundraiser at the Carlyle Hotel in New York City, Biden said that he had taken heat from “some of the people on my team, on the Democratic side” because he had said that rich people were “just as patriotic as poor people.
“The truth of the matter is, you all, you all know, you all know in your gut what has to be done. We can disagree in the margins but the truth of the matter is it’s all within our wheelhouse and nobody has to be punished. No one’s standard of living will change, nothing would fundamentally change,” he said.
And he added: “I mean, we may not want to demonize anybody who has made money.
“When we have income inequality as large as we have in the United States today, it brews and ferments political discord and basic revolution. Not a joke. Not a joke. It allows demagogues to step in and say the reason where we are is because of the ‘other’….
“You’re not the other. I need you very badly. I hope if I win this nomination, I won’t let you down. I promise you. I have a bad reputation, I always say what I mean. The problem is I sometimes say all that I mean.”
Biden talked about decreasing income inequality and promoting workers’ rights. But he took a moderate stance when it came to taxation.
Vermont United States Senator Bernie Sanders, on the other hand, has attacked the ultra-rich as responsible for the ever-widening gap between themselves and the poor.
Bernie Sanders
Palácio do Planalto from Brasilia, Brasil, CC BY 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
“I love Bernie, but I’m not Bernie Sanders. I don’t think 500 billionaires are the reason why we’re in trouble,” Biden said in March.
Instead, he proposed expanding tax credits for the poor and middle class, and making the tax code less friendly to rich investors.
Robert Payne, the distinguished British historian, had a different—and darker—view of the rich.
Payne authored more than 110 books. Among his subjects were Adolf Hitler, Ivan the Terrible, Winston Churchill, Joseph Stalin, Vladimir Lenin, William Shakespeare and Leon Trotsky.
In 1975, he published The Corrupt Society: From Ancient Greece to Present-Day America. It proved a summary of many of his previous works.
Among the epochs it covered were the civilizations of ancient Greece, Rome and China; Nazi Germany; the Soviet Union; and Watergate-era America. And the massive corruption each of those epochs had spawned.
In his chapter, “A View of the Uncorrupted Society,” Payne warned: Power and wealth are the main sources of corruption.
“The rich, simply by being rich, are infected with corruption. Their overwhelming desire is to grow richer, but they can do this only at the expense of those who are poorer than themselves.
”Their interests conflict with those of the overall society. They live sheltered from the constant anxieties of the poor, and thus cannot understand them. Nor do they try to.
“They see the poor as alien from themselves, and thus come to fear and despise them. And their wealth and influence enables them to buy politicians—who, in turn, write legislation that protects the rich from the poor.”
But Payne foresaw an even greater danger from the rich and powerful than their mere isolation from the rest of society: “The mere presence of the rich is corrupting. Their habits, their moral codes, their delight in conspicuous consumption are permanent affronts to the rest of humanity. Vast inequalities of wealth are intolerable in any decent society.”
Writing in 1975, Payne noted that a third of the private wealth was possessed by less than five percent of the population—while about a fifth of the populace lived at the poverty level. By 2000, he predicted, about five percent of the population would possess two-thirds of America’s wealth. And more than half the population would be near or below the starvation level.
The result could only be catastrophe. The only way to halt this this increasing concentration of wealth by fewer people would be through law or violent revolution.
Payne has proven to be an uncanny prophet.
On December 8, 2017, the Seattle Times noted that the wealthiest one percent of Americans owned 40% of the country’s wealth. They owned more wealth than the bottom 90% combined.
From 2013, the share of wealth owned by the one percent increased by nearly three percentage points. Wealth owned by the bottom 90%, meanwhile, fell over the same period.
But this situation need not remain permanent.
Bureaucracybuster's Blog 
ABC NEWS, AL QAEDA, ALTERNET, AMERICABLOG, AP, BABY BOOMER RESISTANCE, BARACK OBAMA, BBC, BLOOMBERG, BRUSSELS, BUZZFEED, CBS NEWS, CIA, CNN, CROOKS AND LIARS, DAILY KOS, DONALD TRUMP, EDUARDO "TED" CRUZ, FBI, FIVETHIRTYEIGHT, GUANTANAMO, HARPER’S MAGAZINE, HUFFINGTON POST, ISLAM, ISLAMIC STATE OF IRAQ AND SYRIA (ISIS), MEDIA MATTERS, MOTHER JONES, MOVEON, MSNBC, NBC NEWS, NEW REPUBLIC, NEWSDAY, NEWSWEEK, NEWT GINGRICH, NICCOLO MACHIAVELLI, NPR, PARIS, PBS NEWSHOUR, PENTAGON, POLITICO, POLITICUSUSA, RAW STORY, REUTERS, RICK SANTORUM, RUDLOPH GIULIANI, RUDOLPH GIULIANI, SALON, SAN BERNADINO, SEATTLE TIMES, SLATE, SUPREME COURT, TALKING POINTS MEMO, TERRORISM, THE ATLANTIC, THE CHICAGO SUN-TIMES, THE CHICAGO TRIBUNE, THE DAILY BEAST, THE DAILY BLOG, THE DISCOURSES, THE GUARDIAN, THE HILL, THE HUFFINGTON POST, THE INTERCEPT, THE LOS ANGELES TIMES, THE NATION, THE NEW REPUBLIC, THE NEW YORK TIMES, THE NEW YORKER, THE VILLAGE VOICE, THE WASHINGTON POST, THINKPROGRESS, TIME, TORTURE, TRUTHDIG, TRUTHOUT, TWO POLITICAL JUNKIES, U.S. NEWS & WORLD REPORT, UPI, USA TODAY, WATERBOARDING, X
DOES TORTURE WORK?: PART TWO (END)
In Bureaucracy, History, Law, Law Enforcement, Military, Politics, Social commentary on June 26, 2024 at 12:11 amDonald Trump made a return to waterboarding terrorism suspects a prime issue in his campaign for the 2016 Republican Presidential nomination.
And a March 30, 2016 Reuters/lpsos poll showed that nearly two-thirds of Americans believed that the use of torture could be justified to force suspected terrorists to talk.
A growing fear by Americans of Islamic terrorism had been ignited by a series of deadly Islamic terrorist attacks in Europe and the United States.
Frightening a prisoner in Iraq
In fact, however, torture, generally, and waterboarding in particular, have proven worthless at obtaining reliable information.
Victims will say anything they think their captors want to hear to stop the agony.
Yoshia Chee, a Special Forces veteran of Vietnam, recalled his use of torture against suspected Vietcong:
“One of the favorite things was popping one of their eyeballs out with a spoon….
“If I had one of my eyeballs hanging out, I’d say I killed Kennedy. I’d agree to anything in the whole world.
“We would do that, and they still wouldn’t talk….You rarely got anything out of them. Just more hatred. More reason to fight back.”
Click here: Strange Ground: An Oral History Of Americans In Vietnam, 1945-1975: Harry Maurer: 9780306808395: Amazon.com: Books
During the George W. Bush Presidency, the CIA relied on harsh physical punishments—beatings, humiliations and waterboarding—to convince suspects to talk. These were euphemistically referred to as “enhanced interrogation techniques.”
Upon assuming the Presidency in 2009, Barack Obama ordered an immediate halt to such methods. Since then, Republicans generally and their Presidential aspirants in particular have harshly criticized Obama’s decision.
Like Trump, they claimed that Obama had endangered American security in the name of Political Correctness. In turn, Obama argued that the use of torture produces unreliable information and inflames Muslim hatred of America.
Meanwhile, the FBI applied its traditional “kill them with kindness” approach to interrogation. And agents found this yielded far greater results.
For one thing, most Al Qaeda members relished appearing before grand juries.
Unlike organized crime members, they were talkative—and even tried to proselytize to the jury members. They were proud of what they had done—and wanted to talk.
“This is what the FBI does,” said Mike Rolince, an FBI expert on counter-terrorism. “Nearly 100% of the terrorists we’ve taken into custody have confessed. The CIA wasn’t trained. They don’t do interrogations.”
According to The Threat Matrix: The FBI at War in the Age of Global Terror (2011) jihadists had been taught to expect severe torture at the hands of American interrogators.
Writes Author Garrett M. Graff:
“Often, in the FBI’s experience, their best cooperation came when detainees realized they weren’t going to get tortured, that the United States wasn’t the Great Satan. Interrogators were figuring out…that not playing into Al Qaeda’s propaganda could produce victories.”
And the FBI isn’t alone in believing that acts of simple humanity can turn even sworn enemies into allies.
No less an authority on “real-politick” than Niccolo Machiavelli reached the same conclusion more than 500 years ago.
In his small and notorious book, The Prince, he writes about the methods a ruler must use to gain power. But in his larger and lesser-known masterwork, The Discourses, he outlines the ways that liberty can be maintained in a republic.
Niccolo Machiavelli
For Machiavelli, only a well-protected state can hope for peace and prosperity. Toward that end, he wrote at length about the best ways to succeed militarily. And in war, humanity can prevail at least as often as inhumanity.
Consider the following example from The Discourses:
Camillus [a Roman general] was besieging the city of the Faliscians, and had surrounded it….A teacher charged with the education of the children of some of the noblest families of that city [to ingratiate himself] with Camillus and the Romans, led these children…into the Roman camp.
And presenting them to Camillus [the teacher] said to him: “By means of these children as hostages, you will be able to compel the city to surrender.”
Camillus not only declined the offer but had the teacher stripped and his hands tied behind his back….[Then Camillus] had a rod put into the hands of each of the children…[and] directed them to whip [the teacher] all the way back to the city.
Upon learning this fact, the citizens of Faliscia were so much touched by the humanity and integrity of Camillus, that they surrendered the place to him without any further defense.
This example shows that an act of humanity and benevolence will at all times have more influence over the minds of men than violence and ferocity.
It also proves that provinces and cities which no armies…could conquer, have yielded to an act of humanity, benevolence, chastity or generosity.
This truth should be remembered whenever Right-wingers brag about their patriotism and willingness to “get tough“ with America’s enemies.
Many—like Newt Gingrich, Rudolph Giuliani, Rick Santorum, Eduardo “Ted” Cruz and Donald Trump—strenuously avoided military service. These “chickenhawks” talk tough and are always ready to send others into battle—but keep themselves well out of harm’s way.
Such men are not merely contemptible; they are dangerous.
Share this: