Claude Lévi-Strauss

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Claude Lévi-Strauss (born November 28, 1908) is a French anthropologist who influenced a wide range of social and aesthetic studies from the 1960s on, through his advocacy of a method usually called structuralism.

He was born in Brussels and studied philosophy in Paris. In 1934, he was teaching at a secondary school in France when he was offered a post as Professor of Sociology at the University of São Paulo in Brazil, on the provision that he give his answer within three hours. He spent the next five years in Brazil, during which he made extensive field trips into remote areas of the country.

Much later, he explained his decision by saying, "I became an anthropologist, as a matter of fact not because I was interested in anthropology, but because I was trying to get out of philosophy." In considering philosophy, he felt he was stopping half-way – confining himself to the established Western tradition – while anthropology seemed to offer a chance to explore the fullest range of human thought.

But what immediately struck him in the anthropological literature was a baffling welter of marriage customs. They couldn't be entirely meaningless, because versions of the same custom appeared all over the world, and yet their variety made the idea of consistent purpose seem absurd. His effort at structural analysis was an attempt to get these data in order. This theoretical work, combined with his field research, became the basis for the papers which brought him a reputation in the American branch of the discipline.

He returned to France for military service but, as a Jew, was forced to leave again when Germany occupied the country. He spent three years teaching at the New School for Social Research in New York City and, from 1946 to 1947, was cultural attaché to the French embassy in Washington, DC.

He returned to France in 1948 to become Professor of Ethnology at the University of Paris, assumed the Chair of Social Anthropology at the Collège de France in 1959, and held a series of other academic posts until his retirement.

His Brazilian field work is reflected in The Elementary Structures of Kinship (1949) and Tristes Tropiques (1955), which is a more contemplative and literary work. The major works of the 1960s and 1970s, when his influence was greatest, are the four volumes called Mythologies.

His theoretical views are set forth in Structural Anthropology (1958). Briefly, he considers culture a system of symbolic communication, to be investigated with methods that others have used more narrowly in the discussion of novels, political speeches, sports, and movies.

His reasoning makes best sense against the background of an earlier generation's social theory. He wrote about this relationship for decades.

A preference for "functionalist" explanations dominated the social sciences from the turn of the century through the 1950s, which is to say that anthropologists and sociologists tried to state what a social act or institution was for. The existence of a thing was explained if it fulfilled a function. The only strong alternative to that kind of analysis was historical explanation, accounting for the existence of a social fact by saying how it came to be.

However, the idea of social function developed in two different ways. The English anthropologist Alfred Radcliffe-Brown, who had read and admired the work of the French sociologist Emile Durkheim, argued that the goal of anthropological research was to find the collective function, what a religious creed or a set of rules about marriage did for the social order as a whole. At back of this approach was an old idea, the view that civilization developed through a series of phases from the primitive to the modern, everywhere the same. All of the activities in a given kind of society would partake of the same character; some sort of internal logic would cause one level of culture to evolve into the next. On this view, a society can easily be thought of as an organism, the parts functioning together like parts of a body.

The more influential functionalism of Bronislaw Malinowski described the satisfaction of individual needs, what a person got out of participating in a custom.

In the United States, where the shape of anthropology was set by the German-educated Franz Boas, the preference was for historical accounts. This approach had obvious problems, which Lévi-Strauss praises Boas for facing squarely.

Historical information is seldom available for non-literate cultures. The anthropologist fills in with comparisons to other cultures and is forced to rely on theories that have no evidential basis whatever, the old notion of universal stages of development or the claim that cultural resemblances are based on some untraced past contact between groups. Boas came to believe that no overall pattern in social development could be proven; for him, there was no history, only histories.

There are three broad choices involved in the divergence of these schools – each had to decide what kind of evidence to use; whether to emphasize the particulars of a single culture or look for patterns underlying all societies; and what the source of any underlying patterns might be, the definition of a common humanity.

Social scientists in all traditions relied on cross-cultural studies. It was always necessary to supplement information about a society with information about others. So some idea of a common human nature was implicit in each approach.

The critical distinction, then, remained: does a social fact exist because it is functional for the social order or because it is functional for the person? Do uniformities across cultures occur because of organizational needs that must be met everywhere or because of the uniform needs of human personality?

For Lévi-Strauss, the choice was for the demands of the social order. He had no difficulty bringing out the inconsistencies and triviality of individualistic accounts. Malinowski said, for example, that magic beliefs come into being when people need to feel a sense of control over events where the outcome was uncertain. In the Trobriand Islands, he found the proof of this claim in the rites surrounding abortions and weaving skirts. But in the same tribes, there is no magic attached to making clay pots even though it is no more certain a business than weaving. So the explanation is not consistent. Furthermore, these explanations tend to be used in an ad hoc, superficial way – you just postulate a trait of personality when you need it.

But the accepted way of discussing organizational function didn't work either. Different societies might have institutions that were similar in many obvious ways and yet served different functions. Many tribal cultures divide the tribe into two groups and have elaborate rules about how the two groups can interact. But exactly what they can do – trade, intermarry – is different in different tribes; for that matter, so are the criteria for distinguishing the groups.

Nor will it do to say that dividing-in-two is a universal need of organizations, because there are a lot of tribes that thrive without it.

For Lévi-Strauss, the methods of linguistics became a model for all examinations of society. His analogies are usually from phonetics.

"A truly scientific analysis must be real, simplifying, and explanatory," he says (in Structural Anthropology). Phonemic analysis reveals features that are real, in the sense that users of the language can recognize and respond to them. At the same time, a phoneme is an abstraction from language – not a sound, but a category of sound defined by the way it is distinguished from other categories through rules unique to the language. The entire sound-structure of a language can be generated from a relatively small number of rules.

In the study of the kinship systems that first concerned him, this ideal of explanation allowed a comprehensive organization of data that had been partly ordered by other researchers. The overall goal was to find out why family relations differed in different South American cultures. The father might have great authority over the son in one group, for example, with the relationship rigidly restricted by taboos. In another group, the mother's brother would have that kind of relationship with the son, while the father's relationship was relaxed and playful.

A number of partial patterns had been noted. Relations between the mother and father, for example, had some sort of reciprocity with those of father and son – if the mother had a dominant social status and was formal with the father, for example, then the father usually had close relations with the son. But these smaller patterns joined together in inconsistent ways.

One possible way of finding a master order was to rate all the positions in a kinship system along several dimensions. For example, the father was older than the son, the father produced the son, the father had the same sex as the son, and so on; the matrilineal uncle was older and of the same sex but did not produce the son, and so on. An exhaustive collection of such observations might cause an overall pattern to emerge.

But for Lévi-Strauss, this kind of work was "analytical in appearance only." It results in a chart that is far harder to understand than the original data and is based on arbitrary abstractions (empirically, fathers are older than sons, but it is only the researcher who declares that this feature explains their relations). Furthermore, it doesn't explain anything. The explanation it offers is tautological – if age is crucial, then age explains a relationship. And it does not offer the possibility of inferring the origins of the structure.

A proper solution to the puzzle is to find a basic unit of kinship which can explain all the variations. It is a cluster of four roles--brother, sister, father, son. These are the roles that must be involved in any society that has an incest taboo requiring a man to obtain a wife from some man outside his own hereditary line. A brother can give away his sister, for example, whose son might reciprocate in the next generation by allowing his own sister to marry exogenously. The underlying demand is a continued circulation of women to keep various clans peacefully related.

Right or wrong, this solution displays the qualities of structural thinking. Even though Lévi-Strauss frequently speaks of treating culture as the product of the axioms and corollaries that underlie it, or the phonemic differences that constitute it, he is concerned with the objective data of field research. He notes that it is logically possible for a different atom of kinship structure to exist – sister, sister's brother, brother's wife, daughter – but there are no real-world examples of relationships that can be derived from that grouping.

The purpose of structuralist explanation is to organize real data in the simplest effective way. All science, he says, is either structuralist or reductionist. In confronting such matters as the incest taboo, one is facing an objective limit of what the human mind has so far accepted. One could hypothesize some biological imperative underlying it, but so far as social order is concerned, the taboo has the effect of an irreducible fact. The social scientist can only work with the structures of human thought that arise from it.

And structural explanations can be tested and refuted. A mere analytic scheme that wishes causal relations into existence is not structuralist in this sense.

Lévi-Strauss' later works are more controversial, in part because they impinge on the subject matter of other scholars. He believed that modern life and all history was founded on the same categories and transformations that he had discovered in the Brazilian back country – the raw and the cooked, from honey to ashes, the naked man (to borrow some titles from the Mythologies). He also pointed out that the modern view of primitive cultures was simplistic in denying them a history. The categories of myth did not persist among them because nothing had happened – it was easy to find the evidence of defeat, migration, exile, repeated displacements of all the kinds known to recorded history. Instead, the mythic categories had encompassed these changes.

In sum, he argued for a view of human life as existing in two timelines simultaneously, the eventful one of history and the long cycles in which one set of fundamental mythic patterns dominates and then perhaps another. In this respect, his work resembles that of Fernand Braudel, the historian of the Mediterranean and 'la longue durée,' the cultural outlook and forms of social organization that persisted for centuries around that sea.

In 2003 Lévi-Strauss received the Meister-Eckhart-Prize (philosophy).

Surautomatism

Surautomatism is any theory or act in practice of surrealist creative production taking or purporting to take automatism to its most absurd limits.

In their 1945 statement "Dialectic of Dialectic," Romanian surrealists Gherashim Luca and Dolfi Trost wrote, "We have returned to the problem of knowledge through images... by establishing a clear distinction between images produced by artistic means and images resulting from rigorously applied scientific procedures, such as the operation of chance or of automatism. We stand opposed to the tendency to reproduce, through symbols, certain valid theoretical contents by the use of pictorial techniques, and believe that the unknown that surrounds us can find a staggering materialization of the highest order in indecipherable images. In generally accepting until now pictorial reproductive means, surrealist painting will find that the way to its blossoming lies in the absurd use of aplastic, objective and entirely non-artistic procedures." In this statement is the core of surautomatist theory.

The name surautomatism suggests a "going beyond" automatism, but whether surautomatism is anything but just a group methods by which surrealist automatism is practiced is controversial. Surautomatism includes cubomania, entopic graphomania and various types of what the Romanian surrealists called "indecipherable writing". (See surrealist techniques.)

See also: writing

Surrealist techniques

Surrealism in art, poetry, and literature utilizes numerous unique techniques and games to provide inspiration. Many of these are said to free the subconscious mind by producing a creative process free of conscious control. The importance of the subconscious as a source of inspiration is central to the nature of surrealism.

The surrealist movement has been a fractious one since its inception. The value and role of the various techniques described here has been one of many subjects of disagreement. Some surrealists consider automatism and surrealist games to be sources of inspiration only. Others consider them as starting points for finished works. Some consider the items created through automatism to be finished works themselves, needing no further refinement.

Automatic Poetry

Automatic poetry is poetry written using the automatic method. One of the oddest uses of automatic writing by a great writer was that of W. B. Yeats. His wife, a spiritualist and barely literate, practised it, and Yeats put large chunks of it into his long poem, A Vision.

Coulage

A coulage is a kind of automatic or involuntary sculpture made by pouring a molten material (such as metal, wax, or chocolate) into cold water. As the material cools it takes on what appears to be a random (or aleatoric) form, though the physical properties of the materials involved may lead to a conglomeration of discs or spheres. The artist may utilize a variety of techniques to affect the outcome.

This technique is also used in the divination process known as ceromancy.

Cubomania

Cubomania is a method of making collages in which a picture or image is cut into squares and the squares are then reassembled without regard for the image. The technique was first used by the Romanian surrealist Gherasim Luca.

This definition of cubomania is to be distinguished from the use of the word to mean "obsession with cubes."

Echo Poem

An echo poem is a poem written using a technique invented by Aurélien Dauguet in 1972. The poem is composed by one or more persons, working together in a process as follows.

The first "stanza" of the poem is written on the left-hand column of a piece of paper divided into two columns. Then the "opposite" of the first stanza, opposite in whatever sense is appropriate to the poem, is composed in the right-hand column of the page. The writing is done automatically and often the "opposite" stanza is composed of a sound correspondence to the first stanza.

For a longer work, the third stanza can then begin in the left-hand column as an "opposite" or a sound correspondence to what preceded it in the right-hand column. Then the fourth stanza might be an "opposite" or sound correspondence to what preceded it in the left-hand column, and so forth. When the poem is completed, the opposite of the last phrase, line, or sentence, generally serves as the title.

Entopic graphomania

Entopic graphomania is a surrealist and automatic method of drawing in which dots are made at the sites of impurities in a blank sheet of paper, and lines are then made between the dots.

The method was invented by Dolfi Trost, who as the subtitle of his 1945 book ("Vision dans le cristal. Oniromancie obsessionelle. Et neuf graphomanies entoptiques") suggests, included nine examples therein. This method of "indecipherable writing" (see below) was supposedly an example of "surautomatism," the controversial theory put forward by Trost and Gherashim Luca in which surrealist methods would be practiced that "went beyond" automatism. In Dialectique de Dialectique they had proposed the further radicalization of surrealist automatism by abandoning images produced by artistic techniques in favour of those "resulting from rigorously applied scientific procedures," allegedly cutting the notion of "artist" out of the process of creating images and replacing it with chance and scientific rigour.

Indecipherable writing

In addition to its obvious meaning of writing that is illegibile or for whatever other reason cannot be made out by the reader, indecipherable writing refers to a set of automatic techniques developed by Romanian surrealists, falling under the heading of surautomatism. Examples include entopic graphomania and the movement of liquid down a vertical surface (see below).

Mimeogram

A mimeogram is a type of automatic art made by peeling off the backing sheets of mimeograph stencils. It was pioneered by Penelope Rosemont.

Movement of liquid down a vertical surface

The movement of liquid down a vertical surface is, as the name suggests, a technique, invented by surrealists from Romania and said by them to be surautomatic and a form of indecipherable writing (see above), of making pictures by dripping or allowing to flow some form of liquid down a vertical surface.

Parsemage

Parsemage is a surrealist and automatic method in the visual arts invented by Ithell Colquhoun in which dust from charcoal or colored chalk is scattered on the surface of water and then skimmed off by passing a stiff paper or cardboard just under the water's surface.

See also

• Cut-up technique
• Surautomatism
• Automatic writing
• Exquisite corpse
• Decretage
• Haifa method

External links

• On use of molten wax: http://www.mojomoon.net/candlwax.html
• On alternate definitions for cubomania: http://www.math.rwth-aachen.de/~Martin.Schoenert/Cube-Lovers/Bill_McKeeman__Proposed_Glossary.html
• ars libri ltd. Catalogue of avant-garde books about the fine arts showing listing for Vision dans le cristal and one of Trost's entopic graphomanias: http://www.arslibri.com/cat130w32.htm

 

Ghost

Ghosts are alleged to be disembodied spirits or souls that sometimes, at least in popular accounts or myth, appear as silvery or shadowy apparitions, or sometimes invisibly (these are alleged to make noises and/or telekinetically displace objects are known as poltergeists). Beliefs about ghosts have varied over time and place, with disagreement both as to what ghosts are (supposed to be) and whether such a thing exists. Recent studies indicates that many Westerners believe in ghosts and an afterlife, and belief in an afterlife is an essential part of Islam and Hinduism.

In the West, those who believe in ghosts sometimes hold them to be souls that could not find rest after death, and so linger on Earth. The inability to find rest is often explained by lingering, unfinished business, such as a victim seeking justice or revenge after death, or a criminal lingering to avoid Purgatory or Hell. It is sometimes held that ghosts reside in Limbo, a place, according to some Catholic doctrine, between Heaven and Hell where the souls of unbaptized infants go.

In the East (such as China), many people believe in reincarnation. Ghosts are those souls that refused to be 'recycled' because they have unfinished business similar to those in western belief. Exorcists can either help a ghost to be reincarnated or blow it out of existence. In Chinese belief, besides reincarnation, a ghost can also become immortal and become demigod, or it can go to hell and suffer till eternality, or it can die again and become "ghost of ghost".

In most cultures, the appearance of ghosts are associated with a chilling sensation. Some believers claim ghosts are related to some kind of negative energy. But a natural animal response to fear is hair-raising which can be mistaken as chill. Ghosts are also associated with seeking justice or revenge almost in all culture. It serves as an effective scare tactic against killers in all society.

See also: Ghost (movie), Parapsychology, Exorcism, Undead, Possession, Spectre, Ghost dance, Holy Ghost

Ghosts in Fiction

In many stories, ghosts are often depicted as haunting the living until a certain desire is met or some grievance was settled by the haunted.

In the Ghostbusters film and television franchise, the protagonists use special technology of their own design to hunt and capture/exile the ghosts they encounter.

In The Matrix, ghosts are explained as obselete or malfunctioning programs which choose to hide in the matrix to escape deletion. A program's other option is to return to "the Source," which is like the Heaven of the matrix.

In Ghost in the Shell, ghost is a word used to describe a person's inner being, similar to the concept of a soul.

Other Meanings

In quantum field theory, ghosts are a auxiliary fields needed in non-abelian gauge theories in order to deal with the gauge freedom. Although they are real fields, ghosts follow fermionic statistics. They are only artifacts of the theory, and do not correspond to real particles.

Surrealist automatism

Surrealist automatism is spontaneous writing, drawing, or the like practiced without conscious aesthetic or moral self-censorship.

It is to be distinguished from mediumistic automatism, by which it was inspired: ghosts, spirits or the like are not purported to be the source of its automatic messages.

"Pure psychic automatism" was how André Breton, surrealism's founder, defined surrealism.

In 1919 Breton and Philippe Soupault wrote the first automatic book, Les Champs Magnetiques.

"The Automatic Message" was one of Breton's most significant theoretical works about automatism.

Some Romanian surrealists invented a number of surrealist techniques (such as cubomania, entopic graphomania, and the movement of liquid down a vertical surface) that purported to take automatism to an absurd point; the name "surautomatism" implies that the methods "go beyond" automatism but this position is controversial.

In the 1940s and 1950s there were a group of Canadians called Les Automatistes, who pursued creative work (chiefly painting) based on surrealist principles.

Some surrealists write automatic mathematics or equations.

 

Antonym

Antonyms are word pairs that are opposite in meaning, such as hot and cold, fat and thin, and up and down. Words may have different antonyms, depending on the meaning. Both long and tall are antonyms of short.

Antonyms are of two types:

• gradable antonyms are pairs that express relationships in a continuum, such as up and down
• complementary antonyms are pairs that express an either/or relationship, such as dead or alive.

Although the word antonym was only coined by philologists in the 19th century, such relationships are a fundamental part of the language, in contrast to synonyms, which are a result of history and drawing of fine distinctions, or homonyms, which are mostly etymological accidents or coincidences.

See also

• Synonym

 

Anthropic principle

The anthropic principle in its most basic form states that any valid theory of the universe must be consistent with our existence as carbon-based human beings at this particular time and place in the universe. Attempts to apply this principle to develop scientific explanations in cosmology have led to some confusion and much controversy.

The term "anthropic principle" was first proposed in 1973 by Brandon Carter during the celebration of Copernicus’s 500th birthday, as if to proclaim that humanity does hold a special place in the universe after all.¹

Proponents of the anthropic principle suggest that the universe appears to be "fine-tuned" to allow the existence of life as we know it, and that if any of the basic physical constants were different, then life as we know it would not be possible. Papers have been written that argue that the anthropic principle would explain the physical constants such as the fine structure constant, the number of dimensions in the universe, and the cosmological constant. Proponents of the anthropic principle point out that these constants are not at "obvious" values. The universe we observe must be suitable for the development of intelligent life, for otherwise we could not be here to observe it.

The two primary versions of the principle, as stated by Barrow and Tipler (1986), are:

• Weak Anthropic Principle (WAP): "The observed values of all physical and cosmological quantities are not equally probable but they take on values restricted by the requirement that there exist sites where carbon-based life can evolve and by the requirements that the Universe be old enough for it to have already done so."
• Strong Anthropic Principle (SAP): "The Universe must have those properties which allow life to develop within it at some stage in its history."

The weak version has been criticized as an argument by lack of imagination for assuming no other forms of life are possible. Furthermore, the range of constants allowing evolution of carbon-based life may be much less restricted than proposed (Stenger, "Timeless Reality"). The strong version is also criticized as not scientifically testable or falsifiable, and unnecessary.

Proponents of the Intelligent design conjecture assert support from the anthropic principle. On the other hand, the existence of alternate universe is suggested for other reasons and the anthropic principle provides additional support for their existence. Assuming some possible universe would be capable of supporting intellegent life, some actual universes must do so, and ours clearly is one of those.

The Anthropic Cosmological Principle

In 1986, the controversial book The Anthropic Cosmological Principle by John D. Barrow and Frank J. Tipler (Oxford University Press) was published. In this book Barrow, a cosmological scientist, pioneered what he called the anthropic principle in order to deal with the seemingly incredible coincidences that allow for our presence in a universe that appears to be perfectly set up for our existence. Everything from the particular energy state of the electron to the exact level of the weak nuclear force seems to be tailored for us to exist. We appear to live in a universe dependent on several independent variables where only a slight change would render it inhospitable for any form of life. And yet, here we are. The anthropic principle states that the reason we are here to ponder this question at all, is due to the fact that all the correct variables are in place.

Brandon Carter presented his ideas about the anthropic principle in a 1974 publication of the International Astronomical Union. Later, in 1983, he claimed that, in its original form, the principle was meant only to caution astrophysicists and cosmologists of possible errors in the interpretation of astronomical and cosmological data unless the biological constraints of the observer were taken into account. In 1983 he also included the warning that the inverse was true for evolutionary biologists; Carter claimed that in interpreting the evolutionary record, one must take into account the astrophysical restraints of the process. Working with this in mind, Carter concluded that the evolutionary chain probably could include only one or two highly improbable links given the available time interval. A. Feoli and S. Rampone ("Is the Strong Anthropic Principle Too Weak", 1999) argued that the estimated size of our universe and number of planets allows a higher bound, indicating no evidence for intelligent design in evolution.

Anthropic bias and anthropic reasoning

In 2002, Nick Bostrom asked "Is it possible to sum up the essence of observation selection effects in a simple statement?" He concluded that it might be, but that "Many 'anthropic principles' are simply confused. Some, especially those drawing inspiration from Brandon Carter’s seminal papers, are sound, but... they are too weak to do any real scientific work. In particular, I argue that existing methodology does not permit any observational consequences to be derived from contemporary cosmological theories, in spite of the fact that these theories quite plainly can be and are being tested empirically by astronomers. What is needed to bridge this methodological gap is a more adequate formulation of how observation selection effects are to be taken into account." His Self-Sampling Assumption is "that you should think of yourself as if you were a random observer from a suitable reference class." This he expands into a model of anthropic bias and anthropic reasoning under the uncertainty introduced by not knowing your place in our universe - or even who "we" are. This may also be a way to overcome various cognitive bias limits inherent in the humans doing the observation and sharing models of our universe using mathematics, as suggested in the cognitive science of mathematics.

See also

• Inverse gambler's fallacy
• Big Bounce

Footnote

¹ The principle had, however, been invoked before then, e.g. in 1957, R.H. Dicke wrote: 'The age of the Universe "now" is not random but conditioned by biological factors ... [changes in the values of the fundamental constants of physics] would preclude the existence of man to consider the problem.' (R.H. Dicke, Principle of Equivalence and Weak Interactions, Rev.Mod.Phys. 29, 355 (1957).) Even earlier statements of the principle may be found in Alfred_Russel_Wallace's book Man's Place in the Universe, which was first published in 1903. For example: "such a vast and complex universe as that which we know exists around us, may have been absolutely required ... in order to produce a world that should be preciesly adapted in every detail for the orderly development of life culminating in man." (pp. 256-7 in the 1912 edition).

Totalitarianism

Totalitarianism is any political system in which a citizen is totally subject to state authority in all aspects of day-to-day life. It goes well beyond dictatorship or typical police state measures, and even beyond those measures required to sustain total war with other states. It involves constant brainwashing achieved by propaganda to erase any potential for dissent, by anyone, including most especially the state's agents.

The term was originally coined by Benito Mussolini to describe his regime in Italy, although it is arguable that Italian fascism was not truly totalitarian until 1940. It was popularized by Hannah Arendt in order to illustrate the commonalities between Nazism and Stalinism as theories of civics. It has also been used to include all fascist and communist regimes — though some fascist regimes, such as Franco's Spain, and Mussolini's Italy before World War II, and some communist regimes, such as Yugoslavia under Tito and the People's Republic of China under Deng Xiaoping, could be characterized as more authoritarian than totalitarian.

Totalitarian regimes have generally been far rarer than authoritarian ones. There is no theory of ethics that holds that they are desirable.

Joseph Stalin's Soviet Union and Adolf Hitler's Germany are widely considered to be the two best examples of totalitarian regimes in history. Both held power for long periods despite substantial pressure, and neither would have collapsed had they not come into conflict with each other, it is most generally believed.

The Khmer Rouge under Pol Pot are widely considered to be the very worst government in human history - that regime transcends all concept of even totalitarian definitions in terms of the sheer horror it unleashed on the citizens of Cambodia. It is certainly totalitarian, but also genocidal - even self-consuming. It eventually collapsed completely.

A contemporary example often cited, e.g. in George W. Bush's Axis of Evil, is North Korea; certain Islamist regimes, such as that found in Iran, are also sometimes described as totalitarian. In fiction, the Big Brother regime described in George Orwell's novel Nineteen Eighty-Four is considered to be a quintessential example of totalitarianism.

Most political scientists believe totalitarian regimes were rare before the 20th century because neither technological means nor ideological justifications existed for controlling large numbers of people. The Qin Dynasty is perhaps a rare example of a possible pre-modern totalitarian state.

Today, however, television, radio, and other mass media make it relatively easy for totalitarian regimes to make their presence felt, often through campaigns of propaganda or the creation of a vast personality cult.

The terms totalitarian democracy and totalitarian republic have also been used to classify a different style of totalitarian rule. In these regimes, the government is generally popular (at least at the beginning), and the ideological justification of the state comes on behalf of the people. Hitler's initially-democratically-elected regime of Nazi totalitarianism is often used as an example of a totalitarian democracy.

 

Theories of totalitarianism

The relationship between totalitarianism and authoritarianism is controversial: some see totalitarianism as an extreme form of authoritarianism, while others argue that they are completely different.

Some political analysts, notably neo-conservatives such as Jeane Kirkpatrick, have studied the various distinctions between totalitarianism and authoritarianism. They argue that while both types of governments can be extremely brutal to political opponents, in an authoritarian government the government's efforts are directed mostly at those who are considered political opponents, and the government has neither the will or often the means to control every aspect of an individual's life. In a totalitarian system, the ruling ideology requires that every aspect of an individual's life be subordinate to the state, including occupation, income, and religion. Personal survival is tied to the regime's survival, and thus the concept of the state and the people are merged. This is also called the carceral state - like a prison.

In political theories such as libertarianism, totalitarianism is regarded as the most extreme form of statism. However, other political philosophers disagree with this analysis as it implies that totalitarianism can come into being through a slow and gradual increase from an operational government, while totalitarian regimes almost uniformly come into being as a result of a revolution which replaces what is generally regarded as an ineffective government.

It has been argued that totalitarianism requires a cult of personality around a charismatic "great leader" who is glorified as the legitimator of the regime. Many totalitarian societies fit this model - for example, those of Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Mussolini, Pol Pot, and Kim Il-Sung. This is one of the reasons some scholars were reluctant to consider the Brezhnev-era Soviet Union and most of the Warsaw Pact nations totalitarian. When those governments fell, however, the majority of the populations and intellectuals of the countries argued that what they had experienced was indeed totalitarianism. This has made more popular the belief that a charismatic leader is a frequent but not a necessary characteristic of totalitarianism.

Michael Ledeen has advanced the theory that the role of the United States should be to impose by war the institutions it associates with democracy - waging what he calls total war to eradicate the prior society. This would imply at least a brief period of totalitarian style control in order to erase that society, and teach the next generation the democratic civics.

See also: Gleichschaltung, Stalinism, communism, fascism, single-party state

Committee for the Liberation of Iraq

The Committee for the Liberation of Iraq (CLI) bills itself as a non-governmental organization comprised of a "distinguished group of Americans" who want to 'free' Iraq from Saddam Hussein. In a news release announcing its formation, the group said it wants to "promote regional peace, political freedom and international security through replacement of the Saddam Hussein regime with a democratic government that respects the rights of the Iraqi people and ceases to threaten the community of nations." It has close links to the Project for the New American Century (PNAC) and the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), important shapers of the Bush administration's foreign policy.

The Washington Post reported in November 2002 that "the organization is modeled on a successful lobbying campaign to expand the NATO alliance. Members include former secretary of state George P. Shultz, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and former senator Bob Kerrey (D-Neb.). ... While the Iraq committee is an independent entity, committee officers said they expect to work closely with the administration. They already have met with Hadley and Bush political adviser Karl Rove. Committee officers and a White House spokesman said Rice, Hadley and Cheney will soon meet with the group." [1]

Personnel

• Mahdi Al-Bassam, Iraq Liberation Action Committee
• Barry Blechman, DFI International
• Eliot Cohen, Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies
• Thomas A. Dine, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty
• General Wayne Downing, U.S. Army (retired), has been a lobbyist for the Iraqi National Congress
• Rend Rahim Francke, Iraq Foundation
• Newt Gingrich, former Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives
• Lt. General Buster Glosson, U.S. Air Force (retired)
• James R. Hoffa, Jr., International Brotherhood of Teamsters
• Bruce P. Jackson, chairman, is the former vice president of weapons contractor Lockheed Martin. He also chaired the Republican Party Platform's subcommittee for National Security and Foreign Policy when George W. Bush ran for president in 2000.
• Howell Jackson, Professor of Law, Harvard Law School
• Robert Kerrey, former U.S. Senator
• Jeane J. Kirkpatrick, American Enterprise Institute
• William Kristol, Weekly Standard
• Bernard Lewis, Princeton University
• General Barry McCaffrey, U.S. Army (retired); former U.S. "drug czar"
• John McCain, U.S. Senator
• Will Marshall, Progressive Policy Institute
• Richard Perle, former Assistant Secretary of Defense
• Danielle Pletka, American Enterprise Institute
• Randy Scheunemann, CLI's executive director, is former chief national-security adviser to U.S. Senator Trent Lott who has also worked for Donald Rumsfeld as a consultant on Iraq policy. While working for Lott in 1998, Scheunemann drafted the "Iraq Liberation Act" that authorized $98 million for the Iraqi National Congress.
• Gary Schmitt is executive director of the Project for the New American Century
• George P. Shultz, former U.S. Secretary of State under Ronald Reagan
• Richard Shultz, The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy
• Steve Solarz, former Member of Congress
• Ruth Wedgwood, Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies
• Leon Wieseltier, The New Republic
• Chris Williams, Johnston and Associates
• James Woolsey, former CIA Director

 

Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty

(Redirected from ABM Treaty)

The Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty (or ABM treaty) was a treaty between the United States of America and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics on the limitation of the anti-ballistic missile (ABM) systems used in defending areas against missile-delivered nuclear weapons. The treaty was in force for thirty years, from 1972 until 2002. On June 13, 2002, six months after giving the required notice of intent, the U.S. withdrew from the treaty.

Particulars

The treaty agreed stated that each nation may have only two ABM deployment areas, restricted and located at least 1,300km apart so that they cannot provide a nationwide ABM defense or become the basis for developing one. Therefore each country left unchallenged the capability of the others retaliatory missile forces (see mutual assured destruction).

The ABM systems that may be deployed were limited to 200 interceptors and launchers, 100 at each site (reduced to 100 in total, by agreement, in 1974) and both nations agreed to limit qualitative improvement of their ABM technology. A Standing Consultative Commission (SCC) was created to handle treaty-related compliance and implementation issues.

 

History

Throughout the late 1950s and into the 1960s, the United States had been developing a series of missile systems with the ability to shoot down incoming ICBM warheads. During this period the US maintained a lead in the number and sophistication of their delivery systems, and considered the defense of the US as a part of reducing the overall damage inflicted in a full nuclear exchange. As part of this defence, Canada and the US established the North American Air Defense Command (now called NORAD).

By the early 1960s the US research on the Nike Zeus missile system (see Project Nike) had developed to the point where small improvements would allow it to be used as the basis of a "real" ABM system. Work started on a short range, high speed counterpart known as the Sprint to provide defense for the ABM sites themselves. By the mid-1960s both systems showed enough promise to start development of base selection for a nationwide ABM system, then known as

Sentinel.

At this point an intense debate broke out in public over the merits of such a system. A number of serious concerns about the technical abilities of the system came to light, many of which reached popular magazines such as Scientific American. At the same time it grew increasingly clear that if the system did work, then the Soviets best course of action was to immediately launch an attack on the US before the system became operational.

As this debate continued, a new development in ICBM technology essentially rendered the points moot. This was the deployment of the MIRV system, allowing a single ICBM missile to deliver several warheads at a time. With this system the USSR could simply overwhelm the ABM defense system with numbers. Upgrading it to counter the additional warheads would cost more than the handful of missiles needed to overwhelm the new system, as the defenders required one rocket per warheard, whereas the attackers could place perhaps 10 warheads on a rocket that was perhaps the same price as the ABM.

At about the same time, the USSR reached strategic parity with the US in terms of ICBM forces. No longer would a war be a matter of the utter destruction of the USSR with the US able to continue on, now both countries would be devastated. This led to the concept of mutually assured destruction, MAD, in which any changes to the strategic balance had to be carefully weighed. ABMs, now ready for use after over a decade of development, seemed to be far too risky – it was better to have no defense than one that might trigger a war.

As relations between the US and USSR warmed in the later years of the 1960s, the US first proposed an ABM treaty in 1967. This proposal was rejected. Following the proposal of the Sentinel and Safeguard decisions on American ABM systems, the SALT I talks began in November 1969. By 1972 agreement had been reached to limiting strategic offensive weapons and strategic defensive systems. It was signed in Moscow May 26, 1972, and ratified by the Senate August 3, 1972. It was seen by many as a key piece in nuclear arms control, being an implicit recognition of the need to protect the nuclear balance by ensuring neither side could ever consider itself immune from retaliation.

For many years the ABM Treaty was considered one of the landmarks in arms limitations. It required two enemies to agree not to deploy a potentially useful weapon, deliberately to maintain the balance of power. In doing so, the formerly terrible relations between the US and USSR started to change considerably.

The treaty was undisturbed until Ronald Reagan announced his Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) on March 23, 1982. Reagan stated that SDI was "consistent with... the ABM Treaty" and he viewed it as a defensive system that would help reduce the possibility of mutual assured destruction (MAD) becoming reality; he even suggested that the Russians would be given access to the SDI technology, although his advisors soon tempered that idea.

This extremely ambitious project was a blow to Yuri Andropov's tentative 'peace offensive'. Andropov said that "It is time they [Washington] stopped... search[ing] for the best ways of unleashing nuclear war... Engaging in this is not just irresponsible. It is insane".

SDI research went ahead, although it did not achieve the hoped for result. SDI research was cut back following the end of Reagan's presidency, and in 1995 it was reiterated in a presidential joint statement that "missile defense systems may be deployed... [that] will not pose a realistic threat to the strategic nuclear force of the other side and will not be tested to... [create] that capability." This was reaffirmed in 1997.

It was not until George W. Bush gained office that the treaty was back in the political arena. On December 13, 2001, Bush gave Russia notice of the United States' withdrawal from the treaty, in accordance with the clause that requires six months' notice before terminating the pact. This was the first time in recent history the United States has withdrawn from a major international arms treaty.

Supporters of the withdrawal argued that it was necessarily in order to test and build a limited National Missile Defense to protect the United States from nuclear blackmail by a rogue state. The withdrawal had many critics. John Rhinelander, a negotiator of the ABM treaty, predicted that the withdrawal would be a "fatal blow" to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and would lead to a "world without effective legal constraints on nuclear proliferation."

Reaction to the withdrawal by both Russia and China was much milder than many had predicted, and followed months of discussion with both Russia and China aimed at convincing both that development of a National Missile Defense was not directed at them. In the case of Russia, the United States has stated that it intends to discuss a massive bilateral reduction in the numbers of nuclear warheads, which would allow Russia to reduce its spending on missiles. In the case of China, statements by Condoleezza Rice, United States National Security Advisor, appeared to some observers to suggest that the United States would not object to an expansion of China's nuclear arsenal in a manner that would allow it to overwhelm American anti-ballistic capabilities.

External link

• Full text of the treaty

See also: nuclear disarmament, nuclear warfare, nuclear weapon, Strategic Defense Initiative, National Missile Defense, mutual assured destruction

Bradley Foundation

The Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation is claimed to be the largest and most influential right-wing think tank in the USA, with about half a billion $US in assets. It's based in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

For example, it provides funds to the Heritage Foundation, the Madison Center for Educational Affairs and the American Enterprise Institute and is believed to fund the Project for the New American Century via the New Citizenship Project.

From 1986 to 1989, the Bradley Foundation gave Charles Murray an annual grant of $90,000, rising to $113,000 by 1991, and then to $163,000 following publication of "The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life" by Murray with coauthor Richard Herrnstein [1]. In this book, the authors claimed to find scientific evidence for racism. The methodology was widely considered to be incorrect, despite the use of statistical tools, and was denounced by the American Psychological Association. Much of its empirical data collection was financed by the Pioneer Fund, a neo-Nazi organization associated with eugenicist research.

External links

• mediatransparency.org analysis

 

Think tank

A think tank is a group of individuals in military laboratories, corporations, or other institutions dedicated to high-level synergistic research on a variety of subjects. Discoveries and activities which resulted from think tanks include:

• the atomic bomb
• dolphin-human communication
• the Internet and the World Wide Web
• some early US? space programs
• Remote viewing
• Global Climatology
• 2003 invasion of Iraq

In the United States of America think tanks generally receive funding from private donors, and make up an important part of forming both foreign and domestic policy. Because some think tanks are private organizations, the members of such think tanks have more freedom to propose and debate ideas than people within government.

Typically, an issue such as national missile defense will be debated within and among think tanks and the result of these debates will influence government policy makers. Some are clearly aligned with a pro-market approach to the economy whilst others, especially those with an emphasis on social welfare, social equity or environmental outcomes, are viewed as left-of-centre.

Critics such as Ralph Nader have pointed out that the private nature of the funding of such think tanks may bias the resulting findings. Some argue that the members will be inclined to promote or publish only those results which will ensure the continued flow of funds from the private donors. This risk of distortion also threatens the reputation and integrity of organisations such as universities, once considered to stand wholly within the public sector. Some supposed think tanks may be more accurately understood as a front for a marketing or public relations organisation.

In the case of the People's Republic of China, there are a number of think tank organizations, sponsored by governmental agencies, but which often retain enough non-official status to be able to propose and debate ideas more freely. Indeed, most of the actual diplomacy between China and the United States takes the form of academic exchanges between members of think tank groups.

Mapping the US think tank network

Since think tanks generally prefer secrecy for their internal organising methods, making it to difficult to map their network of connections and interests.

One method of trying to document the think tank network is by using published books by members of the think tanks and/or by journalists who write about them, and recording whose names occur together on any single page of these books. While crude, this method is used by NameBase [1] and its results are publicly available [2].

Well-Known Think Tanks

• American Enterprise Institute - [3]
• Brookings Institution - [4]
• Cato Institute, associated with the Libertarian Party - [5]
• Center for Strategic and International Studies - [6]
• Council on Foreign Relations - [7]
• Heritage Foundation - [8]
• Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace, Stanford University - [9]
• Hudson Institute - [10]
• Institute for International Economics - [11]
• Manhattan Institute for Policy Research - [12]
• National Endowment for Democracy - [13]
• Project for the New American Century - [14]
• RAND Corporation - [15]
• Research Triangle Institute - [16]

See Also

• List of economics consultancies and think tanks

External Links

• mapping the think tank network
• Disinfopedia's definition of Think Tank

 

Leo Strauss

Leo Strauss (September 20, 1899 - October 18, 1973), the political philosopher, was born in Kirchhasin, Hesse, Germany, to Hugo Strauss and Jennie David, and raised in an Orthodox Jewish home. At the age of 17 he became a political Zionist. Strauss received his higher education within the German university system, notably at Marburg, Hamburg, Giessen, and Berlin. He was influenced by the work of Martin Heidegger, Max Weber, and Thomas Hobbes.

In 1932, Strauss married Marie Bernsohn in Paris, France. In 1934 he moved to England where, in 1935, he accepted a position at the Cambridge University. In 1937, Strauss moved to the United States where he became a Research Fellow in the Department of History at Columbia University. Between 1938 and 1948, he lectured in political science at the New School for Social Research. In 1944, he became a US citizen and from 1949 until 1973, Strauss served as a member of the faculty of the University of Chicago, chiefly as a professor of political philosophy.

In Saul Bellow's quasi-biographical novel Ravelstein, the minor character Davarr is reputed to have been based on Strauss.

Philosophy

Straussianism, as Strauss's philosophy has come to be called, is predicated on the belief that 20th century relativism has been responsible for the deterioration of modern society. According to its advocates, modern egalitarianism devalues philosophy by rejecting anything that cannot be understood by the "common man". Straussians believe that "universal principles of right" exist and are knowable through careful study of those philosophers who believed in such principles, especially Plato and Aristotle. They reject the modern tendency to interpret the ancient philosophers within the context of the era in which they lived, believing that universal principles transcend historicity.

Straussians also believe that the public is not capable of understanding or accepting the universal principles of right. Therefore, they posit the rectitude of the "noble lie" which shields the uneducated public from knowledge of unpalatable truth, for which the public might hold the philosopher to blame (as happened with Socrates). This leads to a dichotomy, within Straussianism, between esoteric and exoteric knowledge. Esoteric knowledge is reserved for the elite philosopher while exoteric knowledge is carefully crafted by the philosopher for everyone else, and often obfuscates the true understanding and intention of the philosopher. Indeed, Strauss thought that the texts of truly "great" philosophers contained both an esoteric and an exoteric level and that the esoteric component was accessible only to the reader willing to carefully analyze and resolve subtle, inherent contradictions within the text. Machiavelli, he believed, was such a philosopher.

Among Strauss's better known protégés is Allan Bloom. Straussianism has been supported and extended to the modern political arena by neoconservatives, notably Michael Ledeen and Paul Wolfowitz, who pursued his Doctorate in political science at the University of Chicago during Strauss's tenure there.

External links

• Leo Strauss biography and bibliography
• Economist article on Leo Strauss' influence on members of the Bush administration
• An article in the March 21, 2003 issue of Executive Intelligence Review (EIR), entitled "Profile: Leo Strauss, Fascist Godfather of the Neo-Cons" by Jeffrey Steinberg (published by Lyndon LaRouche).

References

• Revolt against modernity : Leo Strauss, Eric Voegelin & the search for postliberal order / Ted V. McAllister. Lawrence, Kansas, University Press of Kansas, 1996.
• Thoughts on Machiavelli / Leo Strauss. Chicago, Ill., University of Chicago Press, 1958.

 

Socrates

This article is about the philosopher. See also Socrates (football player) and Socrates Scholasticus for the 4th-century Christian church historian.

---

Socrates (470 B.C. - 399 B.C.) was a Greek (Athenian) philosopher and one of the most important icons of the Western philosophical tradition.

His most important contribution to Western thought is his method of enquiry, known as the method of maieutics, which is a foundation for much of later Western philosophy. This method usually involves questions about the definitions or logoi (singular logos) of key moral concepts. This is known today as the "Soctratic Method", although Soctrates himself called it 'cross-examining'. Socrates was particularly interested in what are often called the five cardinal virtues (held to be such by Socrates' Greek contemporaries), namely, piety, wisdom, temperance, courage, and justice. Such questions challenged implicit moral beliefs of the interlocutors, who, in answering such questions, were often led to realize inadequacies and inconsistencies in their beliefs. Socrates himself professed to be ignorant on such matters--but made wise by the keen awareness of his ignorance.

Socrates left no writings; we know him only from the writings of his contemporary Xenophon, references to his military career in Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War though he was also presented as a caricature of a generic sophist by his contemporary Aristophanes in his play The Clouds. The icon though, is that which Plato and his dialogues evoked, albeit they did also refer to biographical details that co-eval readers would have recognized. Beyond those, there is a plethora of minor notes in Aristotle, Diogenes Laertius and Arabic anecdotal collections which more often than not considered the name of the particular philosopher less important than the fact that it was a name the audience knew.

In the early stages of his life Socrates was a sculptor like his father Sophroniscus. Phaenarete, his mother, was a midwife. He was married to Xanthippe. By the cultural standards of the time, she was considered a shrew. Whether that means that she was what we today would call an independent minded woman, or a nagging housewife, is purely a matter of speculation. On the other expressible aspects, Socrates himself attested that he enjoyed being married to a woman whose taming would prepare him for taming the youth of the city.

Socrates lived during a time of transition from the height of Athenian Empire to her defeat by Sparta and its coalition. Socrates himself fought in Potidea, Delium and Amphipolis. We know from Symposium that Socrates was decorated for bravery. In one instance he stayed with the wounded Alcibiades, and probably saved his life. It is from his own anecdotes about the war that we learn about his legendary indifference to external circumstances. Even during the winter campaign in Thrace, the frost was unable to force Socrates to strap sandals to his feet.

Socrates' practice was often resented by influential figures of his day, whose reputations for wisdom and virtue were debunked by his questions. At a time when Athens was seeking to recover from humiliating defeat, upon the instigation of three leading figures at the time, an Athenian public court tried Socrates for impiety and for corrupting the young, found him guilty as charged, and executed him by ordering him to drink hemlock - see the Trial of Socrates.

The trial of Socrates took place against the backdrop of Athens' defeat in the Peloponnesian war. Although Athens would rebound, no one knew that at the time. Most scholars agree that Socrates was just scapegoated. However, even though Socrates himself fought for Athens and supported the democracy, Alcibiades the faithless plotter, was a member of Socrates' circle, as was Critias, though they were to clash later while Critias was a leader of the 30 tyrants (the pro-Spartan oligarcy that ruled Athens for a few years after the defeat.) Socrates may have believed in the gods, but Alcibiades certainly did not. Socrates' own philosophical circle was cultish, one can imagine parents being annoyed by their children using elenchos on them.

Also, Socrates did have unusual views on religion. He would meditate on his personal spirit, or daimon, sometimes halting for an entire day, oblivious to his surroundings leading some medical experts to speculate that he may have suffered from schizophrenia, and others suggesting epilepsy. He said that his daimon never asked him to do anything, but only prevented him from instigating folly. He also denied that goodness could be defined as just doing what the gods wanted.

However, Socrates himself never wrote anything down, and everything we have today about Socrates comes from: Plato's work, a note in some of Aristotle's work, and an ancient Greek comedy.

The annoying nature of elenchos earned Socrates the moniker "gadfly of Athens."

End times

The end times are, in one version of Christian eschatology, a time of tribulation that will precede the Second Coming of Jesus Christ, as is related in Bible prophecy such as the Book of Daniel, Book of Ezekiel, and Book of Revelation.

Specifically, what is usually referred to as the "end times" revolves around a cluster of beliefs in Christian millennialism. These beliefs typically include the ideas that the Biblical apocalypse is imminent and that various signs in current events are omens of Armageddon. While details vary, there is usually a fairly specific timetable set forth that climaxes in the end of the world. Israel, the European Economic Community, and sometimes the United Nations are supposed to be key players whose role was foretold in prophecies. Believers typically hope that they will be supernaturally summoned to Heaven by the Rapture before the dark prophecies of Revelations take place. These beliefs have been widely held in one form, by the Adventist movement (Millerites), and in another form by dispensational premillennialists.

Origins

Religious movements which expect that the second coming of Christ will be a cataclysmic event, generally called adventism, have arisen throughout the Christian era; but they became particularly common during and after the Protestant Reformation. Swedenborgianism, Shakers, and others developed entire religious systems around a central concern for the second coming of Christ, disclosed by new prophecy or special gifts of revelation. The Millerites are diverse religious groups which similarly rely upon a special gift of interpretation for fixing the date of Christ's return.

Dispensationalism, in contrast to the Millerite Adventist movement, got its start in the 19th century, when John Nelson Darby, founder of the Plymouth Brethren sect, incorporated into his system of Biblical intepretation a system of organizing Biblical time into a number of discrete dispensations, each of which marks a separate covenant with God. Darby's beliefs were widely publicised in Cyrus I. Scofield's Scofield Reference Bible, an annotated Bible that became popular in the United States of America.

Since the Biblical prophets were writing at a time when Palestine was mostly Jewish, and the Temple in Jerusalem was still functioning, they wrote as if those institutions would still be in operation during the prophecied events. Their destruction in A.D. 70 put the prophetic timetable, if there is one, on hold. Believers therefore anticipated the return of Jews to Palestine and the reconstruction of the Temple before the Second Coming could occur.

The prophecies

The foundation of Israel in 1947 gave a major boost to the dispensationalist belief system; Israel's history of wars with its Arab neighbours did even more for it. After the Six Days War in 1967 and the Yom Kippur War in 1973, it seemed plausible to many fundamentalist Christians in the 1970s that Mideast turmoil may well be paving the way for the Battle of Armageddon.

Leaders of the movement such as Hal Lindsey claimed furthermore that the European Economic Community was a revived Roman Empire, and would become the kingdom of the coming Antichrist or Beast. A Roman Empire, of course, also figured in the New Testament writers' vision of the future. The fact that at in the early 1970s, there were seven nations in the European Economic Community was held to be significant; this aligned the Community with a seven headed dragon in Revelations. This specific prophecy has required revision, but the idea of a revived Roman Empire remains.

The Antichrist was supposed to be the dictatorial leader of a "one world government." He would promise peace to the world while leading Christians into apostasy, and impose a "one world money system" in which anyone had to have a Number of the Beast branded on them to buy or sell. Like the Roman emperors of old, he would impose horrible martyrdoms on surviving Christians. At some point after his appearance, a large number of Jews would convert to Christianity and preach the gospel after the Christians had been removed by the Rapture.

Believers in the system therefore scanned the headlines wondering if various world leaders might be the Antichrist, and wondering whether Mideast violence might be a sign of Armageddon. They feared such things as Social Security numbers and UPC barcodes, fearing that these tax identification numbers may be precursors to the dangerous Number of the Beast, whose receipt dooms your soul to damnation.

The Antichrist has as his allies the Beast and the Whore of Babylon, mysterious figures who run an apostate church or false religion. A world ravaged by plague and turmoil turns to the Antichrist to lead it, and who promises to deliver it. Eventually, the Antichrist musters an army to attack Israel. At the climax of the story, the Battle of Armageddon, Jesus returns in the Second Coming and stops the fighting.

The movement has spawned various timetables and countdowns to the apocalypse, whose general tendency can be summed up with the title of one of Lindsey's books, The 1980s: Countdown to Armageddon. The former Soviet Union played a large role in Lindsey's earlier interpretations; his later books understandably tone that down considerably, while new villains like Saddam Hussein take its place. The movement has strained relationships with conservative U.S. governments and the government of Israel, as some Jews think American Christians' supposed support of Israel is merely a cover for their hope of the destruction of Judaism during the end times.

It should be obvious from the foregoing that there is nothing in the Biblical apocalypses that forces these particular interpretations. No major denomination apart from the Jehovah's Witnesses accepts these beliefs as a standard of Biblical interpretation. The Seventh-day Adventists have their own tradition of millennialism arising from the nineteenth century Millerite movement that is distinct from contemporary dispensationalism. The prophecies have had to be revised several times in the light of changing current events. The whole belief system is often characterised by those who do not hold it, or who have abandoned it, as a mass paranoid delusion, full of ideas of reference that supposedly reveal the secret and sinister meaning that links unrelated events.

End times speculations have occasionally been made the subject of political controversy, especially in the United States when conservative Christians seek national political office. The implications of the prophecies that turmoil in the Middle East is inescapable, that nuclear war is predestined by Scripture, and that it will supernaturally lead to a divine utopia, give rise to some misgivings among unbelievers in the prophecies. James G. Watt, Ronald Reagan's Secretary of the Interior, once remarked that "my responsibility is to follow the Scriptures which call upon us to occupy the land until Jesus returns;" this was interpreted by political foes as meaning that we did not need to take care of the environment because Jesus was returning soon. Ronald Reagan himself was quoted in 1980 as saying that "we may be the generation that sees Armageddon," suggesting that he was familiar with the prophecies. Similar controversies have followed United States Attorney General John Ashcroft.

The end times according to the Jehovah's Witnesses

The Jehovah's Witnesses organization has very specific doctrines on the End Times, explained in detail in the literature of the Watchtower Society. Witnesses teach that the Greek word parousia, often translated as 'coming' really means 'presence', that the presence of Christ (commonly called the 'Second Coming') began in the year 1914, and that he now sits at God's right hand, ruling amidst his enemies.

Witnesses generally do not use the expression 'end of the world', with its connotations of the destruction of humanity or the planet, but prefer to use the expression 'end of the system of things', thus maintaining the distinction between the original-language words kosmos (world) and aion (age, or system of things)

Witness eschatology envisages the following series of events at the end of the system of things:

1. Christ becomes King in heaven in 1914; "last days" of 2 Timothy 3:1 begin.
2. Fulfillment of prophecies in Matthew 24, Mark 13, Luke 21 about the 'conclusion of the system of things.'
3. Possibly cry of 'peace and security' (1 Thessalonians 5:3)
4. Destruction of Babylon the Great (all false religion throughout the world) by the 'wild beast' referred to in Revelation 17 and understood by the Witnesses to be the worldwide political system, possibly through the United Nations.
5. Satan's attack on God's people (Ezekiel 38)
6. Armageddon - God's war against the 'Kings of the Earth' (political rulers); destruction of the wicked.
7. 1000-year reign of Jesus Christ. Survivors of Armageddon will work to make the earth a paradise, like the original Garden of Eden, and will gradually be restored to perfection. It is thought that the dead will be resurrected at this time and given the chance to learn righteousness. (Isaiah 26:9, 10)
8. Final test; Satan let loose for a short time, destroyed along with his followers (Revelation 20)
9. Christ hands the Kingdom over to his Father (1 Corinthians 15:28)

Witnesses remain neutral in political affairs and teach that believers on earth will be spectators only in the above-mentioned scenario, not participating in any type of warfare.

Fictional treatments

These beliefs about the end times have been the subject of a number of works of fiction. The motion picture The Omen and its sequels are predicated on these beliefs. The Left Behind series of novels and motion pictures, originally by Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins, are also a fictional retelling of these tales from the point of view of an evangelist who wishes to convert people to belief in these prophecies.

External link

• http://www.endtimes.org

 

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

(Redirected from Hegel)

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (August 27, 1770 - November 14, 1831), a philosopher born in Stuttgart, Germany, received his education at Tübingen seminary, and became fascinated by the works of Spinoza, Kant, and Rousseau, and by the French Revolution. Many consider Hegel's thought to represent the summit of 19th Century Germany's movement of philosophical idealism; it made a profound impact on the historical materialism of Karl Marx.

Hegel attended the seminary at Tübingen with the epic poet Friedrich Hölderlin and the objective idealist philosopher Friedrich Schelling. The three watched the unfolding of the French Revolution and collaborated in a critique of the idealist philosophies of Kant and his follower Fichte.

Hegel's first and most important major work is the Phenomenology of Spirit (or ". . . of Mind"). During his life he also published the Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences, the Science of Logic and the [Elements of the] Philosophy of Right.

Hegel's works have a reputation for their difficulty, and for the breadth of the topics they attempt to cover. Hegel introduced a system for understanding the history of philosophy (and the world itself) often called a "dialectic": a progression in which each successive moment emerges as a working-out of the self-contradictions inherent in the preceding moment. For example, the French Revolution for Hegel constitutes the introduction of real freedom into western societies for the first time in recorded history. But precisely because of its absolute novelty, it is also absolutely radical: on the one hand the upsurge of violence required to carry out the revolution cannot cease to be itself, while on the other, it has already consumed its opponent. The revolution therefore has nowhere to turn but on to its own result: the hard-won freedom is consumed by a brutal Reign of Terror. History, however, progresses by learning from its mistakes: only after and precisely because of this experience can one posit the existence of a constitutional state of free citizens, embodying both the (allegedly) benevolent organizing power of rational government and the revolutionary ideals of freedom and equality.

In contemporary accounts of Hegelianism -- to undergraduate classes, for example -- Hegel's dialectic often appears broken up for convenience into three moments called "thesis" (in our example, the revolution), "antithesis" (the terror which followed), and "synthesis" (the constitutional state of free citizens). Hegel did not use this classification at all himself, though: it was developed earlier by Fichte in his (loosely analogous) account of the relation between the individual subject and the world. Serious Hegel scholarship does not generally recognize the validity of this classification, although it probably has some pedagogical value.

Hegel used this system to explain the whole of the history of philosophy, science, art, politics and religion, but many modern critics point out that Hegel often seems to gloss over the realities of history in order to fit it into his dialectical mold. Karl Popper, a critic of Hegel in The Open Society and Its Enemies, suggests that the Hegel's system forms a thinly veiled justification for the rule of Frederick William III, and that Hegel's idea of the ultimate goal of history is to reach a state approximating that of 1830s Prussia. This view of Hegel as an apologist of state power and precursor of 20th-century totalitarianism was criticized thoroughly by Herbert Marcuse in his Reason and Revolution: Hegel and the Rise of Social Theory. Arthur Schopenhauer despised Hegel on account of the latter's historicism, and decried Hegel's work as "pseudo-philosophy".

After Hegel's death, his followers divided into two major and opposing camps. The Right Hegelians, the direct disciples of Hegel at the University of Berlin, advocated evangelical orthodoxy and the political conservatism of the post-Napoleon Restoration period. The Left became known as the Young Hegelians and they interpreted Hegel in a revolutionary sense, leading to an advocation of atheism in religion and liberal democracy in politics. Left Hegelians included Bruno Bauer, Ludwig Feuerbach, David Friedrich Strauss, Max Stirner, and most famously, Karl Marx. The multiple schisms in this faction eventually led to Stirner's anarchistic variety of egoism and Marx's version of communism.

In the 20th century, Hegel's philosophy underwent a major renaissance, partly through his rediscovery and re-evaluation as the philosophical progenitor of Marxism and the turn of many philosophically oriented Marxists, especially but not exclusively non-Communist ones, to the philosophical foundation of Marxism in Marx's early work and in Hegel's philosophy; partly through a resurgence of the historical perspective that Hegel brought to everything; partly through increasing recognition of the importance of his dialectical method. Some figures associated with this renaissance are Herbert Marcuse, Theodor Adorno, Ernst Bloch, and Alexandre Kojeve.

Major works

• Phenomenology of Spirit (Phanomenologie des Geistes) 1806 (See battle of Jena)
• Science of Logic (Wissenschaft der Logik) 1812-1816
• Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences (Enzyklopaedie der philosophischen Wissenschaften) 1817-1830
• Elements of the Philosophy of Right (Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts) 1819

External links

• Hegel.net - resources available under the GNU FDL
• Links on Hegel's life
• Commented link list
• Hegel mailing lists in the internet
• Explanation of Hegel, mostly in German
• Discussion of the Hegelian tradition, including the Left and Right schism.
• An extensive bibliography
• Professional/academic society focussed on Hegel, Hegelism, and its historical context.

 

Critical theory

(Redirected from Critical Theory)

Critical theory, in sociology and philosophy, is shorthand for critical theory of society or critical social theory, a label used by the Frankfurt School, i.e. members of the Institute for Social Research of the University of Frankfurt, their intellectual and social network, and those influenced by them intellectually, to describe their own work, oriented toward radical social change, in contradistinction to "traditional theory," i.e. theory in the positivistic, scientistic, or purely observational mode. In literature and literary criticism, by contrast, "critical theory" means something quite different, namely theory used in criticism.

Although the original critical social theorists were Marxists and there is some evidence that in their choice of the phrase "critical theory of society" they were in part influenced by its sounding less politically controversial than "Marxism", nevertheless there were substantial substantive reasons for this choice. First, they were explicitly linking up with the "critical philosophy" of Immanuel Kant, where the term "critique" meant philosophical reflection on the limits of claims made for certain kinds of knowledge and a direct connection between such critique and the emphasis on moral autonomy. In an intellectual context defined by dogmatic positivism and scientism on the one hand and dogmatic "scientific socialism" on the other, critical theory meant to rehabilitate through such a philosophically critical approach an orientation toward revolutionary agency, or at least its possibility, at a time when it seemed in decline. Second, in the context of both Marxist-Leninist and Social-Democratic orthodoxy, which emphasized Marxism as a new kind of positive science, they were linking up with the implicit epistemology of Karl Marx's work, which presented itself as critique, as in Marx's "Capital: a critique of political economy", wanting to emphasize that Marx was attempting to create a new kind of critical analysis oriented toward the unity of theory and revolutionary practice rather than a new kind of positive science. In the 1960's, Juergen Habermas raised the epistemological discussion to a new level in his "Knowledge and Human Interests", by identifying critical knowledge as based on principles that differentiated it either from the natural sciences or the humanities, through its orientation to self-reflection and emancipation.

The term "critical theory", in the non-literary-criticism sense, now loosely groups all sorts of work, e.g. that of the Frankfurt School, Foucault, Bourdieu, and feminist theory, that has in common the critique of domination, an emancipatory interest, and the fusion of social/cultural analysis, explanation, and interpretation with social/cultural critique.

Notable figures in critical theory:

• Max Horkheimer
• Walter Benjamin
• Theodor Adorno
• Herbert Marcuse
• Jurgen Habermas
• Michel Foucault
• Pierre Bourdieu
• Mikhail Epstein
• many feminist theorists

See also: Marxism, Frankfurt School, cultural studies, Race Theory, queer theory

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Dispensationalism

Dispensationalism is a school of Bible interpretation that is associated with fundamentalist Christianity.

Dispensationalists believe that sacred history can be broken up into several different "dispensations," (time periods) which mark separate covenants that God is thought to have made with humanity. The most common list includes seven such dispensations:

• Innocence - Adam
• Conscience - After man sinned, up to the flood
• Government - After the flood, man allowed to eat meat, death penalty instituted
• Promise - Abraham up to Moses and the giving of the Torah
• Law - Moses to the crucifixion of Jesus Christ
• Grace - The cross to the Millennial Kingdom
• Millennial Kingdom - A 1000 year reign of Christ on earth centered in Jerusalem

Dispensationalism teaches that the Second Coming of Jesus Christ will be a physical event, by which a world-wide kingdom will be established in human history, geographically centered in Jerusalem. As such, dispensationalism is associated with the circulation of end times prophecy, which professes to read omens of the Second Coming in current events. Many of the distinctive features of dispensationalism were anticipated by the work of Pierre Poiret.

Dispensationalism in this form was proposed as a specific system by John Nelson Darby, founder of the Plymouth Brethren movement. It was popularised in the United States by Cyrus I. Scofield through the vehicle of his widely circulated Scofield Reference Bible, an annotated study Bible that taught dispensationalism as a system.

Dispensationalism has had a number of (arguably) positive effects on Protestantism, at least as it is practised in the United States of America. By consistently teaching that the Beast of Revelations, or the Antichrist, is a political leader, dispensationalism has weakened the traditional Reformation-era identification of that figure with the Pope, and the Roman Catholic Church with the Whore of Babylon. Dispensationalism has led many evangelical Christians of the USA to temper their traditional anti-Catholicism, at least a little.

Dispensationalism rejects the traditional Christian teaching of supersessionism. It tends to go hand-in-hand with a very protective attitude toward the Jewish people, and the modern State of Israel. John Nelson Darby taught, and most subsequent dispensationalists have consistently maintained, that God looks upon the Jews as his chosen people and continues to have a place for them in the dispensational, prophetic scheme of things. While virtually all traditions of Christianity teach that the Jews are a distinct people, irrevocably entitled to the promises of God (because "the gifts and calling of God are without repentance"), dispensationalism is unique in teaching that the covenant with the Church is only a provisional dispensation, until the Jews finally recognize Jesus as their promised Messiah during the trials that dispensationalists envision coming upon the Jews in the Great Tribulation. Darby's prophecies envision Judaism as continuing to enjoy God's protection, parallel to Christianity, literally to the End of Time, and teaches that God has a separate track in the prophecies for Jews, apart from the Church.

On the other hand, it is a curious fact that dispensationalists tend to be energetically evangelistic, with special interest in the Jews because they are "God's chosen people". Dispensationalist beliefs are widespread in many forms of Messianic Judaism, for example, which aggressively seeks the conversion of Jews to a form of Christianity mixed with Jewish ritual and Hebrew language. In some dispensationalist circles, the Jewish converts to Christianity are sometimes referred to as "completed Jews". Thus, while it is at odds with traditional supersessionism (which was formulated to discourage directly carrying over Jewish practice into the Christian Church), dispensationalism generally is markedly at odds with modern religious pluralism, which is typified by the view that proselytism of the Jews is a form of anti-semitism. Also, some dispensationalists, such as Jerry Falwell, have asserted that the Antichrist will be a Jew, based on a belief that the Antichrist will falsely seem to some Jews to fulfill prophesies of the Messiah more accurately than Jesus did. This belief is not essential to dispensationalism. At any rate, dispensationalists are typically, in practical terms, allies of the Jews and enthusiastic popularizers of Judaica, and foes of anti-semitism in the conventional sense.

Dispensationalism is criticized for other reasons. It teaches that Christians should not expect spiritual good from earthly governments, and should expect social conditions to decline as the end times draw nearer. Dispensationalist readings of prophecies often teach that the Antichrist will appear to the world as a peacemaker. This makes some dispensationalists suspicious of all forms of power, religious and secular, and especially of human attempts to form international organisations for peace such as the United Nations. In a manner that seems, apart from dispensationalist assumptions, inconsistent with the Sermon on the Mount, almost all dispensationalists reject the idea that a lasting peace can be attained by human effort in the Middle East. Dispensationalists teach that churches that do not insist on Biblical literalism as they deem appropriate are in fact part of the Great Apostasy. This casts suspicion on attempts to create church organisations that cross denominational boundaries such as the World Council of Churches. (See also Ecumenism.)

Dispensationalism as a school of Biblical interpretation is associated with a number of fundamentalist seminaries, of which the best known are the Dallas Theological Seminary and the Moody Bible Institute.

Biblical Arguments in Favor of Dispensationalism

• The Apostles determined at the Council at Jerusalem (Acts 15) that it was not necessary for Gentiles to become Jewish in order to become Christians. Thus, the church is not a sect of Judaism but a separate entity.
• The term 'Israel' in the Bible always refers to physical descendants of Jacob.
• Similarly, the terms 'church' and 'kingdom' are never used interchangeably in Scripture.
• Paul claims that Israel will be grafted in again (Romans 11).
• Abraham was saved by faith, 430 years before the Law was given to Moses. (See Galatians 3:6,16-19.)
• The Book of Galatians is understood to teach that the Law continues to have binding force for Jews, but not for Christians. Now that Christ has come, Christians are not under the supervision of the law (3:25), but Jews are still governed by the law (5:3) unless they are in Christ (3:28).

Sources

• Enns, Paul: The Moody Handbook of Theology

External link

• http://www.dispensationalism.com

 

Plato

Plato (c. 427 BC - c. 347 BC) was an immensely influential classical Greek philosopher, student of Socrates and teacher of Aristotle. His most famous work is The Republic (Greek Politeia, 'city') in which he outlines his vision of "an ideal" state. He also wrote the Laws and many dialogues in which Socrates is the main participant.

"The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato."
--Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality, 1929

Biography

Plato was born in Athens, into a moderately well-to-do aristocratic family. His father was named Ariston and his mother Perictione. An ancestor, Glaucon, was one of the best-known members of the Athenian nobility. Plato's own real name was "Aristocles". The nickname Plato originates from wrestling circles, that much is agreed on. Since Plato means "broad," it probably refers either to his physical appearance or possibly wrestling stance or style.

He founded the Academy, one of the earliest known organized schools in Western civilization, named after the spot it was founded on, holy to the hero Academus. Aristotle was a student there for many years. It operated until it was closed by Justinian I of Byzantium in 529 A.D.

Plato became a pupil of Socrates in his youth, and--according to his own account, anyhow--attended his master's trial, though not his execution. Unlike Socrates, Plato wrote down his philosophical views and left a considerable number of manuscripts (see below). He was deeply affected by the city's treatment of Socrates: much of his early work enshrines his memories of his teacher, and much of his ethical writing suggests a desire to found a society where similar injustices could not occur.

Plato was also deeply influenced by the Pythagoreans, whose notions of numerical harmony have clear echoes in Plato's notion of the Forms (sometimes thus capitalized; see below); by Anaxagoras, who taught Socrates and who held that the mind or reason pervades everything; and by Parmenides, who argued the unity of all things.

In Plato's writings one finds the heliocentric theory of the universe long before it was advanced by Aristarchus (and revived still later and given a scientific footing by Copernicus, Galileo, and Kepler). One finds debates concerning aristocratic and democratic forms of government. One finds debates concerning the role of heredity and environment in human intelligence and personality long before the modern "nature versus nurture" debate began in the time of Hobbes and Locke, with its modern continuation in such controversial works as The Mismeasure of Man and The Bell Curve. One finds arguments for the subjectivity--and the objectivity--of human knowledge which foreshadow modern debates between Hume and Kant, or between the postmodernists and their opponents. Even the myth of the lost city or continent of Atlantis originates as an illustrative story told by Plato in his Timaeus and Critias.

Work

Plato wrote his philosophy down mainly in the form of dialogues in which several characters discuss a topic by asking questions of one another. The early ones, where Socrates figures prominently and his own teaching style is used, are called the Socratic Dialogues. But the philosophy expressed in his dialogues changed a great deal over the course of Plato's life, and this makes it difficult to determine whether an opinion expressed in one of these dialogues is an idea of Socrates', or Plato's. (Plato himself appears only very briefly in two of the dialogues, and says nothing.) It is generally agreed that Plato's earlier works are more closely based on Socrates' thought, whereas his later writing increasingly breaks away with the views of his former teacher. In the middle dialogues, Socrates becomes a mouthpiece for Plato's own philosophy, and the question-and-answer style is more pro forma. The later dialogues are closer to being simply treatises, and Socrates is often absent or quiet.

Plato's Metaphysics: Platonism, or realism

One of Plato's legacies, and perhaps his greatest, was his dualistic metaphysics, often called (in metaphysics) simply "realism" or "Platonism." Whatever it is called, Plato's metaphysics divides the world into two distinct aspects: the intelligible world of "forms" and the perceptual world we see around us. He saw the perceptual world, and the things in it, as imperfect copies of the intelligible forms or ideas. These forms are unchangable and perfect, and are only comprehensible by the use of the intellect or understanding (i.e., a capacity of the mind that does not include sense-perception or imagination).

In the Republic Books VI and VII, Plato used a number of metaphors to explain his metaphysical views: the metaphor of the sun, the well-known allegory of the cave, and most explicitly, the divided line. Taken together, these metaphors convey a complex and, in places, difficult theory: there is something called The Form of the Good (often interpreted as Plato's God), which is the ultimate object of knowledge and which as it were sheds light on all the other forms (i.e., universals: abstract kinds and attributes) and from which all other forms "emanate." The Form of the Good does this in somewhat the same way as the sun sheds light on, or makes visible and "generates," things in the perceptual world. (See Plato's metaphor of the sun.) But indeed, in the perceptual world, the particular objects we see around us bear only a dim resemblance to the more ultimately real forms of Plato's intelligible world: it is as if we are seeing shadows of cut-out shapes on the walls of a cave, which are mere representations of the reality outside the cave, illuminated by the sun. (See Plato's allegory of the cave.) We can imagine everything in the universe represented on a line of increasing reality; it is divided once in the middle, and then once again in each of the resulting parts. The first division represents that between the intelligible and the perceptual worlds. Then there is a corresponding division in each of these worlds: the segment representing the perceptual world is divided into segments representing "real things" on the one hand, and shadows, reflections, and representations on the other. Similarly, the segment representing the intelligible world is divided into segments representing first principles and most general forms, on the one hand, and more derivative, "reflected" forms, on the other. (See the divided line of Plato.) The form of government derived from this philosophy turns out to be one of a rigidly fixed hierarchy of hereditary classes, in which the arts are mostly suppressed for the good of the state, the size of the city and its social classes is determined by mathematical formula, and eugenic measures are applied secretly by rigging the lotteries in which the right to reproduce is allocated. The tightness of connection of such government to the lofty and original philosophy in the book has been debated.

Plato's metaphysics, and particularly the dualism between the intelligible and the perceptual, would inspire later Neoplatonic thinkers (see Plotinus) and Gnosticism) and other metaphysical realists. For more on Platonic realism in general, see Platonic realism and the Forms.

Plato also had some influential opinions on the nature of knowledge and learning which he propounded in the Meno, which began with the question of whether virtue can be taught, and proceeded to expound the concepts of recollection, learning as the discovery of pre-existing knowledge, and right opinion, opinions which are correct but have no clear justification.

A short history of Plato scholarship

Plato's thought is often compared with that of his best and most famous student, Aristotle, whose reputation during the Middle Ages so completely eclipsed that of Plato that the Scholastic philosophers referred to Aristotle as "the Philosopher."

One of the characteristics of the Middle Ages was reliance on authority and on scholastic commentaries on writings of Plato and other historically important philosophers, rather than accessing their original works. In fact, Plato's original writings were essentially lost to western civilization until their reintroduction in the twelfth century through the agency of Arab scholars who had maintained the original Greek texts of the ancients. These were eventually translated into Latin and later, into the local vernacular.

Only in the Renaissance, with the general resurgence of interest in classical civilization, did knowledge of Plato's philosophy become more widespread. Many of the greatest early modern scientists (e.g., Galileo) and artists (with the support of the Plato-inspired Lorenzo de Medici) who broke with Scholasticism and fostered the flowering of the Renaissance saw Plato's philosophy as the basis for progress in the arts and sciences.

Today, Plato's reputation is as easily on a par with Aristotle's. Many college students have read Plato but not Aristotle, in large part because the former's greater accessibility.

Works by Plato

A work is marked (1) if it is not generally agreed by scholars that Plato is the author of the work. A work is marked (2) if it is generally agreed by scholars that Plato is not the author of the work.

• Alcibiades (1)
• Apology
• Axiochus (2)
• Charmides
• Clitophon (1)
• Cratylus
• Critias
• Crito
• Definitions (2)
• Demodocus (2)
• Epigrams
• Epinomis (2)
• Eryxias (2)
• Euthydemus
• Euthyphro
• Gorgias
• Greater Hippias (1)
• Halcyon (2)
• Hipparchus (2)
• Ion
• Laches
• Laws
• Lesser Hippias
• Letters
• Lysis
• Menexenus
• Meno
• Minos (2)
• On Justice (2)
• On Virtue (2)
• Parmenides
• Phaedo
• Phaedrus
• Philebus
• Protagoras
• Rival Lovers (2)
• Republic
• Second Alcibiades (2)
• Sisyphus (2)
• Sophist
• Statesman
• Symposium
• Theaetetus
• Theages (2)
• Timaeus

External links

• Sophist
• Philebus
• Statesman
• Theaetetus
• Phaedo
• Crito
• Apology
• Meno
• Euthyphro
• Phaedrus
• Ion
• Cratylus
• Symposium
• Euthydemus
• Protagoras
• Laches
• Charmides
• Lysis
• Timaeus
• Critias
• The Republic

See also

• Platonism
• Neoplatonism

 

Relativism

Relativism is the view that the meaning and value of human beliefs and behaviors is not absolute but dependent upon and can be understood and evaluated only in terms of, for example, their historical and cultural context. Philosophers identify many different kinds of relativism depending upon which classes of beliefs are said to depend upon what.

The concept is important to both philosophers and anthropologists, although in different ways. Philosophers explore how beliefs might or might not in fact depend for their truth upon such items as language, conceptual scheme, culture, and so forth; just one example is ethical relativism. Anthropologists, on the other hand, are concerned with describing actual human behavior. For them, relativism refers to a methodological stance in which the researcher suspends or brackets his or her own cultural biases while attempting to understand beliefs and behaviors in their local contexts. This is known as methodological relativism.

One advocate of relativism, Bernard Crick, a British political scientist, wrote "In Defense of Politics", arguing that moral conflict between people was inevitable, that it could only be resolved by ethics, and when that occurred in public the result was politics. Accordingly, the process of dispute resolution, harms reduction, mediation or peacemaking was central to all of moral philosophy. He was an important influence on the feminists and later the Greens.

An extremely common argument against relativism is an inherently contradictory (self-stultifying) notion: The statement "all is relative" is either a relative statement or an absolute one. If it is relative, then there must be some absolutes in the world. If the statement is absolute, on the other hand, then it provides an example of an absolute statement, proving that not all truths are relative.

The latter argument was one of the first things anybody ever said in reply to relativism, and needs more explanation.

See also

• isomorphism
• moral relativism
• linguistic relativism

 

Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis

In linguistics, the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis (SWH) states that there are certain thoughts of an individual in one language that cannot be understood by those who live in another language. SWH states that the way people think is strongly affected by their native languages. It is a controversial theory championed by linguist Edward Sapir and his student Benjamin Whorf.

First discussed by Sapir in 1929, the hypothesis became popular in the 1950s following posthumous publication of Whorf's writings on the subject. In 1955, Dr. James Cooke Brown created the Loglan language (which led to an offshoot Lojban) in order to test the hypothesis. After vigorous attack from followers of Noam Chomsky in the following decades, the hypothesis is now believed by most linguists only in the weak sense that language can have some effect on thought.

Politicians appear to give the idea more credence, as the continuing programs to eliminate sexist and other politically incorrect language demonstrate.

Central to the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is the idea of linguistic relativity--that distinctions of meaning between related terms in a language are often arbitrary and particular to that language. Sapir and Whorf took this one step further by arguing that a person's world view is largely determined by the vocabulary and syntax available in his or her language (linguistic determinism). Whorf in fact called his version of the theory the Principle of Linguistic Relativity.

A possible argument against the extreme ("Weltanschauung") version of this idea, that all thought is constrained by language, can be discovered through personal experience: all people have occasional difficulty expressing themselves due to constraints in the language, and are conscious that the language is not adequate for what they mean. Perhaps they say or write something, and then think "that's not quite what I meant to say" or perhaps they cannot find a good way to explain a concept they understand to a novice. This makes it clear that what is being thought is not a set of words, because one can understand a concept without being able to express it in words.

The opposite extreme--that language does not influence thought at all--is also widely considered to be false. For example, it has been shown that people's discrimination of similar colors can be influenced by how their language organizes color names. Another study showed that deaf children of hearing parents may fail on some cognitive tasks unrelated to hearing, while deaf children of deaf parents succeed, due to the hearing parents being less fluent in sign language. Computer programmers who know different programming languages often see the same problem in completely different ways.

The Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) analysis of the problem is direct: Most people do some of their thinking by talking to themselves. Most people do some of their thinking by imagining images and other sensory phantasms. To the extent that people think by talking to themselves they are limited by their vocabulary and the structure of their language and their linguistic habits. (However it should also be noted that individuals have idiolects.)

John Grinder, a founder of NLP, was a linguistics professor who perhaps unconsciously combined the ideas of Chomsky with the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. A seminal NLP insight came from a challenge he gave to his students: coin a neologism to describe a distinction for which you have no words. Student Robert Dilts coined a word for the way people stare into space when they are thinking, and for the different directions they stare. These new words enabled users to describe patterns in the ways people stare into space, which led directly to NLP — a fitting piece of support for the validity of NLP.

Sapir-Whorf and Programming Languages

The hypothesis is sometimes applied in computer science to postulate that programmers skilled in a certain programming language may not have a (deep) understanding of some concepts of other languages. Though it may equally apply to any area where languages are "synthesized" for specific purposes, computer science is especially fertile when it comes to creating languages.

One way of stating the Church-Turing thesis is that any language that can simulate a Turing machine can be used to implement any effective algorithm -- in this sense, it is irrelevant what language is used to implement a particular algorithm, as that exact algorithm can also be implemented in every other language. However, when designing an algorithm to solve a particular problem, programmers are typically heavily influenced by the language constructs available. Though a large part of this is undoubtedly the way of least resistance (implement whatever is easiest to implement), there is also an element of "appropriateness" or "naturalness" that seems to compel the programmer to a design that "befits" the language.

Most programmers consider this a Good Thing, and the bewildering multitude of programming languages can be defended with the remark that a new programming language, while not extending the set of all possible algorithms, does extend the set of all algorithms we can efficiently think about. A well-known epigram by Alan Perlis states that "a language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming, is not worth knowing".

Examples

• E-Prime - avoids the verb "to be" in terms of general semantics
• The Dispossessed - describes a fictional anarchist culture where use of the possessive case is taboo
• The Languages of Pao - science fiction novel depicting a social engineer who designs new languages for societies that wish to change their lot
• Babel-17 - science fiction novel by Samuel R. Delany that supposes that the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is strongly true, depicting a fictional language, Babel-17, which causes anyone who learns it to become a traitor to their political organisation.
• non-sexist language - often promoted on the grounds that sexist attitudes are aided by sexist language
• gender-neutral pronouns such as spivak pronouns and sie and hir
• Newspeak - fictional language described in Nineteen Eighty-Four, designed to constrict thought to support the totalitarian regime of that book.
• Lojban - a language designed in part to test the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis by placing radically different constraints on speakers
• Anthem-- Ayn Rand's short novel where the word "I" is prohibited by a collectivist state

 

Idea

Idea is a term used both popularly and in philosophical terminology with the general sense of “mental picture”. Today many people believe that ideas are a new sort of intellectual property like copyright, patent. Though some believe there is a realm where ideas exist and that we only “discover” ideas much like we discover the Wikiwiki world.

To “have no idea how a thing happened”, is to be without a mental picture of an occurrence. In this general sense, it is synonymous with concept in popular usage. But idea may contain broader meaning. Say “a chair” can be an idea -- but surely not a concept.

Idea in philosophy

In philosophy, the term “idea” is common to all languages and periods, but there is scarcely any term which has been used with so many different shades of meaning. Plato used it in the sphere of metaphysics for the eternally existing reality, the archetype, of which the objects of sense are more or less imperfect copies. Chairs may be of different forms, sizes, colours and so forth, but “laid up in the mind of God” there is the one permanent idea or type, of which the many physical chairs are derived with various degrees of imperfection.

From this doctrine it follows that these ideas are the sole reality (see also idealism); in opposition to it are the empirical thinkers of all time who find reality in particular physical objects (see hylozoism, empiricism, etc.).

In striking contrast to Plato’s use is that of John Locke, who defines “idea” as “whatever is the object of understanding when a man thinks” (Essay on the Human Understanding (I.), vi. 8). Here the term is applied not to the mental process, but to anything whether physical or intellectual which is the object of it.

Hume differs from Locke by limiting “idea” to the more or less vague mental reconstructions of perceptions, the perceptual process being described as an “impression.”

Wundt widens the term to include “conscious representation of some object or process of the external world.” In so doing, he includes not only ideas of memory and imagination, but also perceptual processes, whereas other psychologists confine the term to the first two groups.

G. F. Stout and J. M. Baldwin, in the Dictionary of Philosophy and Psychology, define “idea“ as “the reproduction with a more or less adequate image, of an object not actually present to the senses.” They point out that an idea and a perception are by various authorities contrasted in various ways. “Difference in degree of intensity,” “comparative absence of bodily movement on the part of the subject,” “comparative dependence on mental activity,” are suggested by psychologists as characteristic of an idea as compared with a perception.

It should be observed that an idea, in the narrower and generally accepted sense of a mental reproduction, is frequently composite. That is, as in the example given above of the idea of chair, a great many objects, differing materially in detail, all call a single idea. When a man, for example, has obtained an idea of chairs in general by comparison with which he can say “This is a chair, that is a stool,” he has what is known as an “abstract idea” distinct from the reproduction in his mind of any particular chair (see abstraction). Furthermore a complex idea may not have any corresponding physical object, though its particular constituent elements may severally be the reproductions of actual perceptions. Thus the idea of a centaur is a complex mental picture composed of the ideas of man and horse, that of a mermaid of a woman and a fish.

“Idea” as property

Throughout the twentieth century the expression and fixation of ideas has become more commercialized as reproductive technologies have proliferated and driven the cost of the reproduction down. Capitalists have seen this as an opportunity to exploit the content of these reproductions by obtaining state sanctioned monopolies to prevent the unauthorized reproduction of content. What started with Victor Hugo and the Berne Convention as a means of protecting the economic livelyhood of authors and artists has turned into a faceless international propaganda machine that bombards individuals with an endless stream of product that is recycled to create more profits for corporate shareholders -- the individual artists and writers have lost their protection that was supposed to be guaranteed.

Patents are a scheme to protect a new idea that has a functional manifestation as invention or know-how. Copyright law is a scheme to protect the expression of ideas like books, videodiscs, and datastreams. There are other schemes to protect designs and even laws to protect integrated circuit patterns. Those types of law are aimed to protect the value of expression for a limited period of time so that the creators or authors, or their designated assignee can exploit those ideas -- a form of monopoly. This area of law is quite complex and the bucket of entitlements that refer to these types of incorporeal property have come to be referred as intellectual property. With the development of digital reproduction the legal concept of fixation has become more an more ephemeral and it has become more difficult to control the reproduction of information that can exist in the digital domain. Some would say that this is the underpinniing idea behind the open source and GNU movements.

See also: intellectual property, The future of ideas, public domain

Credit

• From a 1911 encyclopedia - please edit as needed
• [Internet and Copyright in Japan (07-2002)] Andreas Bovens

 

The Sixth Sense

The Sixth Sense (1999) is a film that tells the fictional story of a troubled, isolated boy and the child psychologist who tries to help him. It was written and directed by M. Night Shyamalan and helped propel him to stardom.

Warning: Wikipedia contains spoilers

Bruce Willis stars as a loving but childless husband named Malcolm Crowe, a devoted and award-winning child psychologist. Crowe is shot early on in the film by former patient Vincent Gray (Donnie Wahlberg), who then commits suicide. Crowe, filled with guilt and puzzled as to how he might have "failed" Vincent, pores over his old notes and audio tapes of sessions conducted when Vincent was a boy.

While Crowe is researching this old case, he and his wife (Olivia Williams) appear to grow increasingly distant from each other. He also picks up a new patient, Cole Sear (played by Haley Joel Osment), a boy whose case gradually begins to provide Dr. Crowe with insight on Vincent's problem.

Cole initially tells Crowe, "You're nice, but you can't help me." As the movie progresses, we see various scenes of people appearing in Cole's house after bedtime:

A woman with cuts on her wrists screams, "No, dinner is not ready!" and "You can't hurt me any more!".

A boy who invites Cole to see his father's gun turns away, whereupon we see that the back of his head has been shot off.

Who are these people? Cole eventually reveals his secret to Dr. Crowe: "I see dead people -- all the time." Crowe is incredulous and thinks Cole's mental condition is even more severe than he has earlier thought. However, he eventually comes to believe that the ghosts are real when he realises that he has tape recordings of Vincent hearing their cries in his old files. With Crowe's assistance and support, Cole learns how the dead people have come to him for help; he finishes their last tasks on earth, allowing them to finally move on. Such an example was Cole showing the secretly recorded tape of the mother of a child, possibly suffering from Munchausen syndrome by proxy, poisoning her daughter's food, at the child's funeral.

At the end of the film it becomes clear that Crowe is himself a dead person, and has been since the shooting that began the story. But as Cole told him, "They don't know they're dead." Thus Crowe becomes the last person to be saved by Cole's aid, atoning for the sin of failing Vincent by helping Cole.

The movie was nominated for several Academy Awards, including Best Actor in a Supporting Role (Haley Joel Osment), Best Actress in a Supporting Role (Toni Collette, who played Cole's mother) and Best Director (M. Night Shyamalan, who also wrote the story.)

 

Babel-17

Babel-17 is a science fiction novel by Samuel R. Delany in which the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis (that language forms thought) is strongly influential.

Warning: Wikipedia contains spoilers.

A political association develops a language, Babel 17, that can be used as a weapon of war. Simply learning it turns one into an unconscious traitor to one's own political association. This fact is discovered by a beautiful starship captain, who is very good at learning new languages. Usually she employs this skill to trade with aliens and get rich. This time, however, she is recruited by her government to go on a mission to discover how traitors are infiltrating and sabotaging strategic sites. She finds herself becoming a traitor as she learns the language. She is rescued by her dedicated crew, figures out the danger, and neutralizes its effects.

The barroom scene is identified by the book's fans as a classic and effective use of drama.

2003 invasion of Iraq

The 2003 invasion of Iraq began on March 20, 2003, when a large force of United States and British troops invaded Iraq, leading to the collapse of the Ba'athist Iraqi government in about three weeks and the start of the U.S.-led occupation of Iraq. Ground forces from Australia and Poland and naval forces from Denmark and Spain also took part. The international community was divided on the legitimacy of this invasion; see worldwide government positions on war on Iraq.

The start of hostilities came after the expiration of a 48-hour deadline which was set by U.S. President George W. Bush, demanding that Saddam Hussein and his two sons Uday and Qusay leave Iraq, ending the diplomatic Iraq disarmament crisis.

The U.S. name for the military campaign was Operation Enduring Freedom. The US military operations in this war were conducted under the name of Operation Iraqi Freedom. The UK military operations in this war were conducted under the name of Operation Telic. The Australian codename was Operation Falconer.

The United States, with support from approximately 45,000 British, 2,000 Australian and 200 Polish combat forces, entered Iraq primarily through their staging area in Kuwait. Coalition forces also supported Iraqi Kurdish militia troops, estimated to number upwards of 50,000. Included in these forces were groups of Australia SAS and Commando Personnel who performed Recon and combat search and rescue mission along side American and British SF units.

Timeline of the invasion

See 2003 invasion of Iraq timeline for a detailed timeline

The invasion was notably swift, with the collapse of the Iraq government and the military of Iraq in about three weeks. The oil infrastructure of Iraq was rapidly secured with limited damage in that time. Securing the oil infrastructure was considered important in order to prevent Saddam Hussein's forces from destroying it (as happened in 1991, creating environmental and economic problems).

Casualties of the invading forces were limited, while Iraqi military and civilian casualties are unknown, probably at least in the thousands. A study from the Project on Defense Alternatives ( http://www.comw.org/pda/ ), a Boston-based think tank, numbered the Iraqi casualities between 11,000 and 15,000 ( http://www.comw.org/pda/fulltext/0310rm8.pdf ), and the Iraq Body Count project numbered the civilian Iraqis injured in 20,000 ( http://www.iraqbodycount.net/editorial_aug0703.htm ).

The U.S. Third Division moved westward and then northward through the desert toward Baghdad, while the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force and a UK expeditionary force moved northward through marshland. UK forces secured Iraq's second-largest city, Basra, following two weeks of conflict, although their control of the city was limited. Preexisting electrical and water shortages continued through the conflict and looting began as Iraqi forces collapsed. While British forces began working with local Iraqi Police to enforce order, humanitarian aid began to arrive from ships landing in the port city of Umm Qasr and trucks entering the country through Kuwait.

Three weeks into the invasion U.S. forces moved into Baghdad with limited resistance, Iraqi government officials either disappeared or conceded defeat. Looting took place in the days following. It was alleged that many items in the National Museum of Iraq were amongst those things looted. The F.B.I. was soon called into Iraq to track down the stolen items. However, it has been found that the initial claims of looting of substantial portions of the collection were somewhat exaggerated. Yet, as some of the dust has settled, thousands of antiquities are still missing including 30 invaluable objects from the main collection.

There has been speculation that some objects still missing were not taken by looters after the war, but were taken by Saddam Hussein or his entourage before or during the fighting. There have also been reports that early looters had keys to vaults that held the more rare pieces and speculation of systematic removal of key artifacts. The arts and antiquities communities warned policymakers in advance of the need to secure the museums. Despite the looting being somewhat less bad than initially feared, the cultural loss of items from ancient Sumeria is significant. The accusation that US forces did not guard the museum because they were guarding the Ministry of Oil and Ministry of Interior is apparently true. The reality of the situation on the ground was that hospitals needed guarding, water plants needed guarding, and ministries with vital intelligence inside needed guarding. There were only enough US troops on the ground to guard a subset of everything that ideally needed guarding, and so some "hard choices" were made.

In the north Kurdish forces under the command of U.S. Special Forces captured oil-rich Kirkuk on April 10. On April 15, U.S. forces mostly took control of Tikrit.

As areas were secured, coalition troops began searching for the key members of Saddam Hussein's regime. These individuals were identified by a variety of means, most famously through sets of most wanted Iraqi playing cards.

George W. Bush announced, with great fanfare and a now notorious banner stating "Mission Accomplished", the end of major combat on May 1, 2003. However, this did not mean that peace returned to Iraq. The U.S.-led occupation of Iraq thereupon commenced, marked by ongoing violent conflict between the Iraqi and the occupying forces. As of Novermber 15, 2003, the total deaths of American soldiers in the Iraq war since march have reached 400. Of these the majority has been killed after the end of major hostilities on May 1. There is concern being voiced from domestic quarters comparing the situation to previous wars such as the Vietnam War.

The ongoing resistance in Iraq is concentrated in, but not limited to, an area known as the Sunni triangle and Baghdad [1]. Critics point out that the regions where violence is most common are also the most populated regions. This resistance may be described as guerilla warfare. The tactics used thus far include mortars, suicide bombers, roadside bombs, small arms fire, and RPGs, as well as purported sabotage against the oil infrastructure. There are also accusations about attacks toward the power and water infrastructure, but these are rather questionable in nature. In the only widely covered example of what some considered an attack on the power system, two US soldiers were killed, indicating that they may instead have been the target. In the purported attack against a water main, some witnesses reported seeing an explosion on the pipe, but US soldiers and repair crews on the scene stated that it did not appear to have been caused by an explosion.

There is evidence that some of the resistance is organized, perhaps by the fedayeen and other Saddam Hussein or Baath loyalists, religious radicals, Iraqis simply angered over the occupation, and foreign fighters. [2]

Events leading to the invasion

In September 2000, in the Rebuilding America's Defenses report [3], the Project for the New American Century planned an attack on Iraq, independently of whether or not Saddam Hussein remained in power. One year later, on the day of the September 11, 2001 Terrorist Attack, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld is reported to have written in his notes, "best info fast. Judge whether good enough hit S.H. [Saddam Hussein] at same time. Not only UBL [Osama bin Laden]". Shortly thereafter, the George W. Bush administration announced a War on Terrorism, accompanied by the doctrine of preemptive military action dubbed the Bush doctrine. In 2002 the Iraq disarmament crisis arose primarily as a diplomatic situation. In October 2002, the United States Congress granted President Bush the authority to wage war against Iraq. The Joint Resolution to Authorize the Use of United States Armed Forces Against Iraq was worded so as to encourage, but not require, UN Security Council approval for military action. In November 2002, United Nations actions regarding Iraq culminated in the unanimous passage of UN Security Council Resolution 1441 and the resumption of weapons inspections. The United States also began preparations for an invasion of Iraq, with a host of diplomatic, public relations and military preparations.

Payoff of Iraqi Military

Shortly after the sudden collapse of the defense of Baghdad, rumors were circulating in Iraq and elsewhere that there had been a deal struck (a "safqua") wherein the US had bribed key members of the Iraqi military elite and/or the Baath party itself to stand down. These rumors were ignored or treated dismissively in the US media and among the US public.

In late May, 2003, General Tommy Franks announced his retirement. Shortly thereafter, he confirmed in an interview with Defense Week that the US had paid Iraqi military leaders to defect. The extent of the defections and their effect on the war were not clear as of this writing (May 24, 2003).

Invasion justification and goals

The stated justification for the invasion included Iraqi production and use of weapons of mass destruction, links with terrorist organizations and human rights violations in Iraq under the Saddam Hussein government. To that end, the stated goals of the invasion, according to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, were: to end the Saddam Hussein government and help Iraq transition to representative self-rule; to find and eliminate weapons of mass destruction and terrorists; to collect intelligence on networks of weapons of mass destruction and terrorists; to end sanctions and to deliver humanitarian support; and to secure Iraq's oil fields and resources.

No weapons of mass destruction have been reported as found as of September 21, 2003, though Saddam Hussein's government collapsed, former Palestine Liberation Front leader Abu Abbas was captured, and the oil fields and resources were rapidly secured but have since suffered continued sabotage.

After the fall of Baghdad, U.S. officials claimed that Iraqi officials were being harbored in Syria, and several high-ranking Iraqis have since been detained after being expelled from Syria.

Support and opposition

See Support and opposition for the 2003 invasion of Iraq for the full article.

The Bush administration claimed that the U.S.-led coalition against Iraq included 49 nations, a group that was frequently referred to as the "coalition of the willing". These nations provided combat troops, support troops, and logistical support for the invasion. The nations contributing combat forces were, roughly: United States (250,000), United Kingdom (45,000), Australia (2,000), Denmark (200), and Poland (54). Ten other countries were known to have offered small numbers of noncombat forces, mostly either medical teams and specialists in decontamination. In several of these countries a majority of the public was opposed to the war. In Spain polls reported at one time a 90% opposition to the war.

Popular opposition to war on Iraq led to global protests, and the war was criticized by Belgium, Russia, France, the People's Republic of China, Germany, and the Arab League.

There are some that claim the US intervention took place without any international legal framework. Others would counter by pointing out that the UN Security Council Resolutions authorizing the 1991 invasion gave legal authority to use "...all necessary means...", which is diplomatic code for going to war. This war ended with a cease fire instead of a permanent peace treaty. Their view was that Iraq had violated the terms of the cease-fire by breaching two key conditions and thus made the invasion of Iraq a legal continuation of the earlier war. To support this stance, one has to "reactivate" the war resolution from 1991; if a war resolution can be reactivated ten years after the fact, it would imply that almost any nation that has ever been at war that ended in a ceasefire (such as Korea) could have the war restarted if any other nation felt at any time that they were no longer meeting the conditions of the cease fire that ended that war. Since the majority of the United Nations security council members (both permanent and rotating) did not support the attack, it appears that they viewed the attack as not being valid under the 1991 resolution.

However, a resolution drafted and accepted the year before the invasion fully endorsed the use of military action to force Iraq to comply with the United Nations desires, and every country that sat upon the Security Council voted to draft that resolution.

Several nations say the attack violated international law as a war of aggression since it lacked the validity of a U.N. Security Council resolution to authorize military force. The Egyptian former United Nations Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali called the intervention a violation of the UN charter.

The United States and United Kingdom claim it was a legal action which they were within their rights to undertake. Along with Poland and Australia, the invasion was supported by the governments of several European nations, including the Czech Republic, Denmark, Portugal, Italy, Hungary, and Spain.

Many people regarded the attack on Iraq to be hypocritical, when other nations such as Israel are also in breach of UN resolutions and have nuclear weapons; this argument is controversial [4].

Although Iraq was known to have pursued an active nuclear weapons development program previously, as well tried to procure materials and equipment for their manufacture, these weapons and material have yet to be discovered. This casts doubt on some of the accusations against Iraq. However, some believe that the weapons were moved into Syria and Lebanon.

Related slogans and terms

This campaign has featured a variety of new and weighted terminology, much coined by the U.S. government and then repeated by the media. The name "Operation Iraqi Freedom", for example, expresses one viewpoint of the purpose of the invasion. Also notable was the exclusive usage of "regime" to refer to the Saddam Hussein government (see also regime change), and "death squads" to refer to fedayeen paramilitary forces. Members of the Hussein government were called by disparaging nicknames - e.g., "Chemical Ali" (Ali Hassan al-Majid), "Comical Ali" (Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf), "Mrs Anthrax" (Huda Salih Mahdi Ammash) - for propaganda purposes and because Western peoples are unfamiliar with Arabic names.

Other terminology introduced or popularized during the war include:

• Shock and awe - The strategy of focusing on reducing the enemy's will to fight through a display of overwhelming force.
• "embedding" - process of assigning reporters to particular military units
• "coalition of the willing"
• untidiness - Rumsfeld's term for the looting and unrest which followed the government's collapse

Media coverage

Media coverage of this war was different in certain ways from that of the Gulf War. The Pentagon established the policy of "embedding" reporters with military units. Viewers in the United States were able to watch U.S. tanks rolling into Baghdad live on television, with a split screen image of the Iraqi Minister of Information claiming that U.S. forces were not in the city. Many foreign observers of the media and especially the television coverage in the USA felt that it was excessively partisan and in some cases "gung-ho"

Another difference was the wide and independent coverage in the World Wide Web demonstrating that for web-surfers in rich countries and the elites in poorer countries, the internet has become mature as a medium, giving about half a billion people access to different versions of events.

However, the coverage itself was intrinsically biased by the fact that internet penetration in Iraq was already very weak (estimate of 12,000 users in Iraq in 2002 [5]), and the deliberate destruction of Iraqi telecommunication facilities by US forces made internet communication even more difficult. Different versions of truth by people who have equal ignorance of first-hand, raw data are by definition a very biased substitute for original, first-hand reports from people living locally.

Al-Jazeera, the Qatar-based news network, which was formed in 1996, gained a lot of worldwide attention for its coverage of the war. Their broadcasts were popular in much of the Arab world, but also to some degree in western nations, with major American networks such as CNN and MSNBC re-broadcasting some of their coverage. Al-Jazeera was well-known for their graphic footage of civilian casualties, which American news media branded as overly sensationalistic. The English website of Al-Jazeera was brought down during the middle of the Iraq war by hackers who saw its coverage as casting a negative view on the American cause.

Iraq

• For previous wars in Iraq, see Iraq War
• History of Iraq
• List of places in Iraq
• Military of Iraq
  • Iraqi Regular Army
  • Iraqi Republican Guard
• Iraqi opposition group

War casualities

• 2003_invasion_of_Iraq_casualties
• Iraq Body Count project
• Possible death of Saddam Hussein
• Joseph Menusa
• Vatche Arslanian, head of logistics in Iraq for the International Committee of the Red Cross

See also

• 2003 invasion of Iraq casualties
• 2003 invasion of Iraq people
• 2003 invasion of Iraq timeline
• 2003 occupation of Iraq timeline
• Alleged effects of invading Iraq
• American government position on war on Iraq
• American popular opinion of war on Iraq
• Baghdad Bob
• Catholic Church against war on Iraq
• Disarmament of Iraq
• doublespeak
• fascism
• friendly fire
• History of United States Imperialism
• imperialism
• Iraq crisis of 2003
• Iraq disarmament crisis
• Australian contribution to the 2003 invasion of Iraq
• Polish contribution to the 2003 invasion of Iraq
• propaganda
• slogan
• The UN Security Council and the Iraq war
• Worldwide government positions on war on Iraq
• U.S. list of most wanted Iraqis
• War on Terrorism
• Human shield

External links and references

• The Iraq Antiwar Homepage on Nonviolence.org
• Operation Telic
• dropped leaflets
• independent media reports from Iraqis and others in Iraq
• Coalition war casualties in Iraq
• Pictures of Destruction and Civilian Victims
• Iraqbodycount.net

 

Zalmay Khalilzad

Zalmay Khalilzad is the highest-ranking native Afghan and Muslim in the Bush administration. He became the George W. Bush administration's special envoy to Afghanistan after the fall of the Taliban as well as is special envoy to the Iraqi opposition to Saddam Hussein. On September 24, 2003, George W. Bush also named Khalilzad the U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan.

An ethnic Pashtun, he was born in the northern city of Mazar-i-Sharif and first went to the United States as a high school exchange student.

Khalilzad received his doctorate at the University of Chicago, where he studied closely with strategic thinker Albert Wohlstetter.

Khalilzad served under former U.S. Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush as special assistant to the president for Southwest Asia, the Near East and North Africa.

From 1985 to 1989, Khalilzad served as a senior United States Department of State official advising on the Soviet war in Afghanistan and the Iran-Iraq war, and from 1991 to 1992, he was a senior Defense Department official for policy planning.

He served as a counsellor to United States Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.

Zalmay Khalilzad was an advisor for the Unocal Corporation.

In the mid 1990s, while working for the Cambridge Energy Research Associates, Khalilzad conducted risk analyses for Unocal for a proposed 890-mile, $2-billion, 1.9-billion-cubic-feet-per-day natural gas pipeline project which would have extended from Turkmenistan through Afghanistan to Pakistan.

He has served in both the State and Defense Departments and is a member of the United States National Security Council.

Leo Strauss

Leo Strauss (September 20, 1899 - October 18, 1973), the political philosopher, was born in Kirchhasin, Hesse, Germany, to Hugo Strauss and Jennie David, and raised in an Orthodox Jewish home. At the age of 17 he became a political Zionist. Strauss received his higher education within the German university system, notably at Marburg, Hamburg, Giessen, and Berlin. He was influenced by the work of Martin Heidegger, Max Weber, and Thomas Hobbes.

In 1932, Strauss married Marie Bernsohn in Paris, France. In 1934 he moved to England where, in 1935, he accepted a position at the Cambridge University. In 1937, Strauss moved to the United States where he became a Research Fellow in the Department of History at Columbia University. Between 1938 and 1948, he lectured in political science at the New School for Social Research. In 1944, he became a US citizen and from 1949 until 1973, Strauss served as a member of the faculty of the University of Chicago, chiefly as a professor of political philosophy.

In Saul Bellow's quasi-biographical novel Ravelstein, the minor character Davarr is reputed to have been based on Strauss.

Philosophy

Straussianism, as Strauss's philosophy has come to be called, is predicated on the belief that 20th century relativism has been responsible for the deterioration of modern society. According to its advocates, modern egalitarianism devalues philosophy by rejecting anything that cannot be understood by the "common man". Straussians believe that "universal principles of right" exist and are knowable through careful study of those philosophers who believed in such principles, especially Plato and Aristotle. They reject the modern tendency to interpret the ancient philosophers within the context of the era in which they lived, believing that universal principles transcend historicity.

Straussians also believe that the public is not capable of understanding or accepting the universal principles of right. Therefore, they posit the rectitude of the "noble lie" which shields the uneducated public from knowledge of unpalatable truth, for which the public might hold the philosopher to blame (as happened with Socrates). This leads to a dichotomy, within Straussianism, between esoteric and exoteric knowledge. Esoteric knowledge is reserved for the elite philosopher while exoteric knowledge is carefully crafted by the philosopher for everyone else, and often obfuscates the true understanding and intention of the philosopher. Indeed, Strauss thought that the texts of truly "great" philosophers contained both an esoteric and an exoteric level and that the esoteric component was accessible only to the reader willing to carefully analyze and resolve subtle, inherent contradictions within the text. Machiavelli, he believed, was such a philosopher.

Among Strauss's better known protégés is Allan Bloom. Straussianism has been supported and extended to the modern political arena by neoconservatives, notably Michael Ledeen and Paul Wolfowitz, who pursued his Doctorate in political science at the University of Chicago during Strauss's tenure there.

External links

• Leo Strauss biography and bibliography
• Economist article on Leo Strauss' influence on members of the Bush administration
• An article in the March 21, 2003 issue of Executive Intelligence Review (EIR), entitled "Profile: Leo Strauss, Fascist Godfather of the Neo-Cons" by Jeffrey Steinberg (published by Lyndon LaRouche).

References

• Revolt against modernity : Leo Strauss, Eric Voegelin & the search for postliberal order / Ted V. McAllister. Lawrence, Kansas, University Press of Kansas, 1996.
• Thoughts on Machiavelli / Leo Strauss. Chicago, Ill., University of Chicago Press, 1958.

Collateral damage

"Collateral damage" denotes accidental damage to civilians and non-military property or lands during war, due to actions that did not violate the laws of war. Some feel it is used as a cynical euphemism for deaths of civilians.

In war, there are in principle legitimate military targets and illegitimate civilian targets. If civilians or their property is affected, it is nevertheless not a war crime if a) that affect could not been forseen or b) it could not be avoided and was minor in relation to the military objective. Clearly, it is often difficult to judge in individual cases whether civilian loss was a war crime or collateral damage.

By the laws of war (see also international humanitarian law), civilians and medical personnel are not to be made the deliberate targets of military operations (see attacks on humanitarian workers). Collateral damage includes accidental damage to non-military property, particularly civilian homes. However, deliberate damage to transport and communication infrastructure is a legitimate military objective and neither war crime nor collateral damage. Determining what classes of target are of military value and thus acceptable to attack is a hotly debated topic.

The line between collateral damage and atrocity is sometimes blurred. For an offensive strategy this may happen when deliberate attacks are made despite knowledge of some civilian presence, disregarding civilian lives in favor of a military objective. An opposite defensive strategy is to actively use civilians as human shields by locating military facilities nearby or within civilian neighborhoods or hospitals. This latter case is a clear case of abuse of the laws of war intended to protect civilians. It is the subject of dispute whether an attacker is entitled to proceed with military activity despite the civilian presence in such cases.

Collateral damage may also be ecological or environmental, affecting a human population less directly but often more severely. During the UN-Iraq war there was very substantial damage to the Persian Gulf and Kuwait desert ecology due to deliberate releases of oil and the deliberate demolition of oil wells (part of a scorched earth strategy) - the Kuwait oil fires took many months to put out. In addition, the movement of huge numbers of troops and equipment through the thin soil of the region made farming difficult to resume after the war. This in turn displaces refugee populations which suffer serious health hazards due to migration, or living in a refugee camp. Destruction of olive trees in the Gaza Strip by Israel is also classified by some as collateral damage of the intifada.

See also: Civilian, war, laws of war, civilian casualties, non-combatant, environmental roots of conflict. Bombing of Dresden in World War II. Hiroshima & Nagasaki, Bombing of Tokyo in World War II, Nuclear warfare

 

Cold War

For a general definition, see cold war.

The Cold War (c. 1945-1990) was the conflict between the two groups, loosely categorised as the West (the United States and its North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) allies) and the East (the Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact allies - loosely described as the Eastern Bloc). A full-scale "east versus west" war never actually broke out, hence the metaphor of a "cold" war with a predilection for quashing armed conflicts to prevent a "hot" and escalating shooting war whenever possible. Indeed, a good show was made on both sides that the conflict was primarily about economic, philosophic, cultural, social, and political ideology. The West criticised the East as embodying undemocratic totalitarianism and communist dictatorship while the East criticised the West as promoting bourgeois capitalism and imperialism. The attitude of both sides towards the other was summed up in the phrases used against each other; the East accused the West of promoting "middle class capitalism and imperialism that sidelined workers" while the West in the 1980s called the East the "evil empire" intent on subverting democracy for communist ideology.

The Cold War continued from the end of World War II until the breakup of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s. The Korean War, the Vietnam War and the conflict in Afghanistan were some of the occasions when the aggression between those two parts of the world took the form of an armed conflict, but much of it was conducted by or against surrogates and through spies and traitors who were working undercover. In those conflicts, the major powers operated in good part by arming or funding surrogates. Hence that part of the war at least had lessened direct impact on the populations of the major powers.

In the strategic conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union a major arena was the strategy of technology. This cold war also involved covert conflict, through acts of espionage. Beyond the actual killing by intelligence services against each other, the Cold War was heavily manifest in the concerns about nuclear weapons and whether wars could really be deterred by their mere existence, as well as in the propaganda wars between the United States and the USSR. Indeed it was far from clear then, that global nuclear war wouldn't result from smaller conflicts, which heightened the level of concern for each conflict. This tension shaped the lives of people around world, almost as much as the actual fighting going on.

One major hotspot of conflict was Germany, particularly Berlin. Arguably, the most vivid symbol of the Cold War was the Berlin Wall, isolating West Berlin (the portion controlled by West Germany and allied with France, England and the United States) from East Germany, which completely surrounded it.

Historiography

There have been three distinct periods in the western study of the Cold War. For more than a decade after the end of World War II, few American historians saw any reason to challenge the official US interpretation of the beginning of the Cold War: that the breakdown of relations was a direct result of Stalin's violation of the Yalta accords, the imposition of Soviet-dominated governments on an unwilling Eastern Europe, and aggressive Soviet expansionism.

However, later historians, especially William Appleman Williams in his 1959 The Tragedy of American Diplomacy and Walter LaFeber in his 1967 America, Russia, and the Cold War, 1945-1967, articulated an overriding concern: US commitment to maintaining an "open door" for American trade in world markets. Some historians have argued that US provocations and imperial ambitions were at least equally to blame, if not more. In short, historians have disagreed as to who was responsible for the breakdown of US-Soviet relations and whether the conflict between the two superpowers was inevitable. This revisionist approach reached its height during the Vietnam War when many began to view the American and Soviet empires as morally comparable.

Since the end of the Cold War, however, the post-revisionist school has come to dominate. The opening of the Soviet archives has demonstrated that the USSR certainly had expansionist ambitions. This combined with full disclosure of Soviet atrocities has brought historians back to an opinion much closer to the original 1950s view. Prominent post-revisionist histroians include John Lewis Gaddis and Robert Grogin.

Articles in this series:

• Origins of the Cold War
• The 1950s and 1960s era
• The Cold War since 1970

Related topics:

• History of the Soviet Union: Part II
• History of the United States (1945-1964)
• History of the United States (1964-1980)
• History of the United States (1980-present

 

Marxism

Marxism is a political practice and social theory based on the works of Karl Marx, a nineteenth century philosopher, economist, journalist, and revolutionary. Marx drew on Hegel's philosophy, the political economy of Adam Smith, Ricardian economics, and 19th century French socialism to develop a critique of society which he claimed was both scientific and revolutionary. This critique achieved its most systematic (if unfinished) expression in his masterpiece, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy (Das Kapital).

There have been many conflicting interpretations and definitions of Marxism. A year before his death, Marx remarked to his son-in-law, Paul Lafargue, "What is certain is that I am no Marxist!"

It is by no means certain that Marx's work does form an organic whole. Although his basic analytic method was consistent, he developed new conclusions as he applied it to new material. Moreover, he died before finishing Capital.

Since Marx's death in 1883, various revolutionaries around the world have appealed to Marxism as the intellectual basis for their politics and policies, which can be dramatically different and conflicting. Marxism was the ideology that inspired the creation of the Soviet Union, and post World War 2 political Communism. Although there are still many Marxist revolutionary movements and political parties around the world, relatively few countries have Marxist governments in power. Cuba, North Korea, and the People's Republic of China have governments in power which describe themselves as Marxist.

The Hegelian Roots of Marxism

Hegel proposed a form of idealism in which ideas gradually developed in history. Marx retained Hegel's emphasis on history, but stood Hegel on his head in proposing that material circumstances shape ideas, instead of the other way around. Marx summarizes his material theory of history, otherwise known as historical materialism, in A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy:

In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of production. The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness.

Marx emphasized that the development of material life will come into conflict with the superstructure. These contradictions, he thought, were the driving force of history. Marx illustrated his ideas most prominently by the development of capitalism from feudalism and by the prediction of the development of socialism from capitalism.

The Political-Economy Roots of Marxism

Political economy is essential to this vision, and Marx built on and critiqued the most well-known economists of his day, the British classical economists. Marx followed Adam Smith and David Ricardo in claiming that the source of profits under capitalism is value added by workers not paid out in wages. He developed this theory of exploitation of the proletariat with an exposition of the labor theory of value in the first volume of Capital, while remaining aware that the labor theory of value was not a valid theory of relative prices. He critiqued Smith and Ricardo, on the other hand, for not realizing their economic concepts reflected capitalist institutions, not innate natural properties of mankind, and could not be applied unchanged to all societies. Marx's theories of business cycles; of economic growth and development, especially in two sector models; and of the declining rate of profit are other important elements of Marxist economics.

The Liberal Challenge

The Austrian School were the first liberal economists to systematically challenge the Marxist school. This was partly a reaction to the Methodenstreit when they attacked the Hegelian doctrines of the Historical School. Though many Marxist authors have attempted to portray the Austrian school as a bourgeois reaction to Marx, such an interpretation is untenable: Carl Menger wrote his Principles of Economics at almost the same time as Marx was completing Das Kapital. The Austrian economists were, however, the first to clash directly with Marxism, since both dealt with such subjects as money, capital, business cycles, and economic processes. Eugen von Boehm-Bawerk wrote extensive critiques of Marx in the 1880s and 1890s, and several prominent Marxists--including Rudolf Hilferding--attended his seminar in 1905-06.

In contrast, the classical economists had shown little interest in such topics, and many of them did not even gain familiarity with Marx's ideas until well into the twentieth century.

Class Analysis

Marxists believe that capitalist society is divided into two social classes:

• the working class or proletariat: Marx defined this class as "those individuals who sell their labor and do not own the means of production" whom he believed were responsible for creating the wealth of a society (buildings, bridges and furniture, for example, are physically built by members of this class). The proletariat may be further subdivided into the ordinary proletariat and the lumpenproletariat, those who are extremely poor and cannot find legal work on a regular basis. These may be prostitutes, beggars, or homeless people.
• the bourgeoisie : those who "own the means of production" and employ the proletariat. The bourgeoisie may be further subdivided into the very wealthy bourgeoisie and the petty bourgeoisie: those who employ labor, but also work themselves. These may be small proprietors, land-holding peasants, or trade workers.

Marx developed these ideas to support his advocacy of socialism and communism: "The philosophers have only interpreted the world differently; the point is, to change it." Communism would be a social form wherein this system would have been ended and the working classes would be the sole beneficiary of the "fruits of their labour".

Socialists often (or, in varying degrees) do not recognize an individual right to private property. At any rate, socialist philosophers have argued that there is not a specific right to private property, though it might be in the best interest of society in general for certain individuals to have exclusive control over certain goods, so long as this control does not lead to the class divisions and exploitation of the working class they seek to eliminate. Critics have said that "socialism is a system in which everyone is equally poor", arguing that because individuals are not rewarded more on the basis of supply and demand, there is less incentive for individual achievement, improving technology, and other factors that result in a higher standard of living.

Some of these ideas were shared by anarchists, though they differed in their beliefs on how to bring about an end to the class society. Socialist thinkers suggested that the working class should take over the existing capitalist state, turning it into a workers revolutionary state, which would put in place the democratic structures necessary, and then "wither away". On the anarchist side people such as Mikhail Bakunin and Peter Kropotkin argued that the state per se was the problem, and that destroying it should be the aim of any revolutionary activity.

Many governments, political parties, social movements, and academic theorists have claimed to be founded on Marxist principles. Social democratic movements in 20th century Europe, the Soviet Union and other Eastern bloc countries, Mao and other revolutionaries in agrarian developing countries are particularly important examples. These struggles have added new ideas to Marx and otherwise transmuted Marxism so much that it is difficult to specify its core.

It is usual to speak of Marxian theory when referring to political study that draws of the work of Marx for the analysis and understanding of existing (usually capitalist) economies, but rejects the more speculative predictions that Marx and many of his followers made about post-capitalist societies.

Marxism and Revolutions

The 1917 October Revolution, led by Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky was the first large scale attempt to put Marxist ideas about a workers' state into practice. However, counterrevolution, civil war, foreign interventions and the failure of a socialist revolution in Germany and in the other western countries gave Joseph Stalin the opportunity to take over power when Lenin died. As predicted by Lenin, Trotsky and others already in the 1920s, Stalin's "socialism in one country" was unable to maintain itself, and according to some Marxist critics, the USSR ceased to show the characteristics of a socialist state long before its formal dissolution.

Following World War II, Marxist ideology, often with Soviet military backing, spawned a rise in revolutionary Communist parties all over the world. Some of these parties were eventually able to gain power, and establish their own version of a Marxist state. Such nations included the People's Republic of China, Vietnam, Romania, East Germany, Albania, Poland, Cambodia, Ethiopia, South Yemen, and others. In some cases, these nations did not get along. The most notable example was the rift that occurred between the Soviet Union and China, whose leaders disagreed on certain elements of Marxism, and how it should be implemented into society.

Many of these self-proclaimed Marxist nations (often styled People's Republics) eventually became authoritarian states, with stagnating economies. This caused some debate about whether or not these nations were in fact led by "true Marxists." Critics of Marxism speculated that perhaps Marxist ideology itself was to blame for the nations' various problems.

In 1991 the Soviet Union collapsed and the new Russian state ceased to identify itself with Marxism. Other nations around the world followed. Since then, radical Marxism or Communism has generally ceased to be a prominent political force in global politics, and has largely been replaced by more moderate versions of democratic socialism.

See also: antagonistic contradiction, dialectical materialism, dictatorship of the proletariat, false consciousness, historical materialism, labor theory of value, social conflict theory

 

Mind control

(Redirected from Brainwashing)

Theories of mind control, thought control, or brainwashing claim that a person's mind can be controlled (either directly or more subtly) by an outside source.

Propaganda and overt persuasion

With the onset of mass media like radio in the 1930s and later television, totalitarian regimes of the time capitalized on the new possibilities for manipulation and state propaganda. Joseph Goebbels, Hitler's propaganda genius, pioneered most of the methods which are still used by modern spin doctors. "A lie repeated many times becomes the Truth" was one of his particularly effective insights. Ironically, spin doctors play a very important role in those democracies dependent on public opinion.

Totalitarian regimes use repression of freedom of speech to homogenize the population. Repression can range from simple censorship through character assassination to outright state sponsored murder. One notorious example is Stalin with his purges, but all governments, including the US government, have been known to use these types of repression. The modern world is in fact characterized by an unprecedented increase in the powers of all states, which can often be very oppressive.

People's minds are clearly influenced by many influences from the outside world, such as advertising, media manipulation, and propaganda, however they are generally aware of these influences. The remainder of this article is about mind control that occurs either without the knowledge, or without the consent, of the individual.

Mind control "technologies"

Hypothesized forms of mind control technology have included the use of drugs, hypnosis, Pavlovian conditioning, repetitive indoctrination, torture and subliminal stimuli.

One of the symptoms of schizophrenia (and sometimes other forms of psychosis) is the belief that one is subject to external mind control, often by use of some form of technology: these often involve less plausible proposed mind control technologies such as the use of microwave radiation or lasers to control thoughts.

Some believers in mind control assert that no one is immune to mind control: a person could just start talking to a someone on the street, and nearly instantly, he is a victim. Other sources believe that there is no such thing as mind control, and that free will cannot be subverted.

Cults and mind control

Many people believe that cults entrap or enslave members through mind control. A counter-cult deprogramming movement has developed to counter cult mind control, and has, in turn, been accused of using mind control techniques.

Deprogrammers have often been able to get judges to issue conservatorships authorizing them to rescue people. There is considerable disagreement about how cults actually operate.

Brainwashing

According to Jeffrey K. Hadden, the concept of "brainwashing" first came into public use during the Korean War in the 1950s as an explanation for why a few American GIs appeared to defect to the Communists. Brainwashing consisted of the notion that the Chinese communists had discovered a mysterious and effective method of causing deep and permanent behaviorial changes in prisoners of war.

See also Professor Hadden's online article, The Brainwashing Controversy (see link at end of article).

The idea was central to the 1962 movie The Manchurian Candidate in which a soldier was turned into an assassin through brainwashing.

The two most authoritative studies of the Korean War defections by Robert J. Lifton and Edgar Schein concluded that "brainwashing" was an inappropriate concept to account for this renunciation of U.S. citizenship. They found that the Chinese did not engage in any systematic re-education. The Chinese were, however, able to get some of them to make anti-American statements by placing the prisoners under harsh conditions of deprivation and then by offering them more comfortable situations such as better sleeping quarters, better food, warmer clothes or blankets. Nevertheless, the psychiatrists noted that even these were quite ineffective at changing basic attitudes for most people. In essence, the prisoners did not actually convert to Communism. Rather many of them behaved as though they did in order to avoid the plausible threat of extreme physical coercion. Moreover the few prisoners that were influenced by Communist indoctrination did so as a result of motives and personality characteristics that existed before imprisonment.

Currently the concept of brainwashing is not used by most psychologists and social scientists, and the methods of persuasion and coercion used during the Korean War are not considered to be esoteric.

U.S. Government research into mind control

A CIA research program, known principally by the codename MKULTRA, began in 1950 and was motivated largely in response to alleged Soviet, Chinese, and North Korean uses of mind control techniques on U.S. prisoners of war in Korea.

The general consensus is that MKULTRA was a failure, although because most of the MKULTRA records were deliberately destroyed in 1973 by order of then-Director of Central Intelligence Richard Helms, it is impossible to have a complete understanding of the more than 150 individually funded research projects sponsored by MKULTRA and the related CIA programs.

Ordinary scientists just trying to control your mind

With intense modern magnets and the technique of transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) or repetitive TMS (rTMS), researchers have been able to transiently stymie certain thought processes--such as the conjugation of verbs--with fleeting magnetic pulses to specific areas of the brain. The technique has proved a valuable tool for testing hypotheses about the role and interplay between brain regions in particular cognitive activities and psychiatric symptoms such as depression. It's tempting to speculate what practical applications the technique and such insights might lead to: Is there a locus for lying and could one disable it on the witness stand? Could one zap away depression? Or accelerate certain kinds of mental performance?

APA Task Force on mind control

The American Psychological Association (APA) in 1984 allowed Margaret Singer, the main proponent of anti-cult mind control theories, to create a working group called Task Force on Deceptive and Indirect Methods of Persuasion and Control (DIMPAC).

In 1987, the final report of the DIMPAC committee was submitted to the Board of Social and Ethical Responsibility for Psychology of the APA. On May 11, 1987, the Board rejected the report and concluded that its kind of mind control theories, used in order to distinguish "cults" from religions, are not part of accepted psychological science (American Psychological Association 1987). Although the APA memorandum only dismissed the theories of brainwashing and mind control as presented in the DIMPAC report -- without prejudice to theories of influence and control other than those advocated by the DIMPAC committee - the results of the APA document were devastating for the anti-cult movement[6].

In fact, the DIMPAC theories rejected by APA largely corresponded to the anti-cult position as a whole. Starting from the Fishman case (1990), where a defendant accused of commercial fraud raised as a defense that he was not fully responsible since he was under the mind control of Scientology, American courts consistently rejected testimonies about mind control and manipulation, stating that these were not part of accepted mainline science (Anthony & Robbins 1992: 5-29). Margaret Singer, and her associate Richard Ofshe filed suits against the APA and the American Sociological Association (who had supported APA's 1987 statement) but they lost in 1993 and 1994.

Subliminal advertising

Outline:

• The term "subliminal advertising" was coined by James Vicary.
• The publication in 1957 of Vance Packard's The Hidden Persuaders brought the term to the attention of the general public.
• In 1973 the book Subliminal Seduction claimed that subliminal techiques were in wide use in advertising.
• There is no evidence that subliminal advertising is effective, and the current consensus among marketing professions is that subliminal advertising is ineffective and can be counter-productive.

Mind control in fiction

Mind control has been a popular subject in fiction, featuring in books and films such as The Ipcress File, and The Manchurian Candidate, which has the premise that a man could be brainwashed into murder on command but retain no memory of the killing.

The TV series The Prisoner featured mind control as a recurring plot element.

George Orwell's novel Nineteen Eighty-Four features a description of mind control, both directly by torture, and indirectly, in the form of pervasive mind control by the use of Newspeak, a constructed language which is designed to remove the possibility of even articulating subversive thoughts.

In science fiction and superhero fiction, mind control often is described as a means of how a person literally seizes control of the minds of the victims to the point where not only their bodies are placed under direct control, but also their consciousnesses as well to become puppets like slaves to the controller. This is often depicted electronically such as the trademark equipment of Batman enemy, The Mad Hatter, which is designed to put victims under his control when placed in direct physical contact with the head. In addition, characters with powerful psionic abilities like Professor Charles Xavier of The X-Men can do the same with mental concentration against a target.

Mind control as entertainment

Hypnotism has often been used by stage performers to make volunteers do strange things, such as clucking like a chicken, for the entertainment of the audience. More sophisticated mental tricks are performed by the British psychological illusionist Derren Brown in his televison programmes, Derren Brown: Mind Control.

See also:

• conditioning
• deprogramming
• thought reform
• hypnosis
• subliminal messages
• tinfoil hat
• Milgram experiment
• Totalitarian religious group

References and external links

• Jeffrey K. Hadden, The Brainwashing Controversy.
• Robert J. Lifton, Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism (1961);
• Edgar H. Schein et al., Coercive Persuasion (1961)
• Snopes on subliminal advertising
• Shapiro, K. A. et al, Grammatical distinctions in the left frontal cortexJ. Cogn. Neurosci. 13, 713-720 (2001).

 

Propaganda

Propaganda,In the broad sense of the term, is information that serves a particular agenda, which could be true or false. If true, it may be one-sided and fail to paint a complete picture. In late Latin, propaganda means "propagating". In 1622, shortly after the start of the Thirty Years' War, Pope Gregory XV founded the "Sacred Congregation of Propaganda", a committee of Cardinals who were to oversee the propagation of Christianity by missionaries sent to non-Christian countries. Originally the term was not intended to refer to false or misleading information.

Propaganda shares many techniques with advertising; in fact, advertising can be said to be propaganda promoting a commercial product. However, propaganda usually has political or nationalist themes. Examples of propaganda include leaflets and broadcasts prepared for an enemy audience during warfare and most political campaign advertisements. Propaganda is also one of the methods used in psychological warfare.

In a narrower and more common use of the term, propaganda refers to deliberately false or misleading deceptive information that supports a political cause or the interests of those in power. The propagandist seeks to change the way people understand an issue or a situation, for the purpose of changing their actions and expectations in ways that are desirable to the propagandist. In this sense, propaganda serves as a corollary to censorship, in which the same purpose is achieved, not by filling people's heads with false information, but by preventing people from knowing true information. What sets propaganda apart from other forms of advocacy is the willingness of the propagandist to change people's understanding through deception and confusion, rather than persuasion and understanding.

Propaganda is also a mighty weapon in a war. In this case its aim is usually to dehumanize the enemy and to create hatred against a special group. The technique is to create a false image in the mind. This can be done by using of special words, special avoidance of words or by saying that the enemy is responsible for certain things he never did. In every propaganda war two things are needed: Injustice and Faint. The faint or the injustice may be fictitious or may be based on facts, the aim is always to create hate.

Examples for propaganda are for instance:

• English propaganda against Germany in the First World War, see Lusitania
• German propaganda against Poland to start the Second World War, see Attack on Sender Gleiwitz

In an even narrower, less commonly used but legitimate sense of the term, propaganda refers only to false information that is meant to reassure people who already believe. The assumption is that, if people believe something that is false, they will constantly be assailed by doubts. Since these doubts are unpleasant (see cognitive dissonance), people will be eager to have them extinguished, and are therefore receptive to the reassurances of those in a position of authority. For this reason propaganda is often addressed to people who are already sympathetic to the agenda.

Propaganda can be classifed according to source. White propaganda comes from an openly identified source. Black propaganda pretends to be from a friendly source, but is actually from an adversary. Gray propaganda pretends to be from a neutral source, but comes from an adversary.

See also: black propaganda, marketing, advertising

History of Propaganda

Propaganda has been a human activity as far back as reliable recorded evidence exists. The writings of Romans like Livy are considered masterpieces of pro-Roman statist propaganda. The term itself originates with the Roman Catholic Sacred Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith (sacra congregatio christiano nomini propagando or, briefly, propaganda fide), the department of the pontifical administration charged with the spread of Catholicism and with the regulation of ecclesiastical affairs in non-Catholic countries (mission territory). The actual Latin stem propagand- conveys a sense of "that which ought to be spread".

Propaganda techniques were first codified and applied in a scientific manner by journalist Walter Lippman and psychologist Edward Bernays (nephew of Sigmund Freud) early in the 20th century. During World War I, Lippman and Bernays were hired by the United States president Woodrow Wilson to sway popular opinion to enter the war on the side of Britain.

The war propaganda campaign of Lippman and Bernays produced within six months so intense an anti-German hysteria as to permanently impress American business (and Adolf Hitler, among others) with the potential of large-scale propaganda to control public opinion. Bernays coined the terms "group mind" and "engineering consent", important concepts in practical propaganda work.

The current public relations industry is a direct outgrowth of Lippman and Bernays' work and is still used extensively by the United States government. For the first half of the 20th century Bernays and Lippman themselves ran a very successful public relations firm.

World War II saw continued use of propaganda as a weapon of war, both by Hitler's propagandist Joseph Goebbels and the British Political Warfare Executive.

Nazi Germany

Nazi domestic economic
propaganda flyer

Most propaganda in Germany was produced by the Ministry for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda ("Promi" in German abbreviation). Joseph Goebbels was placed in charge of this ministry shortly after Hitler took power in 1933. All journalists, writers, and artists were required to register with one of the Ministry's subordinate chambers for the press, fine arts, music, theater, film, literature, or radio.

The Nazis believed in propaganda as a vital tool in achieving their goals. Adolf Hitler, Germany's Führer, was impressed by the power of Allied propaganda during World War I and believed that it had been a primary cause of the collapse of morale and revolts in the German home front and Navy in 1918. Hitler would meet nearly every day with Goebbels to discuss the news and Goebbels would obtain Hitler's thoughts on the subject; Goebbels would then meet with senior Ministry officials and pass down the official Party line on world events. Broadcasters and journalists required prior approval before their works were disseminated. In addition the Nazis had no moral qualms about spreading propaganda which they themselves knew to the false and indeed spreading deliberately false information was part of a doctrine known as the Big Lie.

Nazi propaganda before the start of World War II had several distinct audiences:

• German audiences were continually reminded of the struggle of the Nazi Party and Germany against foreign enemies and internal enemies, especially Jews.
• Ethnic Germans in countries such as Czechoslovakia, Poland, the Soviet Union, and the Baltic states were told that blood ties to Germany were stronger than their allegiance to their new countries.
• Potential enemies, such as France and Great Britain, were told that Germany had no quarrel with the people of the country, but that their governments were trying to start a war with Germany.
• All audiences were reminded of the greatness of German cultural, scientific, and military achievements.

Until the Battle of Stalingrad's conclusion on February 4, 1943, German propaganda emphasized the prowness of German arms and the humanity German soldiers had shown to the peoples of occupied territories. In contrast, British and Allied fliers were depicted as cowardly murderers, and Americans in particular as gangsters in the style of Al Capone. At the same time, German propaganda sought to alienate Americans and British from each other, and both these Western belligerents from the Soviets.

After Stalingrad, the main theme changed to Germany as the sole defender of Western European culture against the "Bolshevist hordes." The introduction of the V-1 and V-2 "vengeance weapons" was emphasized to convince Britons of the hopelessness of defeating Germany.

Goebbels committed suicide shortly after Hitler on April 30, 1945. In his stead, Hans Fritzsche, who had been head of the Radio Chamber, was tried and acquitted by the Nuremberg war crimes tribunal.

Cold War Propaganda

The United States and the Soviet Union both used propaganda extensively during the Cold War. Both sides used film, television and radio programming to influence their own citizens, each other and Third World nations. The United States Information Agency operated the Voice of America as an official government station. Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty, in part supported by the Central Intelligence Agency, provided grey propaganda in news and entertainment programs to Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union respectively. The Soviet Union's official government station Radio Moscow, broadcast white propaganda, while Radio Peace and Freedom broadcast grey propaganda. Both sides also broadcast black propaganda programs around special crises.

One of the most insightful authors of the Cold War was George Orwell, whose novels Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four are virtual textbooks on the use of propaganda. Though not set in the Soviet Union, their characters live under totalitarian regimes in which language is constantly corrupted for political purposes.

Techniques of Propaganda Generation

A number of techniques are used to create messages which are persuasive, but false. Many of these same techniques can be found under logical fallacies since propagandists use arguments which, although sometimes convincing, are not necessarily valid.

Some time has been spent analyzing the means by which propaganda messages are transmitted, and that work is important, but it's clear that information dissemination strategies only become propaganda strategies when coupled with propagandistic messages. Identifying these propaganda messages is a necessary prerequisite to studying the methods by which those messages are spread. That's why it is essential to have some knowledge of the following techniques for generating propaganda:

Appeal to fear: Appeals to fear seeks to build support by instilling fear in the general population - for example Joseph Goebbels exploited Theodore Kaufman's Germany Must Perish! to claim that the Allies sought the extermination of the German people.

Appeal to authority: Appeals to authority cite prominent figures to support a position idea, argument, or course of action.

Bandwagon: Bandwagon-and-inevitable-victory appeals attempt to persuade the target audience to take a course of action "everyone else is taking." "Join the crowd." This technique reinforces people's natural desire to be on the winning side. This technique is used to convince the audience that a program is an expression of an irresistible mass movement and that it is in their interest to join. "Inevitable victory" invites those not already on the bandwagon to join those already on the road to certain victory. Those already, or partially, on the bandwagon are reassured that staying aboard is the best course of action.

Obtain disapproval: This technique is used to get the audience to disapprove an action or idea by suggesting the idea is popular with groups hated, feared, or held in contempt by the target audience. Thus, if a group which supports a policy is led to believe that undesirable, subversive, or contemptible people also support it, the members of the group might decide to change their position.

Glittering generalities: Glittering generalities are intensely emotionally appealing words so closely associated with highly valued concepts and beliefs that they carry conviction without supporting information or reason. They appeal to such emotions as love of country, home; desire for peace, freedom, glory, honor, etc. They ask for approval without examination of the reason. Though the words and phrases are vague and suggest different things to different people, their connotation is always favorable: "The concepts and programs of the propagandist are always good, desirable, virtuous."

Rationalization: Individuals or groups may use favorable generalities to rationalize questionable acts or beliefs. Vague and pleasant phrases are often used to justify such actions or beliefs.

Intentional vagueness: Generalities are deliberately vague so that the audience may supply its own interpretations. The intention is to move the audience by use of undefined phrases, without analyzing their validity or attempting to determine their reasonableness or application

Transfer: This is a technique of projecting positive or negative qualities (praise or blame) of a person, entity, object, or value (an individual, group, organization, nation, patriotism, etc.) to another in order to make the second more acceptable or to discredit it. This technique is generally used to transfer blame from one member of a conflict to another. It evokes an emotional response which stimulates the target to identify with recognized authorities.

Oversimplification: Favorable generalities are used to provide simple answers to complex social, political, economic, or military problems.

Common man: The "plain folks" or "common man" approach attempts to convince the audience that the propagandist's positions reflect the common sense of the people. It is designed to win the confidence of the audience by communicating in the common manner and style of the audience. Propagandists use ordinary language and mannerisms (and clothes in face-to-face and audiovisual communications) in attempting to identify their point of view with that of the average person.

Testimonial: Testimonials are quotations, in or out of context, especially cited to support or reject a given policy, action, program, or personality. The reputation or the role (expert, respected public figure, etc.) of the individual giving the statement is exploited. The testimonial places the official sanction of a respected person or authority on a propaganda message. This is done in an effort to cause the target audience to identify itself with the authority or to accept the authority's opinions and beliefs as its own.

Stereotyping or Labeling: This technique attempts to arouse prejudices in an audience by labeling the object of the propaganda campaign as something the target audience fears, hates, loathes, or finds undesirable.

Scapegoating: Assigning blame to an individual or group that isn't really responsible, thus alleviating feelings of guilt from responsible parties and/or distracting attention from the need to fix the problem for which blame is being assigned.

Virtue words: These are words in the value system of the target audience which tend to produce a positive image when attached to a person or issue. Peace, happiness, security, wise leadership, freedom, etc., are virtue words.

Slogans: A slogan is a brief striking phrase that may include labeling and stereotyping. If ideas can be sloganized, they should be, as good slogans are self-perpetuating memes.

See also doublespeak, information warfare, meme, psyops

Techniques of Propaganda Transmission

Common methods for transmitting propaganda messages include news reports, government reports, historical revision, junk science, books, leaflets, movies, and posters.

References

• Disinfopedia, the encyclopedia of propaganda
• Howe, Ellic. The Black Game: British Subversive Operations Against the German During the Second World War. London: Futura, 1982.
• Edwards, John Carver. Berlin Calling: American Broadcasters in Service to the Third Reich. New York, Prager Publishers, 1991. ISBN 0-275-93705-7.
• Linebarger, Paul M. A. (aka Cordwainer Smith). Psychological Warfare. Washington, D.C., Infantry Journal Press, 1948.
• Shirer, William L. Berlin Diary: The Journal of a Foreign Correspondent, 1934-1941. New York: Albert A. Knopf, 1942.
• Much of the information found in Propaganda techniques is take from: "Appendix I: PSYOP Techniques" from "Psychological Operations Field Manual No.33-1" published by Headquarters; Department of the Army, in Washington DC, on 31 August 1979. I'm sure there are copies of this whole manual on the web, I'll try to find a good link soon.

See also: propaganda film, Logical fallacy, political media, ideology, spin, Information warfare, CNN, BBC, agitprop

External links

• propaganda critic: A website devoted to propaganda analysis.
• David Welch: Powers of Persuasion
• Documentation on Early Cold War
• U.S. Propaganda Activities in the Middle East] by the National Security Archive. Collection of 148 documents and overview essay.
• Bibliography on the British Political Warfare Executive
• Propaganda techniques list from Disinfopedia
• Propaganda defined more technically, also from Disinfopedia
• Sacred Congregation of Propaganda from the Catholic Encylopedia.
• Propaganda: The Formation of Men's Attitudes by Jacques Ellul--excerpts

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Authority

In politics, authority generally refers to the ability to make laws, independent of the [[power to enforce them. People obey authority out of respect, while they obey power out of fear. For example, "the congress has the authority to pass laws" vs "the police have the power to arrest law-breakers".

Questions of who has what authority are often central to political debates, and answers are normally grounded in practical and moral considerations, prior practices and theories of criminal justice or the just war.

In sociology, authority is a particular type of power. The dominant usage comes from functionalism and follows Weber in defining authority as power which is recognised as legitimate and justified by both the powerful and the powerless. Weber further sub-divided authority into three types:

• Traditional authority which simply derives from long-established habits and social structures. The right of hereditary monarchs to rule furnishes an obvious example.
• Charismatic authority. From time to time, people make extraordinary claims of heading a revolution of some kind (which is always against a well-established system of traditional or legal-rational authority). When these claims are taken seriously, this is an instance of charismatic authority: religious or political authority that does not flow from tradition or law, but instead thrives on the short-lived excitement of social change. The careers of Lenin, Martin Luther, Hitler, and Lech Walesa provide examples. Charismatic authority is always short-lived (even when successful) and it inevitably gives way to either traditional or to legal-rational authority.
• Legal-rational authority depends for its legitimacy on formal rules, which are usually written down, and often very complex. Modern societies are based on legal-rational authority.

As an example of the development of legal-rational authority, consider the history of France. In medieval times a king ruled simply because he was the king (i.e., he held traditional authority), but by the 17th century it became necessary to invent a doctrine claiming that Louis XIV ruled by "divine right" - in other words, to justify Louis' authority by a rational claim to his appointment by a legitimate superior (God). This served for another century, but was threatened by the rival claim made to legal-rational authority by the Estates General, and then eclipsed by the charismatic authority held by the leaders of the French Revolution, which was in turn replaced by the legal-rational authority of the republic.

Within conflict theory, "authority" is used both in the same sense as Weber's functionalist definition above, and in a rather different sense which is based on the observation that power is almost never endorsed in a moral sense by those who do not have it, and therefore defines "authority" as power which is so institutionalised that it is largely unquestioned.

Obedience to authority is highly ingrained in most of the population: the Milgram experiment showed that over 60% of a sample of Americans were willing to torture another person to death when given orders from an appropriate authority figure. This experiment has been replicated in several other cultures with similar results.

See also: appeal to authority, power, trust, régime, law

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Fascism

Mussolini with Hitler

Fascism (in Italian, fascismo), capitalized, refers to the authoritarian political movement which ruled Italy 1922-1943 under the leadership of Benito Mussolini. The name comes from fascio, which may mean "bundle", as in a political group, but also fasces, the Roman authority symbol of a bundle of rods and axe-head.

Introduction

The word fascism has come to mean any system of government resembling Mussolini's, that exalts nation and often race above the individual, and uses violence and modern techniques of propaganda and censorship to forcibly suppress political opposition, engages in severe economic and social regimentation, and espouses nationalism and sometimes racism (ethnic nationalism). Nazism is usually considered as a kind of fascism.

Unlike the pre–World War II period, when many groups openly and proudly proclaimed themselves fascist, in the post–World War II period the term has taken on an extremely pejorative meaning, largely in reaction to the crimes against humanity undertaken by the Nazis. Today, very few groups proclaim themselves as fascist, and the term almost universally is used for groups for whom the speaker has little regard, often with minimal understanding of what the term actually means. More particularly, "Fascist" is sometimes used by people of the Left to characterize some group or persons of the far-right or neo-far-right, though this usage has somewhat receded since the 1970s. As George Orwell in his 1946 essay "Politics and the English Language" famously complained, "The word Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies 'something not desirable.'" This negative association makes it unlikely that the fascist label will be used or accepted by any future regimes.

Fascism, in many respects, is an ideology of negativism: anti-liberal, anti-Communist, anti-democratic, anti-egalitarian, etc. As a political and economic system in Italy, it combined elements of corporatism, totalitarianism, nationalism, and anti-communism.

Fascism is generally regarded as somehow the "opposite" to socialism or communism. Mussolini himself characterized it as such in a 1932 paper entitled What Is Fascism?:

...Fascism [is] the complete opposite of ... Marxian Socialism, the materialist conception of history of human civilization can be explained simply through the conflict of interests among the various social groups and by the change and development in the means and instruments of production....

Fascism, now and always, believes in holiness and in heroism; that is to say, in actions influenced by no economic motive, direct or indirect. And if the economic conception of history be denied, according to which theory men are no more than puppets, carried to and fro by the waves of chance, while the real directing forces are quite out of their control, it follows that the existence of an unchangeable and unchanging class-war is also denied - the natural progeny of the economic conception of history. And above all Fascism denies that class-war can be the preponderant force in the transformation of society....

..."The maxim that society exists only for the well-being and freedom of the individuals composing it does not seem to be in conformity with nature's plans." "If classical liberalism spells individualism," Mussolini continued, "Fascism spells government."

--Benito Mussolini, public domain, from The Internet Modern History Sourcebook

 

It is notable that the central distinctions are views of class conflict and religious orthodoxy. A fascist government is usually characterized as "extreme right-wing," and a socialist government as "left-wing". Others argue that the differences between fascism and totalitarian forms of socialism are more superficial than actual. (See political spectrum for more on these ideas).

The most common feature of fascism cited in contrast to socialism is the fact that neither Hitler nor Mussolini nationalized their nations' industries. Some contend that this difference is also more cosmetic than actual, since both leaders used extreme regulation to control industry, while leaving them in the hands of their owners. Hitler commented on this difference in a letter to Herman Rauschning, where he wrote:

"Of what importance is all that, if I range men firmly within a discipline they cannot escape? Let them own land or factories as much as they please. The decisive factor is that the State, through the Party, is supreme over them regardless of whether they are owners or workers. All that is unessential; our socialism goes far deeper. It establishes a relationship of the individual to the State, the national community. Why need we trouble to socialize banks and factories? We socialize human beings."

It is also possible, since fascism incorporates corporatism, that a fascist regime may de-facto nationalize certain key industries, simply by maintaining close personal and/or business relationships with the corporations' owners.

Practice of fascism

Examples of fascist systems include Nazi Germany and Spain under the Falange Party of Francisco Franco, in addition to Mussolini's Italy.

Fascism in practice embodied both political and economic practices, and invites different comparisons. Writers who focus on the politically repressive policies of fascism identify it as one form of totalitarianism, a description they use to characterise not only Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany, but also communist countries such as the Soviet Union, Communist China and Cuba (although fascists and communists identify each other as enemies).

However, some analysts point out that some fascist governments were arguably more authoritarian rather than totalitarian. There is almost universal agreement that Nazi Germany was totalitarian. However, many would argue that the governments of Franco's Spain and Salazar's Portugal, while fascist, were more authoritarian than totalitarian.

Writers who focus on economic policies of state intervention in the market and the use of state apparatuses to broker conflicts between different classes make even broader comparisons, identifying fascism as one form of corporatism, a political outgrowth of Catholic social doctrine from the 1890s, with which parallels have been drawn embracing not only Nazi Germany, but also Roosevelt's New Deal United States and Juan Peron's populism in Argentina.

Prominent proponents of fascism in pre-WWII America included the publisher Seward Collins, whose periodical The American Review (1933-1937) featured essays by Collins and others that praised Mussolini and Hitler. The America First movement, funded by William Regnery, among others, took a pro-German view of the world during the 1930s and fought to keep America neutral after Great Britain entered the war in 1939.

Italian Fascism

Mussolini's Fascist state, established nearly a decade before Hitler's rise to power, would provide a model for Getulio Vargas' later economic and political policies. Both a movement and a historical phenomenon, Italian Fascism was, in many respects, an adverse reaction to both the apparent failure of laissez-faire and fear of the left, although trends in intellectual history, such as the breakdown of positivism and the general fatalism of postwar Europe should be of concern.

Fascism was, to an extent, a product of a general feeling of anxiety and fear among the middle class of postwar Italy arising because of a convergence of interrelated economic, political, and cultural pressures. Under the banner of this authoritarian and nationalistic ideology, Mussolini was able to exploit fears regarding the survival of capitalism in an era in which postwar depression, the rise of a more militant left, and a feeling of national shame and humiliation stemming from Italy's 'mutilated victory' at the hands of the World War I postwar peace treaties seemed to converge. Such unfulfilled nationalistic aspirations tainted the reputation of liberalism and constitutionalism among many sectors of the Italian population. In addition, such democratic institutions had never grown to become firmly rooted in the young nation-state.

As the same postwar depression heightened the allure of Marxism among an urban proletariat even more disenfranchised than their continental counterparts, fear regarding the growing strength of trade unionism, Communism, and Socialism proliferated among the elite and the middle class. In a way, Benito Mussolini filled a political vacuum. Fascism emerged as a "third way" — as Italy's last hope to avoid imminent collapse of the 'weak' Italian liberalism, and Communist revolution. While failing to outline a coherent program, it evolved into new political and economic system that combined corporatism, totalitarianism, nationalism, and anti-Communism in a state designed to bind all classes together under a capitalist system, but a new capitalist system in which the state seized control of the organization of vital industries. Under the banners of nationalism and state power, Fascism seemed to synthesize the glorious Roman past with a futuristic utopia.

The appeal of this movement, the promise of a more orderly capitalism during an era of interwar depression, however, was not isolated to Italy, or even Europe. A decade later, as the Great Depression led to a sharp economic downturn of the Brazilian economy, a sort of quasi-fascism would emerge there that would react to Brazil's own socio-economic problems and nationalistic consciousness of its peripheral status in the global economy. The regime of Getulio Vargas adopted extensive fascist influence and entered into an alliance with Integralism, Brazil's local fascist movement.

Founded as a nationalist association (the Fasci di Combattimento) of World War I veterans in Milan on March 23, 1919, Mussolini's fascist movement converted itself into a national party (the Partito Nazionale Fascista) after winning 35 seats in the parliamentary elections of May 1921. Initially combining ideological elements of left and right, it aligned itself with the forces of conservatism by its opposition to the September 1920 factory occupations.

Despite the themes of social and economic reform in the initial Fascist manifesto of June 1919, the movement came to be supported by sections of the middle class fearful of socialism and communism, while industrialists and landowners saw it as a defence against labour militancy. Under threat of a fascist "March on Rome", Mussolini in October 1922 assumed the premiership of a right-wing coalition Cabinet initially including members of the pro-church People's Party.

The transition to outright dictatorship was more gradual than in Germany a decade later, though in July 1923 a new electoral law all but assured a Fascist parliamentary majority, and the murder of the Socialist deputy Giacomo Matteotti eleven months later showed the limits of political opposition. By 1926 opposition movements had been outlawed, and in 1928 election to parliament was restricted to Fascist-approved candidates.

The regime's most lasting political achievement was perhaps the Lateran Treaty of February 1929 between the Italian State and the Holy See, by which the Papacy was granted temporal sovereignty over the Vatican City and guaranteed the free exercise of Catholicism as the sole state religion throughout Italy in return for its acceptance of Italian sovereignty over the Pope's former dominions.

Trade unions and employers' associations were reorganized by 1934 into 22 fascist corporations combining workers and employers by economic sector, whose representatives in 1938 replaced the parliament as the "Chamber of Corporations": power continued to be vested in the Fascist Grand Council, the ruling body of the movement.

The 1930s saw some economic achievements as Italy recovered from the Great Depression: the draining of the malaria-infested Pontine Marshes south of Rome was one of the regime's proudest boasts. But international sanctions following Italy's invasion (October 1935) of Ethiopia (the Abyssinia crisis), followed by the government's costly military support for Franco's Nationalists in Spain, undermined growth despite successes in developing domestic substitutes for imports (Autarchia).

International isolation and their common involvement in Spain brought about increasing diplomatic collaboration between Italy and Nazi Germany, reflected also in the fascist regime's domestic policies as the first anti-semitic laws were passed in 1938. But Italy's intervention (June 10th 1940) as Germany's ally in World War II brought military disaster, from the loss of her north and east African colonies to U.S. and British invasion of first Sicily (July 1943) and then southern Italy (September 1943).

Dismissed as prime minister by King Victor Emmanuel III on July 25th 1943, and subsequently arrested, Mussolini was freed in September by German paratroopers and installed as head of a puppet "Italian Social Republic" at Salo in German-occupied northern Italy. His association with the German occupation regime eroded much of what little support remained to him, and his summary execution (April 28th 1945) by northern partisans was widely seen as a fitting end against the backdrop of the war's violent closing stages.

After the war, the remnants of Italian fascism largely regrouped under the banner of the neo-Fascist "Italian Social Movement" (MSI), merging in 1994 with conservative former Christian Democrats to form the "National Alliance" (AN), which proclaims its commitment to constitutionalism, parliamentary government and political pluralism.

Fascism as an International Phenomenon

It's often a matter of dispute whether a certain government is to be characterized as fascist, authoritarian, totalitarian, or just a plain Police state.

Italy (1922-1943) - The first fascist country, it was ruled by Benito Mussolini, Il Duce until Mussolini was captured during the Allied invasion. Mussolini was rescued from house arrest by German troops, and set up a short lived puppet state in northern Italy under the protection of the German army.

Germany (1933-1945) - Ruled by the Nazi movement of Adolf Hitler, (der Führer). In the terminology of the Allies, Nazi Germany was as their chief enemy the mightiest and best-known fascist state.

Spain (1936-1975) - The fascist Falange Española Party was led by Generalissimo Francisco Franco, who took power in a civil war and was El Caudillo until his death.

Portugal (1932-1968) - Although less restrictive than the first three, the Estado Novo Party of António de Oliveira Salazar was quasi-fascist.

Austria (1932-1945) - The Heimwehr of Engelbert Dollfuss led Austria to be allied with Mussolini's Italy and then fall into the hands of Germany (Anschluss). In 1997, Jörg Haider, an extreme nationalist, became popular. Many political commentators believe that Haider's Austrian Freedom Party is a neo-fascist organization.

Greece - Joannis Metaxas' dictature (1936-1941) was not particularly ideological in nature, and might hence be characterized as authoritarian rather than fascist. The same can be argued regarding Colonel George Papadopoulos' US-supported military dictature (1967-1974).

Brazil (1937-1945) - Many historians have argued that Brazil's Estado Novo under Getulio Vargas was a Brazilian variant of the continental fascist regimes. For a period of time, Vargas' regime was aligned with Plínio Salgado's Integralist Party, Brazil's fascist movement.

Belgium (1939-1945) - The violent Rexist movement and the VNV party achieved some electoral success in the 1930s and many of its members assisted the Nazi occupation during World War II. The Verdinaso movement, too, can be considered fascists, but its leader, Joris Van Severen was killed before the Nazi occupation. Some of its adapts collaborated, but others even joined the resistance.

Slovakia (1939-1944) - The Slovak Populist Party was a quasi-fascist nationalist movement associated with the Roman Catholic Church. Founded by Father Andrej Hlinka, his successor Monsignor Jozef Tiso became the Nazis' quisling in a nominally independent Slovakia.

France (1940-1944) - The Vichy regime of Philippe Pétain, established following France's defeat against Germany, collaborated with the Nazis, including in the death of 65,000 French Jews.

Romania (1940-1944) - The violent Iron Guard took power when Ion Antonescu forced King Carol II to abdicate. The fascist regime ended after the Soviet invasion.

Norway (1943-1945) - Vidkun Quisling had already during the German invasion on April 9th, 1940, attempted a coup d'état, but was appointed to head a puppet government under Nazi-Germany first from February 1st, 1943. His party had never had any substantial support in Norway.

Hungary (1944-1945) - Ferenc Szálasi headed the extremist Arrow Cross party. In 1944, he succeeded admiral Miklós Horthy de Nagybánya as Head of State in Hungary. (The government led 1920-1944 by Miklos Horthy, a staunch Conservative, had joined Nazi-Germany in World War II, in hopes of bringing the return of the lost territories of Transylvania, Croatia, and Slovakia, which at the end of the war resulted in German interventions in Hungary, forcing Horthy to abdicate.)

Argentina (1946-1955 and 1973-1974) - Juan Perón admired Mussolini and established his own pseudo-fascist regime. After he died, his third wife and vice-president Isabel Perón was deposed by a military junta.

Paraguay (1954-1989) - Alfredo Stroessner's Colorado Party made Paraguay a safe haven for Nazi war criminals such as Mengele.

See Also

• George Seldes, early reporter of US fascism

External Links

• Fascism Anyone?

 

Michael Ledeen

Michael Ledeen is one of the most prominent neo-conservative thinkers. He has worked for The Pentagon, U.S. State Department, and the National Security Council, and he was involved with the arms transfers to Iran during the Iran/Contra affair, which he documents in his book Perilous Statecraft: An Insider's Account of the Iran-Contra Affair.

William O. Beeman of the Pacific News Service writes that "Ledeen's ideas are repeated daily by such figures as Richard Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz. His views virtually define the stark departure from American foreign policy philosophy that existed before the tragedy of Sept. 11, 2001. He basically believes that violence in the service of the spread of democracy is America's manifest destiny. Consequently, he has become the philosophical legitimator of the American occupation of Iraq."

Quotes from Ledeen's works reveal a view of politics that appear to resemble those of Marxism: "Change -- above all violent change -- is the essence of human history," (from Machiavelli on Modern Leadership: Why Machiavelli's Iron Rules Are as Timely and Important Today as Five Centuries Ago). In the National Review Online he asserts, "Creative destruction is our middle name. We do it automatically ... it is time once again to export the democratic revolution." This rhetoric resembles the Common Sense Revolution rhetoric of the common sense conservative.

Beeman claims that "Ledeen has become the driving philosophical force behind the neoconservative movement and the military actions it has spawned. His 1996 book, Freedom Betrayed; How the United States Led a Global Democratic Revolution, Won the Cold War, and Walked Away, reveals the basic neoconservative obsession: the United States never "won" the Cold War; the Soviet Union collapsed of its own weight without a shot being fired. Had the United States truly won, democratic institutions would be sprouting everywhere the threat of Communism had been rife."

Iraq, Iran and Syria are the first and foremost nations where this should happen, according to Ledeen, and it should be achieved violently, by what he terms total war," which he defines as follows:

"Total war not only destroys the enemy's military forces, but also brings the enemy society to an extremely personal point of decision, so that they are willing to accept a reversal of the cultural trends... The sparing of civilian lives cannot be the total war's first priority ..." (see collateral damage).

"The purpose of total war is to permanently force your will onto another people."

The 2003 invasion of Iraq, and the subsequent occupation of Iraq and re-making of its institutions, were the first test of this theory in practice on a large scale. A next step to invade Iran or Syria are strongly advocated by the Project for a New American Century, on which Ledeen is a major influence.

See also: Leo Strauss

 

Stoicism

Stoicism is a school of philosophy commonly associated with such philosophers as Cicero, Seneca, Marcus Aurelius, and Epictetus.

Organized at Athens in the third century B.C.E. (310 BC) by Zeno of Citium and Chrysippus. The Stoics provided a unified account of the world that comprised formal logic, materialistic physics, and naturalistic ethics. Later Roman Stoics emphasized more exclusively the development of recommendations for living in harmony with a natural world over which one has no direct control.

The Stoic philosophy developed from that of the Cynics whose founder, Antisthenes, had been a disciple of Socrates. The Stoics emphasized ethics as the main field of knowledge, but they also developed theories of logic and natural science to support their ethical doctrines.

Holding a somewhat materialistic conception of nature they followed Heraclitus in believing the primary substance to be fire. They also embraced his concept of Logos which they identified with the energy, law, reason, and providence found throughout nature.

They held Logos to be the animating or 'active principle' of all reality. The Logos was conceived as a rational divine power that orders and directs the universe; it was identified with God, nature, and fate. Human reason and the human soul were both considered part of the divine Logos, and therefore immortal.

The foundation of Stoic ethics is the principle, proclaimed earlier by the Cynics, that good lies in the state of the soul itself, in wisdom and restraint. Stoic ethics stressed the rule "Follow where Reason leads"; one must therefore resist the influence of the passions-love, hate, fear, pain, and pleasure.

Living according to nature or reason, they held, is living in conformity with the divine order of the universe. The four cardinal virtues of the Stoic philosophy are wisdom, courage, justice, and temperance, a classification derived from the teachings of Plato.

A distinctive feature of Stoicism is its cosmopolitanism. All people are manifestations of the one universal spirit and should, according to the Stoics, live in brotherly love and readily help one another. They held that external differences such as rank and wealth are of no importance in social relationships. Thus, before the rise of Christianity, Stoics recognized and advocated the brotherhood of humanity and the natural equality of all human beings. Stoicism became the most influential school of the Greco-Roman world and produced a number of remarkable writers and personalities.

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External links:

• "Stoicism," Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
• The Stoic Hearth of the Rational Good Life

 

Cult of personality

(Redirected from Personality cult)

The term cult of personality generally refers in derogatory terms to the worship of a single living leader. The term does not generally refer showing respect for the dead, nor does it refer to honoring symbolic leaders who have no real power. The latter often occurs with monarchies, such as that of Thailand, in which subjects treat their monarchs with extreme respect, but convention or law forbid them from converting this respect into real political power.

Personality cults usually characterise totalitarian states or countries which have recently experienced revolutions. The reputation of a single leader, often characterized as the "liberator" or "savior" of the people, elevates that leader to an almost divine level. The leader's picture appears everywhere, as do statues and other monuments to the leader's greatness and wisdom. Slogans of the leader cover massive billboards, and books containing the leader's speeches and writings fill up the bookstores and libraries. The level of flattery can reach heights which may appear absurd to outsiders. For example, during the Cultural Revolution, all essays including scientific papers, had a quote from Mao Zedong, and all quotes from Mao appeared highlighted in boldface or in red.

Personality cults aim to make the leader and the state seem synonymous, so it becomes impossible to comprehend the existence of one without the other. It also helps justify the often harsh rule of a dictatorship, and propagandize the citizens into believing that the leader operates as a kind and just ruler. In addition, cults of personality often arise out of an effort to quash opposition within a ruling elite. Both Mao Zedong and Josef Stalin used their cults of personality to help crush their political opponents.

Cult of personality do not appear universal among all totalitarian or authoritarian societies. A few of the world's most oppressive regimes have in fact exhibited little to no worship of the leader. The Marxist Khmer Rouge government in Cambodia and the theocratic Taliban government of Afghanistan lacked many of the trappings of cults of personality, and the leaders in these regimes remained almost anonymous. In these cases, the lack of a cult of personality seems partly motivated by the desire to project an image of a faceless but omniscient and omnipresent state. In other cases such as post-Mao China, authoritities frown upon the establishment of a cult of personality for fear it may upset the balance or power between the leaders within the political elite.

The creation of such a vast cult often led to criticism of the regimes of Joseph Stalin and Mao Zedong. During the peak of their reigns both these leaders appeared as god-like omniscient rulers, destined to rule their nation for all eternity. Government orders prescribed the hanging of their portraits in every home and public building, and many artists and poets were instructed to only produce works that glorified the leader. To justify this level of worship, both Mao and Stalin tried to present themselves as personally humble and modest, and would often characterize their vast personality cults as nothing more than a spontaneous show of affection by their people. Stalin in particular used this excuse to justify the Communist Party's massive campaign of renaming things in his honor (see Stalingrad).

Cults of personality can collapse very quickly after the ousting or death of the leader. Stalin and Mao both provide examples of this. In some cases, the leader formerly the subject of a cult of personality becomes vilified after his death, and often a massive effort at renaming and statue-removal ensues.

Other notable past personality cults included that of Kemal Atatürk's Turkey, Ho Chi Minh's Vietnam Nicolae Ceausescu's Romania and Saddam Hussein's Iraq. Imperial Rome and the world of Hellenistic Greece displayed many pre-modern equivalents of cult of personality features, with ancient Egypt especially practised in the ways of elevating monarchs to god kings.

Some current countries that feature personality cults include Saparmurat Niyazov's Turkmenistan and Kim Jong Il's North Korea. Compare the reputation of Fidel Castro in Cuba and of Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe.

Compare with: king, emperor, apotheosis

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The term cult of personality may also describe:

• the media's obsession with celebrities
• the functioning of person-centred leadership in the gurus of purported cults
• ego-driven management in a commercial corporation

 

Authoritarianism

The term authoritarianism is used to describe an organization or a state which enforces strong and sometimes oppressive measures against the population. It is distinguished from totalitarianism both by degree and scope, authoritarian administration or governance being less intrusive and in the case of organizations not necessarily backed by the use of force. For example, the Roman Catholic Church can be accurately described as authoritarian; however, in modern times it lacks the means to use force to enforce its edicts and is not a totalitarian organization.

The distinction between authoritarianism and totalitarianism was a crucial part of the Kirkpatrick Doctrine, which asserted that the United States could cooperate with authoritarian nations with bad human rights records because they were more capable of fundamental reform and less dangerous than totalitarian nations.

In an authoritarian state citizens are subject to state authority in many aspects of their lives, including many that other political philosophies would see as matters of personal choice.

Typically, the leadership (government) of an authoritarian regime is ruled by an elite group that uses repressive means to stay in power. However, unlike totalitarian regimes, there is no desire or ideological justification for the state to control all aspects of a person's life, and the state will generally ignore the actions of an individual unless it is perceived to be directly challenging the state. Totalitarian governments tend to be revolutionary, intent on changing the basic structure of society, while authoritarian ones tend to be conservative.

One controversial belief is that countries ruled by authoritarianism are more likely to be economically successful than democratic countries. Examples given to support this thesis are South Korea, Singapore, and the Republic of China (on Taiwan), which were authoritarian during their period of growth. This notion of developmental authoritarianism is a central justification for the rule of the Communist Party of China within the People's Republic of China.

One counter-argument is that there are many instances of authoritarian nations that have not encountered rapid growth, for example the Philippines and Indonesia. In addition, critics of the thesis of developmental authoritarianism point out India, which had impressive growth in the 1990s with a democratic government.

The question of whether developmental authoritarianism is stable over the long-term, and whether or not it can be justified when an economy has developed, is also controversial. In the case of South Korea and Taiwan, development led to the release of social forces that forced a transition to democracy. In Singapore's case, justification was given to its strict social behavior laws as "a way to force civility onto a third-world country," which it was at the time of its separation from Malaysia.

The notion that authoritarian government is ultimately superior to democracy was part of the idea of Asian values, although it diminished somewhat after the Asian financial crisis of 1998.

Another country considered authoritarian in this sense was Spain, under the government of Francisco Franco.

See also: statism, totalitarianism

 

Stalinism

Stalinism is a colloquial term for the political and economic system implemented by Joseph Stalin in the Soviet Union. This system is often regarded as being synonymous with totalitarianism.

Building on Lenin's work, Stalin expanded the centralized bureaucratic system of the Soviet Union during the 1930s. A series of two five-year plans led to a massive expansion of the Soviet economy. Large increases were seen in many sectors, especially coal and iron production. Society was brought from a position decades behind the West to one of near economic and scientific equality within thirty years. Some economic historians now believe it to be the fastest economic growth ever achieved.

While the system was ultimately devastating to the Soviet Union, it was almost certainly responsible for defeating Nazism. Without the staggering economic production that Stalinism brought to the Soviet Union, the nation would have been easily overrun by the German forces. After World War II Stalinism was exported to the Soviet Union's new Eastern European satellite states.

After Stalin's death in 1953, Stalin's successor Nikita Khrushchev repudiated his policies and condemned Stalinism. While the repression was somewhat reduced, the control economy continued. Bureaucratic morasses and falling standards eventually came to light after the system started to crumble under the perestroika (or "restructuring") of the 1980s and came to full light after the collapse of the Soviet system in the early 1990s.

Many parallels can be seen between Stalinism and the economic policy of Czar Peter the Great. Both men desperately wanted Russia to catch up to the western European states. Both succeeded to an extent, turning Russia temporarily into Europe's leading power. In both cases it only took a few decades for the forced economic growth to evaporate, and for Russia to once more become one of the poorest nations in Europe.

The term "Stalinism" was also used by anti-Soviet Marxists, particularly Trotskyists, to distinguish the policies of the Soviet Union from those they regard as more true to Marxism. Trotskyists argue that Stalinism is not socialism, but rather a form of "state capitalism;" that is, a system in which exploitation is merely controlled by the state. The term is also used by more democratic Marxists (as well as many non-Marxists) to condemn the totalitarian variety of Communism that still exists in states such as North Korea.

See also

• Stalin
• History of the Soviet Union

 

Nazism

Nazism or National Socialism is the totalitarian ideology and practices engaged in by the German nationalistic dictatorship which ruled Germany from 1933 to 1945, "the Third Reich".

The dictator Adolf Hitler rose to power as leader of a political party, the National Socialist German Workers' Party (Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei or NSDAP for short). Germany during this period is also referred to as Nazi Germany. Nazism was also called National Socialism (German Nationalsozialismus). Adherents of Nazism were called Nazis. Nazism has been outlawed in modern Germany, although tiny remnants, known as Neo-Nazis, continue to operate in Germany and abroad. Some historical revisionists disseminate propaganda which denies or minimizes the Holocaust and other Nazi acts, and attempts to put a positive spin on the policies of the Nazi regime and the events which occurred under it.

Ideological Theory

According to Mein Kampf (My Struggle), Hitler developed his political theories by carefully observing the policies of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He was born as a citizen of the Empire, and believed that ethnic and linguistic diversity had weakened it. Further, he saw democracy as a destabilizing force, because it placed power in the hands of ethnic minorities, who had incentives to further weaken and destabilize the Empire.

The center of the national socialist ideology is the term race. The Nazi theory says that the Aryan race is a "master race" superior to other races. This belief is justified by the following logic.

National Socialism classically says that a nation is the highest creation of a race. Therefore, great nations (literally large nations) are said to be the creation of great races. The theory says that great nations grow from military power. In turn, military power naturally grows from rational, civilized cultures. In turn, these cultures naturally grow from races with natural good health, and aggressive, intelligent, courageous traits.

The weakest nations are said to be those of impure or "mongrel" races, because they have divided, quarrelling, and therefore weak cultures.

According to the Nazis, an obvious mistake of this type is to permit or encourage multiple languages within a nation. This belief is why the German Nazis were so concerned with the unification of German-speaking peoples' territories.

Nations that cannot defend their borders were therefore said to be the creation of weak or slave races. Slave races were thought to be less worthy of existence than master races. In particular, if a "master race" should require room to live (Lebensraum), it was thought to have the right to take it and kill or enslave the indigenous "slave races."

Races without homelands were therefore said to be "parasitic races." The richer the members of a "parasitic race" are, the more virulent the parasitism was thought to be. A "master race" could therefore, according to the Nazi doctrine, easily strengthen itself by eliminating "parasitic races" from its homeland.

This was the theoretic justification for the oppression and elimination of Jews and Gypsies, a duty which most Nazis (oddly enough) found personally repugnant.

Religions that recognize and teach these "truths" were said to be "true" or "master" religions because they create mastery by avoiding comforting lies. Those that preach love and toleration, "in contravention to the facts," were said to be "slave" or "false" religions.

The man who recognizes these "truths" was said to be a "natural leader," those who deny it were said to be "natural slaves." Slaves, especially intelligent ones, were said to always attempt to hinder masters by promoting false religious and political doctrines.

However, it is a misconception that Nazism was all about race - this is probably because of the bad reputation Nazism has gained after the war, and especially because of the holocaust. The ideological roots of Nazism are deeper, and can be found in the romantic tradition of the 19th Century, and especially Friedrich Nietzsche's thoughts on "breeding upwards" toward the goal of an Übermensch.

Nazism and Romanticism

According to Bertrand Russell, Nazism comes from a different tradition than that of either liberal capitalism or communism. Thus, to understand values of Nazism, it is necessary to explore this connection, without trivializing the movement as it was in its peak years in the 1930s and dismissing it as a little more than racism.

Many historiographers say that the antisemitic element, which does not exist in the sister fascism movement in Italy and Spain, was adopted by Hitler to gain popularity for the movement. Antisemitic prejudice was very common among the vulgar masses in German Empire. It is claimed that mass acceptance required anti-Semitism, as well as flattery of the wounded pride of German people after the defeat of WWI.

But the origin of Nazism and its values come from the irrationalist tradition of the romantic movement of the early 19th century. Strength, passion, lack of hypocrisy, petty utilitarianism, traditional family values and devotion to community were valued by the Nazis.

Nazism and the British Empire

Hitler admired the British Empire. Racist theories were developed by British intellectuals in the 19th century to control the Indian people and other "savages." These methods were often copied by the Nazis.

Similarly, in his early years Hitler also greatly admired the United States of America. In Mein Kampf, he praised the United States for its anti-immigration laws. According to Hitler, America was a successful nation because it kept itself "pure" of "lesser races." However as war approached, his view of the United States became more negative and he believed that Germany would have an easy victory over the United States precisely because the United States in his later estimation had become a mongrel nation.

Economic Theory

Nazi economic theory concerned itself with immediate domestic issues and separately with ideological conceptions of international economics.

Domestic economic policy was narrowly concerned with three major goals:

1. Elimination of unemployment
2. Elimination of hyperinflation
3. Expansion of production of consumer goods to improve middle and lower-class living standards.

All of these policy goals were intended to address the perceived shortcomings of the Weimar Republic and to solidify domestic support for the party. In this, the party was very successful. Between 1933 and 1936 the German GNP increased by an average annual rate of 9.5 percent, and the rate for industry alone rose by 17.2 percent. However, many economists argue that the expansion of the Germany economy between 1933 and 1936 was not the result of the Nazi party, but rather the consequence of economic policies of the late Weimar Republic which had begin to have an effect.

In addition, it has been pointed out that while it is often popularly believed that the Nazis ended hyperinflation, that the end of hyperinflation preceded the Nazis by several years.

This expansion propelled the German economy out of a deep depression and into full employment in less than four years. Public consumption during the same period increased by 18.7%, while private consumption increased by 3.6% annually. However, as this production was primarily consumptive rather than productive (make work projects, expansion of the war-fighting machine, initiation of the draft to remove working age males from the labor force), inflationary pressures began to rear their head again, although not to the highs of the Weimar Republic. These economic pressures, combined with the war-fighting machine created in the expansion (and concomitant pressures for its use), has led some commentators to the conclusion that a European war was inevitable for these reasons alone. Stated another way, without another general European war to support this consumptive and inflationary economic policy, the Nazi domestic economic program was unsupportable. This is not to say that other more important political considerations were not to blame. It is only meant to state that economics have been, and are a primary motivating factor for any society to go to war.

Internationally, the Nazi party believed that a international banking cabal was behind the global depression of the 1930s. The control of this cabal was identified with the ethnic group known as Jews, providing another link in their ideological motivation for the destruction of that group in the holocaust. However, broadly speaking, the existence of large international banking or merchant banking organizations was well known at this time. Many of these banking organizations were able to exert influence upon nation states by extension or withholding of credit. This influence is not limited to the small states that preceded the creation of German Empire as a nation state in the 1870s, but is noted in most major histories of all European powers from the 1500s onward. In fact, some transnational corporations in the 1500 to 1800 period (the Dutch East India Company for one good example) were formed specifically to engage in warfare as a proxy for governmental involvement, as opposed to the other way around.

Using more modern nomenclature, it is possible to say that the Nazi Party was against transnational corporations power vis-a-vis that of the nation state. This basic anti-corporate stance is shared with many mainstream center-left political parties, as well as otherwise totally opposed anarchist political groups.

It is important to note that the Nazi Party's conception of international economics was very limited. As the National Socialist in the name NSDAP suggests, the party's primary motivation was to incorporate previously international resources into the Reich by force, rather than by trade (compare to the international socialism as practiced by the Soviet Union and the COMECON trade organization). This made international economic theory a supporting factor in the political ideology rather than a core plank of the platform as it is in most modern political parties.

In a economic sense, Nazism and Fascism are related. Nazism may be considered a subset of Fascism, with all Nazis being Fascists, but not all Fascists being Nazis. Nazism shares many economic features with Fascism, featuring complete government control of finance and investment (allocation of credit), industry, and agriculture. Yet in both of these systems, corporate power and market based systems for providing price information still existed. Quoting Benito Mussolini: "Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism because it is a merger of State and corporate power."

Rather than the state requiring goods from industrial enterprises and allocating raw materials required for their production (as in socialist / communist systems), the state paid for these goods. This allows price to play an essential role in providing information as to relative scarcity of materials, or the capital requirements in technology or labor (including education, as in skilled labor) inputs to produce a manufactured good. Additionally, the unionist (strictly speaking, syndicalist) veneer placed on corporate labor relations was another major point of agreement. Both the German and Italian fascist political parties began as unionist labor movements, and grew into totalitarian dictatorships. This idea was maintained throughout their time in power, with state control used as a means to eliminate the assumed conflict between management labor relations.

Effects

These theories were used to justify a totalitarian political agenda of racial hatred and suppression using all the means of the state, and suppressing dissent.

Like other fascist regimes, the Nazi regime emphasized anti-communism and the leader principle (Führerprinzip), a key element of fascist ideology in which the ruler is deemed to embody the political movement and the nation. Unlike other fascist ideologies, Nazism was virulently racist. Some of the manifestations of Nazi racism were:

• Anti-Semitism, culminating in the Holocaust
• Ethnic nationalism, including the notion of Germans' status as the Herrenvolk ("master race") and Übermensch
• A belief in the need to purify the German race through eugenics - this culminated in the involuntary euthanasia of disabled people

Anti-clericalism was also part of Nazi ideology.

Backlash Effects

Perhaps the primary intellectual effect has been that Nazi doctrines completely discredited any attempt to use biology to explain or influence social issues, for at least two generations after Nazi Germany's brief existence.

People and History

The most prominent Nazi was Adolf Hitler, who ruled Nazi Germany from 30 January 1933 until his suicide on 30 April 1945, led the German Reich into World War II, and oversaw the murder of over 40 million people. Under Hitler, ethnic nationalism and racism were joined together through an ideology of militarism to serve his goals.

After the war, many prominent Nazis were convicted of war crimes and crimes against humanity at the Nuremberg Trials.

The Nazi symbol is the clockwise swastika.

Nazism and Religion

The relationship between Nazism and Christianity can only be described as complex -- and controversial, since most modern writers wish to dissociate their own views from Nazism as much as possible.

Hitler and other Nazi leaders clearly made use of Christian symbolism and emotion in propagandizing the overwhelmingly Christian German public, but it remains a matter of controversy whether Hitler believed himself a Christian. Some Christian writers have sought to typify Hitler as an atheist or occultist -- even a Satanist -- whereas non-Christian writers have emphasized Nazism's outward use of Christian doctrine, regardless of what its inner-party mythology may have been. The existence of a Ministry of Church Affairs, instituted in 1935 and headed by Hanns Kerrl, was hardly recognized by ideologists such as Rosenberg and by other political decision-makers.

The Nazi Party's relations with the Catholic Church are yet more fraught. Many Catholic priests and leaders vociferously opposed Nazism on the grounds of its incompatibility with Christian morals. As with many political opponents, many of these priests were sentenced in the concentration camps for their opposition. Nevertheless, the Church hierarchy represented by Pope Pius XII remained largely silent on the issue, and allegations of the Pope's complicity are today commonplace.

Nazism is considered as a kind of fascism

 

Nazism and Fascism

Nazism is often (but incorrectly) used interchangeably with Fascism. While Nazism employed stylistic elements of Fascism, the only serious similarities between the two were dictatorship, territorial irredentism, and basic economic theory. For example, Benito Mussolini, the founder of fascism, did not embrace anti-Semitism until seduced by his alliance with Hitler, whereas Nazism had been explicitly racialist from its inception. Spanish dictator Francisco Franco, often termed a fascist by his largely Communist opposition, could perhaps be described as a reactionary Catholic monarchist who adopted little of fascism but its style.

Toward the end of the 20th century, Neo-Nazi movements have arisen in a number of countries, including the United States of America and several European nations. Neo-Nazism can include any group or organization that exhibits an ideological link to Nazism. It is frequently associated with the skinhead youth subculture. Some fringe political parties, such as the Libertarian National Socialist Green Party, have also adopted Nazi ideas.

Which factors promoted the success of National socialism?

An important question about national socialism is the question for the factors that promoted its success not only in Germany, but also in other European countries (National socialistic movements could be found in Sweden, Great Britain, Italy, Spain and even in the US) in the twenties and thirties of the last century?

These factors might have included:

• Economic devastation all over Europe after WWI
• Lack of orientation of many people after the breakdown of monarchy in many European countries.

---

See also:

• History of Germany
• Weimar Republic
• Nazi Germany
• General Government
• Nazi party
• World War II
• Doublespeak (for a discussion of the semantic implications of words such as Nazi).
• Nazi children

Political economy

The term political economy originally meant the study of the conditions that determined the relative wealth or poverty of polities (e.g. nation-states). The term was first widely used in the 18th Century by philosophers such as the physiocrats and Adam Smith.

In the 19th century liberal theorists argued that the state should not regulate the market; that politics and markets operated according to different principles; and that political economy should be replaced by two separate disciplines, Political science and Economics. Around 1870 neoclassical economists such as Alfred Marshall began using the term economics instead of "political economy."

Notable thinkers have opposed this liberal tradition: Karl Marx (who rejected the conceptual distinction between politics and economics) and John Maynard Keynes (who rejected the institutional separation of politics and economics); their followers often favor "political economy" as a way of bringing politics and economics back together. Use of the term underwent something of a revival during the 1960s when it was used increasingly by the libertarian economists of the Chicago School.

Today, the term political economy is used in various ways. It is most commonly used to refer to interdisciplinary studies that draw on economics, law, and political science in order to understand how political institutions and the political environment influence market behavior. Within political science, the term refers to liberal, realist, and Marxian theories concerning the relationship between economic and political power among states. This is also of concern to students of economic history and institutional economics; nevertheless, within economics the term is more closely associated with Game theory. "International political economy" is a branch of economics that is concerned with international trade and finance, and state policies that affect international trade such as monetary and fiscal policy. Others, especially anthropologists, sociologists, and geographers, use "political economy" to refer to neo-Marxian approaches to development and underdevelopment set forth by Andre Gundar Frank and Immanuel Wallerstein.

See also: Honda Toshiaki

See also "The Political Economy of Very Large Space Projects" at http://www.transhumanist.com/volume4/space.htm

Political science

Political science is the study of politics. It involves the study of structure and process in government - or any equivalent system that assures safety, fairness, and closure across a broad range of risks and access to a broad range of commons for its human charges. Accordingly, political scientists often study trade unions, corporations, churches or other forms of collective intelligence that are not "political" in the sense of influencing law or executive decisions - but have structure and process approaching that of government in complexity and interconnection.

The term "political science" was first coined in 1880 by Herbert Baxter Adams, a professor of history at Johns Hopkins University.

Political scientists study the allocation and transfer of power in decision making. Because of the complex interaction of often conflicting interests, political science is often an applied instance of game theory.

Since the end of the World War II, the study of International Relations, that is also part of Law, Economy, Sociology, among others, became an important area of Political Science. International Relations has become more independent of Political Science over time, in methodology and the scholars themselves. Some universities have developed programs specifically in conflict resolution, which has come to be seen as relevant domestically as well as internationally.

One thing that complicates the study of political science is that political scientists are themselves part of the political process, since their teachings often provide the frameworks within which other commentators, such as journalists, pressure-groups, politicians and the electorate select options. Political scientists measure success on the basis of many things, including stability, justice, material wealth, and peace.

The complex interplay of economic and political choices is reflected in the field of political economy, where economics and political science overlap.

In the United States, political scientists look at a variety of data including elections, public opinion (on matters ranging from Social Security reform to foreign policy), institutional roles (how the U.S. Congress acts, where congressional power gravitates, how and when the Supreme Court acts, or does not act, etc.).

While historians look backward, seeking to explain the past, political scientists try to illuminate the politics of the present and predict those of the future.

See also: list of literature on political science

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