Political Observer comments.

I’ll just ‘sample’ key paragraph’s of this wan apologetic that Mr. Friedman offers, on behalf Blinken, in a Newspaper that is the active partner of The American National Security State. Note that Friedman mentions Blinken being a Jew, yet not his own status as Jew! Nor the fact that his standing as a ‘Political Centrist’, and apologist for American/Israeli crimes, makes him the perfect interviewer for Davos. And its collection of Politicians, Political Technocrats, Billionaire Thieves, and their apologists, to remake ‘The West’: as it continues to sink in the mire of Neo-Liberalisms watershed of Catastrophe!

Headline: Blinken’s Search for Humanity in the Gaza War

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My own way of dealing with the nightmarish nature of this war is to focus all my energies on thinking about how to stop it. But I can always think about China, or something else, if I want. That’s not the case if you are Secretary of State Antony Blinken and you are Jewish and you understand how unspeakably vicious the Hamas onslaught was on Oct. 7. Not to mention if you understand that Israel has a right to self-defense, but you also understand that Palestinian civilian casualties in Gaza have reached numbers you cannot ignore and that could leave a long-term stain on Israel and America.

So when I was invited to Davos to interview Blinken before a large audience today, I asked him bluntly the question people here have been asking me: One of the things you hear so often from people given the high number of civilian casualties in Gaza is, for the United States, do Jewish lives matter more than Palestinian Muslim lives or Palestinian Christian lives, given the incredible asymmetry of the casualties?

Blinken did not hesitate for a second to give an impassioned and heartfelt answer that I thought did him and America proud — an answer that neither obscured the vast human tragedy that has been triggered by Israel’s retaliation nor let Hamas off the hook for its role in starting the whole thing.

“No — period,” Blinken immediately shot back at me.

“I think for so many of us,” he continued, “what we’re seeing every single day in Gaza is gut-wrenching, and the suffering we’re seeing among innocent men, women and children breaks my heart. The question is: What is to be done? We’ve made judgments about how we thought we could be most effective in trying to shape this in ways to get more humanitarian assistance to people — to get better protections and minimize civilian casualties at every step along the way. Not only have we impressed upon Israel its responsibilities to do that, we’ve seen some progress in areas where, absent our engagement, I don’t believe it would have happened.”

Blinken continued: “But that in no way, shape or form takes away from the tragedy that we’ve seen and continue to see. It’s why we’re at it relentlessly, every single day. All I can tell you, Tom, is just on a purely human level, it’s devastating,” he said, referring to the “gut-wrenching” suffering that Israel has inflicted on the Palestinians in Gaza. “But it also reinforces my conviction that there has to be — and there is — another way that answers Israel’s most profound concerns” about security.

Mr. Brooks still thinks of himself as an agenda setting political commentator/writer. Here I will assign motive to Mr. Brook’s intervention. As the protégé of Wm. F. Buckley Jr., and a Neo-Conservative, no matter how abraded by political/careerist opportunism: The Noble Lie*, as celebrated by Leo Strauss, and his coterie of American Jingo’s is active in his mentality. Mr. Brooks seeks, in his way, to present a crisis that will render the The Gaza Genocide in shadow, as an imperative that must be acted upon, without delay!

Headline: Death by a Thousand Paper Cuts

In his 1, 245 word essay, the patient Reader arrives at these final paragraphs:

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Organizations are trying to protect themselves from lawsuits, but the whole administrative apparatus comes with an implied view of human nature. People are weak, fragile, vulnerable and kind of stupid. They need administrators to run their lives. They have to be trained never to take initiative, lest they wander off into activities that are deemed by the authorities to be out of bounds.

The result is the soft despotism that Tocqueville warned us about centuries ago, a power that “is absolute, minute, regular, provident and mild.” In his Liberties essay, Edmundson writes that this kind of power is now centerless. Presidents and executives don’t run companies, universities or nations. Power is now held by everyone who issues work surveys and annual reports, the people who create H.R. trainings and collect data. He concludes: “They are using the terms of liberation to bring more and more free people closer to mental serfdom. Some day they will awaken in a cage of their own devising, so harshly confining that even they, drunk on their own virtue, will have to notice how their lives are the lives of snails tucked in their shells.”

Trumpian populism is about many things, but one of them is this: working-class people rebelling against administrators. It is about people who want to lead lives of freedom, creativity and vitality, who find themselves working at jobs, sending their kids to schools and visiting hospitals, where they confront “an immense and tutelary power” (Tocqueville’s words) that is out to diminish them.

Mr. Brooks ends his self-serving polemic with the notion of ‘soft despotism’ and Trump garners a mention. Yet the Murderous appetite of the Neo-Conservatives in ‘The War on Terror’ stands as the clear evidence, that Brooks’ sounding the alarm, is about a wan and self-serving attempt to change the subject!

Headline: At Least 37 Million People Have Been Displaced by America’s War on Terror

Sub-headline: A new report calculates the number of people who fled because of wars fought by the United States since Sept. 11, 2001.

*

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In the Republic the Noble Lie is supposed to make the citizens of Callipolis care more for their city. Schofield (2009) argues that the guards, having to do philosophy from their youth, may eventually find philosophizing “more attractive than doing their patriotic duty” (115). Philosophy, claims Schofield, provides the guards with knowledge, not with love and devotion for their city. The Noble Lie is supposed to engender in them devotion for their city and instill in them the belief that they should “invest their best energies into promoting what they judge to be the city’s best interests” (113). The preambles to a number of laws in the Laws that are meant to be taken as exhortations to the laws in question and that contain elements of traditional mythology (see 790c3, 812a2, 841c6) may also be taken as “noble lies”.

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Plato’s eschatological myths are not complete lies. There is some truth in them. In the Phaedo the statement “The soul is immortal” is presented as following logically from various premises Socrates and his interlocutors consider acceptable (cf. 106b–107a). After the final argument for immortality (102a–107b), Cebes admits that he has no further objections to, nor doubts about, Socrates’ arguments. But Simmias confesses that he still retains some doubt (107a–b), and then Socrates tells them an eschatological myth. The myth does not provide evidence that the soul is immortal. It assumes that the soul is immortal and so it may be said that it is not entirely false. The myth also claims that there is justice in the afterlife and Socrates hopes that the myth will convince one to believe that the soul is immortal and that there is justice in the afterlife. “I think”, says Socrates, that “it is fitting for a man to risk the belief—for the risk is a noble one—that this, or something like this, is true about our souls and their dwelling places” (114d–e). (Edmonds (2004) offers a interesting analysis of the final myth of Phaedo, Aristophanes’ Frogs and the funerary gold leaves, or “tablets”, that have been found in Greek tombs). At the end of the myth of Er (the eschatological myth of the Republic) Socrates says that the myth “would save us, if we were persuaded by it” (621b). Myth represents a sort of back-up: if one fails to be persuaded by arguments to change one’s life, one may still be persuaded by a good myth. Myth, as it is claimed in the Laws, may be needed to “charm” one “into agreement” (903b) when philosophy fails to do so.

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https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/plato-myths/#:~:text=The%20Noble%20Lie%20is%20supposed,best%20interests%E2%80%9D%20(113).