Daily Archives: 29 April 2012

Machiavelli’s “The Prince” — a review

A review by my friend Andy Duncan:

open quote Machiavelli offers advice for imperial aggressors on how they should conquer a Muslim state:

But if once the Turk has been vanquished and broken in battle so that he cannot raise new armies, there is nothing to worry about except the ruler’s family. When that has been wiped out there is no one left to fear, because the others have no credit with the people.

So, capture Saddam Hussein and kill his sons. But once we achieve that, what do we do next with a former Muslim leader’s country:

When states newly acquired as I said have been accustomed to living freely under their own laws, there are three ways to hold them securely: first, by devastating them; next, by going there and living there in person; thirdly, by letting them keep their own laws, exacting tribute, and setting up an oligarchy which will keep the state friendly to you.

So, set up an interim appointed government and eventual elections guaranteed to keep the interim appointed government in place, with good options on the oil supply made out to your business friends. But what do we do about a possibly resentful population?

Violence must be inflicted once and for all; people will then forget what it tastes like and so be less resentful. Benefits must be conferred gradually; and in that way they will taste better.

Ah, yes. Gradually re-establish the water and the electricity supplies, then link in the ‘election’ of your interim appointed government to coincide with further improvements, so as to keep this government in place and suitably disposed towards yourself.

But we should avoid blaming Machiavelli for our own modern world. It is our politicians who have created it, not this wonderful Florentine writer. He was just telling it like it was. Many of his views even coincided with our own:

The main foundations of every state, new states as well as ancient or composite ones, are good laws and good arms; and because you cannot have good laws without good arms, and where there are good arms, good laws inevitably follow…Rome and Sparta endured for many centuries, armed and free. The Swiss are strongly armed and completely free.

His belief in the sanctity of arms would even have stood comparison with the National Rifle Association:

There is simply no comparison between a man who is armed and one who is not. It is unreasonable to expect that an armed man should obey one who is unarmed, or that an unarmed man should remain safe and secure when his servants are armed.

So next time you hear your local police calling themselves public servants, ask yourself who has the guns, and who has the power. close quote (Read more)

the Trotskyite roots of the National Review and ‘neo’ conservatism

open quote Have you ever used the term “Islamofascist?”

Do you get excited when some politician gets up on his hind legs and starts babbling about “American exceptionalism?”

You, too, may be a Trotskyite.

. . . .

The typical American wannabe conservative does not want to think too deeply about why a supposedly right-wing publication would get so worked up about a piece of writing that offends liberal sensibilities.

That wannabe conservative has been brainwashed by the heirs of old Leo.

I get these pests commenting constantly on my blog. They parrot the neocon line about spreading human liberation to every corner of the Earth without even realizing that every word of it has been planted in their brains by Trotskyites.

Here on the Lew Rockwell blog is a good explanation of the roots of “neo” conservatism in the thought of Trotsky:

From the anti-Stalinists who became conservatives — including James Burnham, Whittaker Chambers, and Irving Kristol — the Right gained a political education and, in some cases, an injection of passion. The ex-radicals brought with them the knowledge that ideological movements must have journals and magazines to articulate their perspectives. In 1955, for example, William F. Buckley, Jr., launched National Review at the urging of Willi Schlamm, a former German Communist. In its early years, National Review was largely written and edited by the Buckley family and a handful of former Communists, Trotskyists, and socialists, such as Burnham and Chambers.

Read the whole thing. Then you will get some understanding of why NR seemed conservative at a time when worldwide communism was a real threat but now seems so liberal. By “liberal” of course I mean in favor of the sort of big-government, centralized state that the Republicans created under George W. Bush.

You can see why these NR types feel so threatened by Ron Paul. He represents a return to the small-government, decentralized conservatism popular before the Trotskyites took over the American “right.”

They’re much happier with a hack like Newt Gingrich who can stir up the masses to concentrate even more power in Washington. They can overlook his support for cap-and-trade and the individual mandate as long as he pushes their internationalist foreign policy. close quote (Read more)

The pro-choice case for infanticide

open quote Just when you thought the religious right couldn’t get any crazier, with its personhood amendments and its attacks on contraception, here comes the academic left with an even crazier idea: after-birth abortion.

No, I didn’t make this up. “Partial-birth abortion” is a term invented by pro-lifers. But “after-birth abortion” is a term invented by two philosophers, Alberto Giubilini and Francesca Minerva. In the Journal of Medical Ethics, they propose:

[W]hen circumstances occur after birth such that they would have justified abortion, what we call after-birth abortion should be permissible. … [W]e propose to call this practice ‘after-birth abortion’, rather than ‘infanticide,’ to emphasize that the moral status of the individual killed is comparable with that of a fetus … rather than to that of a child. Therefore, we claim that killing a newborn could be ethically permissible in all the circumstances where abortion would be. Such circumstances include cases where the newborn has the potential to have an (at least) acceptable life, but the well-being of the family is at risk.

close quote (Read more)