On Friendship

 

On Friendship

Peter Schultz

 

            In her book Aristotle and the Philosophy of Friendship, Lorraine Smith Pangle writes the following on Montaigne’s and Aristotle’s understanding of friendship as perhaps the greatest good:

 

“But perhaps the very core of friendship’s goodness has nothing to do with comfort and assistance, and lies in the simple, irreducible sweetness of intimacy itself, to which Montaigne directs our attention and which Aristotle also acknowledges. The sweetness is the sweetness of expanded aliveness, an expanded sense of being, that comes with knowing and cherishing, with being known and cherished, with the vicarious but vivid experience of another’s being, and the enhanced awareness of one’s own. Such intimacy, in its peak moments, is always in some degree physical….and is always riveted in the present moment. Past, present, and all distractions melt away; one is simply there, with one’s whole being, with another, with his whole being.” [pp. 70-71]

 

            Friendship as a pathway to being, one’s own and that of another. And I wonder if Jane Austin, for example, isn’t writing about friendship or love in this sense, against which the glory of the British monarchy, its aristocracy, and its empire loses its glow.

Musings Aroused by Triple Course

 

Musings Aroused by Triple Cross

Peter Schultz

 

            Here are some musings that were aroused in me by the book by Peter Lance, Triple Cross: How Bin Laden’s Master Spy Penetrated the CIA, the Green Berets, and the FBI.

 

            Basic question: Why did the FBI, for example, have such a difficult time “connecting the dots” regarding al Qaeda, bin Laden, and Ali Mohamed? Because the FBI created those “dots” in the first place. Creating “dots” was how the FBI did its job and, of course, as dots, they are disconnected, as intended. Why create disconnected dots? Because that’s how the FBI as a bureaucracy operates. It creates “cases” which are in fact abstractions that consist of some facts. Turning Ali Mohamed into “a case file” requires abstracting from the “real,” or a more complete Mohamed. His true significance is easily lost sight of once he has been turned into “a case.” And his connections to others, his connections to al Qaeda tend to disappear or be overlooked.

 

            The FBI made, for example, Martin Luther King, Jr. into a case. It did that in order to be able to keep eyes on him, to watch him, and catalogue his actions. Of course, King’s relationship to American society and American history, and especially to the black community, disappeared or was lost sight of by proceeding this way. He became “a dot,” and though attempts were made to connect this “dot” to his social and political context, that is, to find out if he was a communist, those dots were never successfully connected. Once dots are created, it is difficult then to connect them, primarily because the dots were created to be disconnected so they may be seen more clearly.

 

            Further, the purpose of creating “cases” is to solve them, which usually means to use them to arrest people and then convict them. When this happens, success is declared, which is what one FBI agent declared upon the conviction of those involved in the Bojinka trial. FBI special agent Pellegrino declared: “It’s over. We won!” The FBI had been successful. But apparently, Pellegrino didn’t appreciate that the FBI had actually “won” very little because other members of al Qaeda, other “dots,” would replace those who had been convicted and the war against the United States would go on. Just as, of course, it did in Kenya, Tanzania, Yemen, and eventually on 9/11. What Pellegrino lost sight of, because in his mind he was dealing with “dots” and “cases,” was that those “dots” that were successfully dealt with in “a case" were connected to an organization. That is, they weren’t just dots, and the case was an abstraction that actually helped hide “real reality.” By winning the case, the United States was not any closer to winning the war against al Qaeda. In other words, the US could win its cases but still lose the war to al Qaeda, just as the US could win battle after battle in Iraq, and still not win the war.  

Being and Politics

 

Being and Politics

Peter Schultz

 

Is life about “being?” Do humans search for “being” (or the beautiful, or the good)? Do humans search for “being” via politics, and thus may be described as “political animals?” Does this help explain the intensity of politics in that humans equate their politics with their very being, as expressions of their “being”? Being “un-American” is about the worst thing an American can be charged with.

 

Alternative search for being is by way of “Jerusalem.” Hence, “Athens” v. Jerusalem. Is “Athens” superior because it recognizes the legitimacy of “Jerusalem’s” search for being, whereas “Jerusalem” denies the legitimacy of “Athens” search and the conflict with it? Some in Jerusalem’s camp recognize the legitimacy of that conflict, Maimonides, Alfarabi. Zionism does not, being a political expression of being. It is as inadequate or dangerous as any other political expression of being.

 

The Americans offered the Vietnamese peace, prosperity, freedom, and democracy but did so at the expense of their being Vietnamese. But as Vietnamese history illustrates, being Vietnamese, for example, by resisting Chinese invasions, trumps peace and even prosperity. In other words, if the price of peace, prosperity, freedom, and democracy is to give up one’s being, then that price is too high – even in Kansas. And some Muslims say the same thing to Americans. But Americans don’t hear this because they are unaware that life is about being [by the way, that’s a philosophical problem, ala’ Ms. Cherry]. Moreover, if this is so, then the Enlightenment project is doomed one way or another because it denies that life is about being [which brings us To Where the Wasteland Ends and the single vision].

On Being Political

 

On Being Political

Peter Schultz

 

            Aristotle argued that human beings are political animals. And this means, I think, that humans express their being politically. “American” is a political expression of being, which seems to us a weird notion.

 

            But notice human behavior. In a once well-read book, What’s the Matter with Kansas?, the question was asked because Kansans were voting in ways that conflicted with their interests, especially their economic interests. But why were they doing so? I would argue because they were voting as they thought Americans should vote, thereby they were voting to be Americans. So, if their economic interests conflicted with their “American-ness”, and being political animals and not economic animals, they voted against their economic interests deliberately, if not quite consciously. And, so, if by pointing out that Kansans were voting against their economic interests, you think that this news will change votes, you are mistaken. Political appeals will always trump economic political appeals.

 

            So will political appeals always trump philosophic appeals. Jefferson wrote that “We hold these truths to be self-evident,” but it wasn’t those truths that led to the American revolution. It was the budding American nationalism; that is, it was the emerging American “being-ness.” Americans were becoming or had become “a people,” distinct from the British people, deserving of their own political order, and were even willing to engage in treasonous war for that American “being-ness.”

 

            So, the promises of peace and prosperity, of freedom and democracy pitched to the Vietnamese by Americans in order “to win their hearts and minds” had to fail because such things can’t compare to being Vietnamese. The Vietnamese had been expressing themselves, expressing their being politically against the Chinese for centuries, sometimes successfully, sometimes not. But being Vietnamese trumped the peace and the prosperity promised by both the Chinese and the Americans. Because the Americans did not understand this, they could not understand why they were doomed to lose that war.  

The Farcical War on Terror: Afghanistan

 

The Farcical War on Terror: Afghanistan

Peter Schultz

 

            Some passages from Anand Gopal’s book No Good Men Among the Living:

 

            “In December 2001, an American Special Operations Forces unit pulled into an old Soviet airbase on the outskirts of Kandahar city. They were accompanied by a team of Afghan militiamen and their commander, a gregarious, grizzly bear of a man named Gul Agra Sherzai, an anti-Taliban warlord…. In return for privileged access to American dollars, Sherzai delivered one thing US forces felt they needed most: intelligence. His men became the Americans’ eyes and ears in their drive to eradicate the Taliban and al-Qaeda from Kandahar. Yet here lay the contradiction. Following the Taliban’s collapse, al-Qaeda had fled the country, resettling in the tribal regions of Pakistan and in Iran. By April 2002, the group could be no longer be found in Kandahar – or anywhere else in Afghanistan. The Taliban, meanwhile, had ceased to exist, its members having retired to their homes and surrendered their weapons. Save for a few lone wolf attacks, the US forces in Kandahar in 2002 faced no resistant at all…yet US special forces were on Afghan soil with a clear political mandate: defeat terrorism.

 

            “How do you fight a war without an adversary? Enter Gul Agra Sherzai – and men like him around the country. They would create enemies where there were none, exploiting the perverse incentive mechanism that the Americans – without even realizing it – had put in place. Sherzai’s enemies became America’s enemies, his battles its battles. His personal feuds and jealousies were repackaged as ‘counterterrorism’….” [pp.107 & 109]

 

            This meant that Afghanis who were supporting America and the Karzai government were being targeted by American forces, killed, captured, tortured, and sent to Guantanamo. In late January 2002, American Green Beret forces attacked a schoolhouse that housed several supporters of the Karzai government. Neither the Americans nor the Afghan government officials realized who they were fighting but “Either way, every official was killed. In twenty minutes, the violence was over.” [122]  

 

            At least that violence was over, because down the road from the schoolhouse was the governor’s compound, which housed the locally appointed governor, Tawilder Yunis and his allies. The Americans rushed in, and the battle began with Yunis telling his allies that the Americans were “our friends.” Well, not so much. One sixteen-year-old boy was found later with a bullet in his head.

 

            “The survivors of both attacks were rounded up and loaded into helicopters…. In the governor’s compound, they found that the attackers had left behind a calling card. Emblazoned with the symbol of an American flag, it bore a handwritten message: ‘Have a nice day. From Damage, Inc.’”

 

            The death toll from the two attacks were twenty-one pro-American leaders, twenty-six taken prisoners, and some who couldn’t be accounted for. There were no members of either the Taliban or al-Qaeda among the dead or the survivors. “Instead, in a single thirty-minute stretch the US had managed to eradicate both of Khas Urozgan’s potential governments, the core of any future anti-Taliban leadership – stalwarts who had outlasted the Russian invasion, the civil war, and the Taliban years but would not survive their own allies.” [123-24]

Oozing Patriotism and Blood

 

The Age of Betrayal: Oozing Patriotism and Blood

Peter Schultz

 

             A quotation from Jack Beatty’s book, The Age of Betrayal: The Triumph of Money in America, 1865-1900:

 

            “Besides God’s revelation to McKinley of the destiny of the American branch of the ‘Anglo-Saxon race’ to rule over ‘weaker races,’ industrial capitalism drove expansion….The home market could not soak up the overspill….Plundering Africa and Asia for customers and raw materials, the European powers showed brooding class Americans they had company in fearing confinement – and in seeing trade as a hedge against unemployment and discontent at home, imperialism as a solvent for radicalism…’We escape the menace and peril of socialism and agrarianism, as England escaped them, by a policy of colonization and conquest,’ Henry Watterson, the editor of the Louisville Courier-Journal, told a New York reporter the month Teddy Roosevelt and his Rough Riders charged up San Juan Hill. Oozing patriotism and blood, farm boys were safe from Populism.” [pp. 388-389]

How Many Americans?

 

How Many Americans?

Peter Schultz

 

 

 

How many Americans can entertain the thought that MLK, Jr. was correct when he said that the US was greatest purveyor of death and destruction in the world? How many Americans can entertain, even momentarily, that RFK, Jr. was correct when he asserted that his uncle, JFK, was assassinated by otherwise legitimate parts of the US government, like the CIA? Do you think that that number might be just about as many Germans in the 1930s could entertain the thought that Jews were being transported to extermination camps? Just wondering.