I purchased ‘The Poetry of Friedrich Nietzsche’ what seemed like decades ago, from a Oxford University Press book sale.
I had read Rudiger Safranski’s Philosophical Biography of Nietzsche, well before reading about Nietzsche’s poetry. Some of his thought’s, positions seemed unhinged.
And some of ‘Philosophy and Truth’ :
As a ‘misfit’ I might have felt a sense of sympathy, or felt a kind of resonance- he inspired both Adorno and Heidegger…
Perhaps my next book should be Alexander Nehamas’ book ? Though it will have to wait.
If Capitalism is represented by an ‘investor’, Peter Thiel, what might that say about the state of Capitalism? The Peddler of the 21st Century, Jeff Bezos, employees thousands in his chain of warehouses, and its fleets of delivery vans. Bezos built it from the ground up, Thiel made some very lucky investments, but has only financed people like Bezos. Mr. Thiel is like Sherman McCoy (lead character in ‘Bonfire of the Vanities’, now utterly forgotten) but ‘he’ is reborn in the political present, although with a taste for political thugs, like Henry Ford. That is why Zuckerberg and his familiar Sandberg have ended their political relationship with Thiel.
The job of reinforcing the imperatives of The American National Security State, in their ‘Metaverse’, is a small price to pay- even though Facebook’s popularity/profitability are sinking! Rumble, Substack, TikTok ,and Joe Rogin are the New Places to Be, the New Internet Toys! Facebook is Old News!
The Reader might just compare Thiel with Henry Luce of the Time/Life Empire, now long forgotten. Although ‘Time’ still has 23 million readers.
Can The New Citizens, like Peter Thiel, associated with Asperger’s syndrome, a form of autism, now present an opportunity to view humanity within another frame? ‘The Straussian Moment’ is now superceded by men who are attached to how their brain functions, as outside ‘the norm’. ?
With House Republicans poised to pass President Trump’s centerpiece legislation, Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries is making the most of the customary “magic minute” he’s afforded at the end of floor debate. In a marathon speech that has lasted six hours thus far, the New York Democrat is taking to task supporters of the “big, beautiful bill,” which would deliver historic rollbacks in the social safety net.
Beginning just shy of 5 a.m., and ongoing as of this writing, Jeffries began by observing, “This bill represents the largest cut to health care in American history. It’s an all-out assault on the health care of the American people,” which renders hollow Trump’s January promise to “love and cherish Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid.”
Later on, Jeffries addressed House Speaker Mike Johnson, saying, “I feel the obligation, Mr. Speaker, to stand on this House floor, and take my sweet time.” As his Democratic colleagues broke into applause, Jeffries continued, “to tell the stories of the American people” as well as “their health care,” “their Medicaid,” “their nutritional assistance,” “veterans,” “farmers,” “children,” “seniors,” “people with disabilities,” and “small businesses.”
Jeffries’s speech is working through a sizable collection of letters from residents of each U.S. state who are worried about losing health care coverage, or otherwise suffering under the legislation, as well as naming the Republican lawmakers who represent those concerned residents.
Shortly before 8 a.m., Jeffries said, “Budgets are moral documents. And in our view, Mr. Speaker, budgets should be designed to lift people up. This reckless Republican budget that we are debating right now … tears people down … and that is why I stand here on the floor of the House of Representatives with my colleagues in the House Democratic Caucus, to stand up and push back against it with everything we have.”
The longest “magic minute” was an over eight-hour speech delivered in February 2018 by then-Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy. Jeffries, having recently completed his sixth hour of speaking, shows no sign of stopping soon—his effort echoing, to a degree, Senator Cory Booker’s record-breaking 25-hour speech in April lambasting the Trump administration and Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency.
This story was last updated at 11:53 a.m.
This paragraph of Hakeem Jeffries’s six hour speech offers a moral argument. The New Democrats failed by running an addled Joe Biden, as a viable candidate, and then offering a feckless Kamala Harris!
Shortly before 8 a.m., Jeffries said, “Budgets are moral documents. And in our view, Mr. Speaker, budgets should be designed to lift people up. This reckless Republican budget that we are debating right now … tears people down … and that is why I stand here on the floor of the House of Representatives with my colleagues in the House Democratic Caucus, to stand up and push back against it with everything we have.”
Headline: MPs like Corbyn won’t be prosecuted for Palestine Action support
Sub-headline: The former Labour leader and fellow PA advocates such as Diane Abbott will not be punished for expressing support in the chamber due to parliamentary privilege
MPs will avoid prosecution if they support Palestine Action while speaking in the House of Commons even after the group is proscribed as a terror group.
Parliamentary privilege will protect them from prosecution, the House of Commons confirmed.
It means that left-wing members including the former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, John McDonnell, who served as his shadow chancellor, the former Labour MP Zarah Sultana, Carla Denyer, the Green party leader, and others who spoke out against the government’s move to ban Palestine Action will not face prosecution if they incite support for the group.
They were among 26 MPs, including nine from Labour, who voted against the move to proscribe Palestine Action on Wednesday. The Labour members included Diane Abbott, the veteran left-winger.
Barring a last-minute injunction proving successful at the High Court on Friday, Palestine Action will be added to a list of terrorist groups alongside Al Qaeda, Isis and Hamas. That will make it illegal to be a member or to invite support for the organisation, punishable by up to 14 years in jail.
The Commons confirmed that this will not apply to MPs who speak in support of the group in the chamber due to parliamentary privilege, which frees MPs and peers to speak freely in parliament even if doing so otherwise breaches the law.
The High Court will hear an application from Palestine Action to suspend the proscription of the group until a full legal hearing can be heard later this summer. On Thursday it launched a new direct action group named “Yvette Cooper” in an attempt to force the home secretary to proscribe herself. Cooper has said the Home Office would look to ban any new groups set up in an attempt to circumvent the proscription of Palestine Action.
On Thursday four Palestine Action members were behind bars on remand after anti-terror police charged them over a £7 million vandalism attack on two aircraft at RAF Brize Norton. Amy Gardiner-Gibson, 29, and Jony Cink, 24, both of no fixed abode, along with the north London duo of Daniel Jeronymides-Norie, 36, of Barnet, and Lewis Chiaramello, 22, of Cricklewood, appeared at Westminster magistrates’ court.
The Crown Prosecution Service said it submitted “that these offences have a terrorist connection”. The defendants, who held hands and smiled as they entered the dock, spoke only to confirm their names. They also made peace signs, blew kisses and waved at supporters in the public gallery.
They have yet to offer a plea to conspiracy to enter a prohibited place knowingly for a purpose prejudicial to the safety or interests of the United Kingdom and conspiracy to commit criminal damage. Prosecutors said both offences occurred between June 1 and June 21, 2025.
Counter Terrorism Policing South East (CTPSE) said the charges came as part of an investigation into “an incident in which damage was caused to aircraft at RAF Brize Norton, Oxfordshire”.
Richard Link, the prosecutor, told the court on Thursday: “This relates to a serious incidence of criminal damage at RAF Brize Norton on June 20 committed by a group called Palestine Action Group. The allegations against these four are [that] they are members of that group and they are heavily into the methodology and reasons behind why they have attacked the airbase.”
He told the court that as far as the prosecution was aware, they lived “transient lifestyles”.
District Judge Daniel Sternberg remanded all four in custody to reappear at the Old Bailey on July 18. There was applause and chants of “Free Palestine” from the packed public gallery as the defendants were led away.
CTPSE on Wednesday said a 41-year-old woman arrested on suspicion of assisting an offender had been released on bail until September 19. A 23-year-old man was arrested and released without charge, it added.
…
Editor: On the pressing question of Free Speech in Britain:
The British First Amendment
One of the recommendations of the Leveson Inquiry into the British press was that an explicit duty should be placed on the government to protect the freedom of the press.
Hugh Tomlinson QC was involved in drafting such a measure, which some would call “a British First Amendment.” The first three clauses of this are reproduced below.
But the government didn’t like the idea and, because it was part of a package which included independent regulation, neither did the press. As a result, the proposal was never implemented.
1. Protection of media freedom
(1) Public authorities must aim to:
(a) protect the freedom of the media, and (b) support the independence of the media.
(2) In particular, in exercising their functions public authorities must:
(a) have regard to the importance of the freedom and independence of the media, and
(b) recognise the right of the media to receive and impart information without interference by public authorities.
(3) It is unlawful for a public authority to interfere or attempt to interfere with the media unless the interference or attempt is undertaken:
(a) for a legitimate purpose which the public authority considers necessary in a democratic society, and
(b) having full regard to the importance of the freedom and independence of the media.
Editor: the final paragraphs of Mr. Stephens essay are indictive of Stephen’s usual attempt at carefully side-stepping the Gaza Genocide, via in an ersatz compassion. This is all by his recollection of the Jan. 29, 2004, at 8:48 a.m. The Narrative of the dutyful dad, changing the the diaper of his daughter, establishes a variety of verisililitude?
On the stillbirth of a Selective Compassion :
There are rich and legitimate debates to be had about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and U.S. policy toward it. None of us should look away at the devastating toll the war in Gaza exacts on Palestinian civilians. And nobody has a monopoly on truth or virtue: Those who want to condemn Israeli policy are fully within their rights.
But a major political candidate who plainly refuses to condemn the phrase “globalize the intifada” isn’t participating in legitimate democratic debate; he is giving moral comfort to people who deliberately murder innocent Jews.
There are liberals and progressives who’ll continue to make excuses for Mamdani. They will argue that his views on “globalize the intifada” are beside the point of his agenda for New York. They will observe that he has a predictable share of far-left Jewish supporters. They will play semantic games about the original meaning of “intifada.”
To those supporters, one can say only good luck. They’re making Donald Trump’s case about the radical direction of too much of the Democratic Party better than he ever could.
Editor: With the whole of the American Political Class being bought and paid for by by AIPAC, and Netanyahu’s visit on July 7 , 2025, what might an American Future look like and be! ‘An Imagimed Future’might be that Iran and Russia will become a check on the Trump/Netanyahu allience?
What is telling is that FP was founded by Samuel P. Huntington of the ‘Clash of Civilizations’ and its racist twin ‘Who Are We?: The Challenges to America’s National Identity’ ! Luce was also a Speech writer to US Treasury Secretary, Lawrence Summers, 1999-2001. In sum Mr. Luce is a well connected political writer, and regular columnist for The Financial Times. He qualifies and one of Lippmann’s Technoctrat’s for hire, as a check against too much democracy!
Mr. Luce’s notorious interview with Kissinger, in the guise of The Great Man, is here:
Lunch with the FT: Henry Kissinger ‘We are in a very, very grave period’
While babies in Vietnam are still being born with catastrophic birth defects from the effects of Agent Orange, decades after the end of the American Anti-Communists crusade or just call it mass slaughter, The Great Man is treated to lunch by a pundit who disingenuously call him consigliere, as the-in-order-too of not sounding too much like what he is, a sycophant to The Great Man. Did Luce even mention his book ‘The Retreat of Western Liberalism’ ? Isn’t there some kind of obligation, on the part of the guest to know something of your host’s latest accomplishment? Or is the aged Great Man above that kind of social obligation?
The essay unfolds in an almost comic mode with Luce planning to waylay The Great Man into ‘spilling the beans’ on the Know-Nothing Trump. The dramatic tension is non existent, as this 95 year old is more interested in having an audience who simply listens, in awe, to his estimation and opinions about the wider historical scope of his intelligence: his specialty is Foreign Policy Metaphysics. The Great Man doesn’t disappoint himself .
Mr. Luce knows the Party Line by heart, as he helped to construct it: Russian revanchism, the end of the ‘rules based order’ meaning the erosion of NATO, in sum the ‘decline of American Power’. Or rather, the fact that Europe is no longer in need of American tutelage. The burning question is TRUMP and his chaotic practice politics and his disturbing propinquity for another political monster Putin.
This little melodrama ends with Luce helping The Great Man to his car in the rain, and the ‘server’ speaks to Luce with some pertinent information: “Dr Kissinger has been looking forward to this lunch for days,”
Editor: In the bleek Age of Trump, Simon & Schuster provides Public Realations chatter:
An intimate and masterful biography of Zbigniew Brzezinski—President Carter’s national security advisor and one of America’s leading geopolitical thinkers—from one of the finest columnists and political writers at work today.
Zbigniew Brzezinski was a key architect of the Soviet Union’s demise, which ended the Cold War. A child of Warsaw—the heart of central Europe’s bloodlands—Brzezinski turned his fierce resentment at his homeland’s razing by Nazi Germany and the Red Army into a lifelong quest for liberty. Born the year that Joseph Stalin consolidated power, and dying a few months into Donald Trump’s first presidency, Brzezinski was shaped by and in turn shaped the global power struggles of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. As counsel to US presidents from John F. Kennedy to Barack Obama, and chief foreign policy figure of the late 1970s under Jimmy Carter, Brzezinski converted his acclaim as a Sovietologist into Washington power. With Henry Kissinger, his lifelong rival with whom he had a fraught on-off relationship, he personified the new breed of foreign-born scholar who thrived in America’s “Cold War University”—and who ousted Washington’s gentlemanly class of WASPs who had run US foreign policy for so long.
Brzezinski’s impact, aided by his unusual friendship with the Polish-born John Paul II, sprang from his knowledge of Moscow’s “Achilles heel”—the fact that its nationalities, such as the Ukrainians, and satellite states, including Poland, yearned to shake off Moscow’s grip. Neither a hawk nor a dove, Brzezinski was a biting critic of George W. Bush’s Iraq War and an early endorser of Obama. Because he went against the DC grain of joining factions, and was on occasion willing to drop Democrats for Republicans, Brzezinski is something of history’s orphan. His historic role has been greatly underweighted. In the almost cinematic arc of his life can be found the grand narrative of the American century and great power struggle that followed.
Editor: Reader note the framing of this New York Times essay by Jeremy W. Peters:
What I Cover
I write about debates over freedom of speech and expression as they impact our country’s most important institutions, with a particular focus on college campuses. If there is a simmering free-speech controversy at a university, local government or cultural institution, I want to be covering it. I’m interested in how institutions grapple with tensions over the most contentious issues of the day — politics, race, democracy, war — and whether they are making any progress toward resolving the extreme polarization in American society.
Editor: Self-congratulation rules this political moment, without a readable text to refer to as check against the self-serving?
Editor: The Times offers this collection of political actors, thinkers, assistants in the production of propaganda!
Hosted by Michael Barbaro
Produced by Caitlin O’Keefe,Asthaa Chaturvedi and Stella Tan
Edited by Lisa Chow and Larissa Anderson
With Paige Cowett
Original music by Marion Lozano and Elisheba Ittoop
Engineered by Alyssa Moxley
Featuring Jeremy W. Peters
…
Warning: This episode contains strong language.
From the outside, the political movement created by Donald J. Trump has never seemed more empowered or invulnerable.
But Steve Bannon, who was the first Trump administration’s chief strategist, sees threats and betrayals at almost every turn, whether it’s bombing Iran or allowing tech billionaires to advise the president.
Jeremy W. Peters, a national reporter at The Times, talks to Mr. Bannon about those threats and why, to him, the future of the MAGA movement depends on defeating them.
…
Queer Atheist.
With this: ‘Warning: This episode contains strong language’ the reader might wonder, about the demographic that this New York Times political intervention is carefully aimed?
It’s Monday, June 29. This is The Front Page, your daily window into the world of The Free Press—and our take on the world at large. Today: Arthur Brooks on the secret to a fulfilling life; Jed Rubenfeld on a blockbuster Supreme Court decision; Olivia Reingold on how New York’s political establishment is scrambling to stop Zohran Mamdani; River Page on the revisionist history of Pride Month; and much more.
But first: The ideological insurgency against the Jewish people.
Glastonbury is a music festival organized by hippie farmers in the southwest of England. For years it’s been a place people go to camp, drink too much cider, and listen to music. At least, that was roughly the deal when I skipped school to attend 18 years ago. But if the footage out of Somerset this weekend is anything to go by, moments at this year’s festival resembled a hate rally.
In a performance on Saturday afternoon, the front man of the punk duo Bob Vylan led the crowd in anti-Israel chants. Among them: “From the river to the sea,” and perhaps most disturbingly: “Death, death to the IDF.” Thousands in the crowd joined in. This was on one of the festival’s main stages, and broadcast live on the BBC.
The presence of a performer like this, chanting things like this, with thousands joining in, at a mainstream festival is deeply troubling. And the incident was quickly condemned by British prime minister Keir Starmer. But if you think these were just the hateful chants of a few bad apples, you’re missing the point, says Ayaan Hirsi Ali. They are part of something much bigger, much scarier, she argues: a movement that wants to cleanse the culture. First, of Israel. Then, of Jews. Then, of the rest of us.
Editor: Neither Oliver Wiseman nor Ayaan Hirsi Ali understand that Hip-Hop has become the voice of ‘Popular Resistance’, across language and time: Glastonbury is its natural place! Both Wiseman & Hirsi Ali are not just the fellow travelers, of the Zionist Faschist State, but its propagandists, as the number of dead,wounded, and murdered lie under the rubble as yet to be found!
Editor: The Neo-Cons have a long and toxic American History: Oliver Wiseman& Ayaan Hirsi Ali share in that legacy!
Fathers and Sons
By Timothy Noah
Jan. 13, 2008
…
The first half of Heilbrunn’s book relates neoconservatism’s origins and its journey to the brink of political power in the late 1970s. It’s a familiar tale, told better in “The Neoconservatives: The Men Who Are Changing America’s Politics,” published in 1979 by Peter Steinfels (then the executive editor of Commonweal and now a columnist on religion for The New York Times). Steinfels came at the neocons from farther to the left than Heilbrunn and consequently was more critical. But the Steinfels book was also more rigorously analytic and, strangely, more generous in granting neocons their due as thinkers. Chalk it up to the narcissism of small differences. As best I can make out, Heilbrunn retains most of the foreign-policy views that he held before but applies them with greater judiciousness, and can no longer bear the sight of those who don’t. (The neocons’ domestic policies seem to interest Heilbrunn not at all; he scarcely mentions them.)
From both Steinfels and Heilbrunn, we learn that neoconservatism was the final stop of an ideological journey for a group of New York intellectuals, typically the children of Jewish immigrants, that began during the early 1940s in Alcove 1 of the cafeteria at City College. Alcove 1 was the gathering place for a group of brilliant young Trotskyists that included Irving Kristol, Seymour Martin Lipset, Nathan Glazer and Melvin Lasky. Along with Irving Howe, who would later break with Trotskyism but not with the left, and Daniel Bell, who never accepted Marxist orthodoxies in any form, the Alcove 1 Trotskyists waged intellectual battle with the Stalinists in Alcove 2, who vastly outnumbered them.
…
From both Steinfels and Heilbrunn, we learn that neoconservatism was the final stop of an ideological journey for a group of New York intellectuals, typically the children of Jewish immigrants, that began during the early 1940s in Alcove 1 of the cafeteria at City College. Alcove 1 was the gathering place for a group of brilliant young Trotskyists that included Irving Kristol, Seymour Martin Lipset, Nathan Glazer and Melvin Lasky. Along with Irving Howe, who would later break with Trotskyism but not with the left, and Daniel Bell, who never accepted Marxist orthodoxies in any form, the Alcove 1 Trotskyists waged intellectual battle with the Stalinists in Alcove 2, who vastly outnumbered them.
…
Coaxed by a diverse group of thinkers that included Sidney Hook, Reinhold Niebuhr and Samuel M. Levitas, known as Sol, the veterans of Alcove 1 eventually drifted away from Trotskyism, becoming stalwarts of the anti-Communist left, where they were joined by Norman Podhoretz, then a young literary scholar. With the advent of the cold war, the proto-neocons pushed for a hard line against the Soviet Union, sometimes harder than that of anti-Communist liberals like Arthur Schlesinger Jr. and George F. Kennan; few if any of them expressed concern when they discovered that Encounter, a magazine that Irving Kristol co-founded in 1952, was secretly underwritten by the Central Intelligence Agency. The student radicalism of the late 1960s disillusioned proto-neocons about the left; George McGovern’s landslide defeat in 1972 disillusioned many of them about mainstream liberalism and the Democratic Party; and after Ronald Reagan entered the White House in 1981, a number of them stopped resisting the “conservative” label, joined the Republican Party and began to exercise power.
2 – The Premature Jewish Neoconservatives
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
For poor, young Jewish intellectuals in New York in the 1930s, City College was where the action was. In dingy, horseshoe-shaped alcoves lining the college lunchroom, the students spent hour after hour in ideological debate that was often more spirited and stimulating than the classroom lectures.
There were separate alcoves for Catholics, Zionists, and Orthodox Jews, but the pro-Stalinist and anti-Stalinist radicals made the most noise and commanded the most attention. The Stalinists in Alcove Two outnumbered the other factions and controlled the student newspaper, which defended the Moscow trials in editorials. They had close to fifty allies among City College’s left-leaning faculty, and, Irving Howe remembered, one in their group, Julius Rosenberg, would later be executed along with his wife, Ethel, for conspiring to steal America’s atomic secrets.
The group in Alcove One was a mixed bag. Although they were all pretty radical in their college days, many would later make their names as prominent neoconservatives. They were united in their opposition to the Soviet dictator and often sought to provoke his backers (who were not permitted to speak to them) in Alcove Two. On other political issues, however, they disagreed with one another as often as not. For example, while Howe and Irving Kristol backed the revolutionist Leon Trotsky, who broke away from Stalin and was later murdered in Mexico, Nathan Glazer and Daniel Bell were anti-Trotskyites.
Mr. Ignatieff reviews Mr Pankaj Mishra’s latest book ‘Age of Anger: A History of the Present’. Some quotations from this review reflects both Mr. Ignatieff’s elite western prejudices and his status as apologist, in fact as agent for Western Imperialism/Capitalism.
The reader might just make the connection between the practice of ‘Responsibility to Protect’ (R2P) of the acolytes of Isaiah Berlin , like Mr Ignatieff and Samantha Power and their natural political allies the perpetually bellicose Neo-Conservatives: the one invades other countries in the name of ‘Human Rights’ the other in the name of American hegemony.
‘There’s a lot of anger in this age of ours, but not all anger is the same and not all anger has equal justification. To describe terrorism as an act of anger, for example, may seem to imply that it has a justifying cause. In lumping together the anger of workers left high and dry by plant shutdowns, young people unable to find a secure job, and jihadi killers, Mishra fails to distinguish an anger that results in indiscriminate slaughter and has no justification whatever.’
The collapse of the Neo-Liberal Dispensation in the ‘West’ in 2008 and the subsequent economic privation of the working classes, while the elites continue to flourish has eluded the attention of Mr.Ignatieff. The Occupy Wall Street movement, although crushed by Mayor Bloomberg, in New York City, captured the debate with its telling descriptor of 1% vs. 99%: the plutocrats were rhetorically routed by the Great Unwashed. Yet the myth of the Self-Correcting Market has yet to manifest itself. The barista with a Masters or PhD has reached the commonplace. Mr.Ignatieff doesn’t seem to understand that those ‘jihadi killers’ are a manifestation against American Imperialism and its allies, Islamic autocracies. On the question of justification for anger Mr. Ignatieff misses the point, for ideological reasons.
Mishra doesn’t bother with such distinctions, it seems, because he sympathizes with the anger of jihadists and believes it has some justification. At one point, for example, he says of the ISIS terrorists that they have “aimed at exterminating a world of soul-killing mediocrity, cowardice, opportunism and immoral deal-making.” Never, so far as I know, has a free and freedom-loving intellectual handed a gang of killers such a lofty worldview. Mishra would not justify terrorist acts—he would recoil at the very idea—yet in seeing its perpetrators as holy warriors against “modernity” he justifies their arguments.
Mr. Ignatieff then attempts to shame, to defame Mishra as a fellow traveler of ISIS with this fragment: “aimed at exterminating a world of soul-killing mediocrity, cowardice, opportunism and immoral deal-making.” the jihadis are anti-imperial, anti-Neo-Liberal, anti-American, in a world where Afghanistan and Iraq are still the subject to American invasion, occupation, warfare. With the Drone War waged at the whim of America and its ‘allies’, its dwindling ‘Coalition Partners’. The Syrian debacle is still evolving. Yet the rage of the ever expanding, ever morphing Islamic Fundamentalism- the anger of the invaded and occupied, and their sisters and brothers, viewing the carnage from distances thought to be unimaginable to Mr. Ignatieff, simply confirms the failure to win ‘hearts and minds’. The ever expanding American remit of ‘The War on Terror’ is a failure that continues to make more enemies than friends. This state of Perpetual war, only confirms the WASP paranoia of American National Security State operative Samuel P. Huntington, whose Vietnam crime still manifests itself in birth defects caused by the indiscriminate use of Agent Orange. Compare this to the use of depleted uranium and white phosphorous in Iraq.
For some insights into Mr. Ignatieff ‘s particular brand of Liberal Moralizing, the reader can review his May 2, 2004 essay in the New York Times Magazine titled ‘Lesser Evils’. It offers some insight on the very questions asked by Mr. Ignatieff of Mr.Mishra:
‘But thinking about lesser evils is unavoidable. Sticking too firmly to the rule of law simply allows terrorists too much leeway to exploit our freedoms. Abandoning the rule of law altogether betrays our most valued institutions. To defeat evil, we may have to traffic in evils: indefinite detention of suspects, coercive interrogations, targeted assassinations, even pre-emptive war. These are evils because each strays from national and international law and because they kill people or deprive them of freedom without due process. They can be justified only because they prevent the greater evil. The question is not whether we should be trafficking in lesser evils but whether we can keep lesser evils under the control of free institutions. If we can’t, any victories we gain in the war on terror will be Pyrrhic ones.’
…
‘They were at war with us, and we convinced ourselves that we were not at war with them. Post-Church, we may have betrayed a fatal preference for clean hands in a dark world of terror in which only dirty hands can get the job done.
But dirty hands need not be lawless.’
Also for some insights into the ‘Responsibility to Protect'(R2P) construct see this essay by Sarah de Geest – Research Assistant for the Human Security Center, in her essay titled ‘Russian Intervention in Ukraine: R2P Limits and reclaiming the Concept and Narrative’. In her essay Ms. de Geest describes and quotes from Mr. Ignatieff’s position on Ukraine:
Michael Ignatieff is one of the scholars that helped articulate the R2P principle at the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS) in 2001[5]. Later, in a 2014 address at Chatham House, he touched upon the different ways[6] in which Mr. Putin has mangled R2P’s imminent (and not so imminent) purposes:
Who do we protect: we should protect everyone, not just ethnic Russians or citizens who identify themselves as Russian. For example, this protection should have extended to the victims of February 18th in Kiev where 25 demonstrators died and more than a thousand were wounded in the violent clashes with the police[7],
The threat itself: it is pertinent that the threat embodies serious mental and bodily harm, for example ethnic massacre and genocide. In Ukraine there was no known threat that amounted to this “just cause threshold”[8],
How do we protect: What are the limits that are both legally and practically implied? Should unilateral action be allowed? Should Russia be allowed to essentially lead Crimea on a fast track unilateral secession?
Given Mr. Ignatieff ‘s position on ‘dirty hands’ and its servant ‘lawfulness’ in his May 2, 2004 essay in the New York Times Magazine titled ‘Lesser Evils’, he manages to echo the legal pasticheur John Yoo. Given the moral/rhetorical intervention and his R2P stance on Ukraine, the glaringly obvious question arises : what is the difference between the R2P Interventionist and the Neo-Conservative’s unslakable bellicosity? Is it simply a question of the rationalization used, to invade and subjugate, or simply to use the cudgel of power, to blackmail these lesser beings into submission, to the political will of a ruthless Empire? Yet this Empire can’t seem to win any of it’s Wars of Choice!
Notice that Mr. Ignatieff’s essay appears in the New York Review of Books, the ideological center of the ‘Cult of Isaiah Berlin,‘ and its creature the R2P Public Intellectual. And that Mr. Mishra is a regular contributor to this publication, indeed, he is a favorite. Yet he is now guilty of deviationism, and the good grey Mr.Ignatieff is assigned the task of publicly shaming this political nonconformist. Yet Mr. Ignatieff’s book chat is just the most pedestrian kind of literary journalism, it doesn’t even qualify as polemic, just an unimaginative political scolding by a literary/political hack.
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