We had our Ideas Cafe discussion this evening on whether assassination missions can be justified.
We started off with some definitions with Ted's help. Assassinations always have a target, usually a politically prominent person. It is different from a terrorist act where the purpose is to kill and create fear with no particular target person in mind.
Richard started off with the premise that killing another human for any reason cannot be justified. It therefore follows that a planned and premeditated killing by assassination is definitely not justified.
Mano said that the rule of law must be followed. Someone cannot just decided that another person should be assassinated and go do it. The act itself needs to be judged by laws applicable or at least in the international court.
Ted felt that assassinations can be justified in extreme cases but all other avenues must be explored first. If the Iranian president is to be a target of assassination because of his claims of using nuclear weapons on Israel, then at least we should bomb the nuclear facilities first.
Shula then pointed out that in bombing the nuclear facilities, some other unnamed person (and likely more than one) will likely die as a result. Which means that these people are being hurt because they are nameless just so that the real source of the issue, the president, is spared.
Dan pose the example that if he is the dictator of country and he makes his own rules that allows him to mistreat his people, then there is not much point to judge him by the law of his country. The United Nations as a rule are reluctant to get into the internal affairs of countries.
There is also the issue of the international court not being participated by every country. Is it a truly international court if important countries like the US do not agree to be part of it? Why should anyone be subjected to a court system that he had not agreed to be part of?
Rafi said that we cannot rule out killing as a deterrent. If we unilaterally declare that we will not kill for any reason because we respect human life while our enemies have no hesitation in killing us, then we put ourselves in a defenseless position against them.
Mano mentioned the example of the anti abortionist who justify to himself that he needs to assassinate the doctor doing abortions in order to save the many unborn fetuses. This thinking is no different than the utilitarian or conventionalist argument of using assassination as a way of minimizing future damage to innocent victims.
Mano also feels that most of us are law abiding citizens and he theorizes that assassinations likely involve the two extreme segments of society: One segment includes those in the bottom, desperate and with nothing left to lose. The other segment is the ones in the very top, who thinks that they are either above the law or that they know better than the rest of the "little people".
This discussion reminded me of the discussion on spies and undercover policeman where they are by definition, lairs because they are hiding their true identity. They have to do it in order to deal with segments of society or foreign governments, both of which are not following the rules of the country.
With assassinations, we run into problems of which law is in force, dictators that make their own laws and abuse their citizens, other cultural or ethnic value and believe systems. There are no stardard agreed upon frame of reference to judge. So we revert back to might is right as a last resort to protect ourselves against others who are used to operating that way.
We like to be in civilized society with rules to ensure stability. However, the real world outside is anarchy if we cannot get agreement to go by the same set of rules.
Messy but that is the way it is.
Hi there, I am very sorry I did not come last week. Due to another minor dental operation, I still can not speak very well. I do hope I have not yet been ostracized. Here is, a fairly generalized comment on last week’s discussion, “can assignation missions be justified”:
ReplyDeleteHappy Families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way -
The old adage still holds that politicians, along their assassinators, are all the same. To justify a specificity of one particular over another is a naturalistic and moralistic fallacy; the details of structure or abstraction are ignored in the belief that what is necessarily extendable or instantiatable is necessarily good, bad, or true, false. Like Einstein’s sayings for geometry, “by the word “true” we are eventually in the habit of designating always the correspondence with a “real” object”, rather, the “logical connections of these ideas among themselves” should be focus. What is “true” between politicians and assassinators is, simply that, some survive longer than others. Similar to the Provisional Irish Republican Army’s (IRA) comments after the failed Brighton hotel bombing of Margaret Thatcher: "Today we were unlucky, but remember we only have to be lucky once. You will have to be lucky always”; the question lies on their failure, and better yet, what motivates them to win.
As man is, God once was; as God is, man may be -
ReplyDeleteWe might begin in the publication date, 1912, of Emile Durkheim’s Les formes élémentaires de la vie religieuse: The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life and the sui generis introduction of a ‘collective effervescence’; the energy and ecstasy participated by ceremonious or ritualistic group solidarity. This co-present delirium, with a transcendental, extra-personal consciousness often impresses as such the intervention of an omnipresent, extra-ordinary ‘sacred dimension’. To become ‘aware’, individuals and society will search for a perceptus, noetic value through projecting such a collective experience onto external embodiments, known as the ‘représentations collectives’. Thus, an objectified network emerges as a ‘symbolic immanence’ of this collective experience, and souvenired as a ‘memento materia’ through certain degrees of ‘sacrality’. As thought and corporeality become diversified, however, representations of the collective effervescence is attenuated to that of the psyche and human person, as they remain the only common qualia and element, that quantifies what Durkheim termed the ‘cult of the individual’. When government and unions fail to preserve the sacred institutions of such moral individualism (e.g. Déclaration des droits de l'homme et du citoyen), an anomie can emerge in denial of the original diversifications and favour fundamentalism. However, what Nietzsche termed a believer of ‘der Wille zur Macht’, when ‘diseased’ with such fragmentation, demands hypertrophic fanaticism and a ‘will to command’. Retreating to the lower, selfish sentiments of the ‘Homo Duplex’, freeloading of such a believer’s ‘sacred selfhoods’ is rewarded, though they are no longer part of altruistic integration. Trapped in a state of permanent liminality (or a struggle of liminoidity), believers must defend their ‘personal exonumias’ from uncertainty through ‘die Entzauberung der Welt’ – the disenchantment of the world; for an ‘agnostic reflex’ serves to dissonate their insatiable, instable primordial appetite for unambiguous order and communita, instead, establishing secular hierarchies to regiment and proliferate their ‘inner elohim’. Functionalism of these bureaucratic authorities behave in constant competitive and complementary schismogenesis; as emphasized in Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and Alastair Smith’s The Dictator’s Handbook, can be described in three political dimensions, each dependent, suppressing, and in rivalry against the other: the nominal selectorate – the interchangeables, the real selectorate – the influentials, and the winning coalition – the essentials, with the incumbent as chief and a disenfranchised for replacements. Modern authoritarian regimes, terrorist organizations, and even democracies summarize this characterology.
Every man for himself, and the devil take the hindmost –
ReplyDeleteIt should be differentiated that “pure charisma” – the idyllic spiritual divinity sacrosanct to oneself or a leader, is not reducible to a ‘das ding an sich’ – a thing in itself, nor deconstructionist ideals of a ‘play of power’; as Ferdinand de Saussure’s semiosis, there is a reflexivity between the signifié and signifiant, and thereby being ‘denotata’, it should accompany a psychoanalytical ‘designata’. When ‘celebration’ of such an “anthropomorphic anima mundi” is indoctrinated into overt reification through induced hyper-suggestibility and reliance on heuristic qualities, it satisfies a feedback loop of cognitive ‘divine intuition’ that is chronically void of reflective judgement. Such operants, often rampant in politics, acts stimulus to anti-social attitudes, sadomasochistic Messiah/God or Martyr/Victim complexes (though not official in the DSM-IV), and convictions of the individual in their teleology is further ensconced in office. When threats are translated to such parochial traits, narcissistic wounding and existential insecurity may be incentivized, galvanizing self or mutual aggrandizing agencies of reward and costly punishment; encouraging self discipline and interest survival, intolerance of logical or context – sensitive interpretation, mundane issues become sacralized, non-compromising and immune to materially consequential injunction and negotiation. Symptoms of such grandiosity can delusion entitlement to parricide, genocide, kleptocracy, neocracy, chicanery, embezzlement, immortality and omnipotence; a general ignorance of public needs and negative externalities in sacrificing employment and destruction of all apparatus to win the game.
If you meet the Buddha, kill the Buddha –
ReplyDeleteAs Carl Jung once said, we all have “complexes” – deep, archetypal constellations of dynamic unrest, the theoria, poiesis, praxis of self -discovery, self-monitoring, self-destruction, the will to meaning in creating ubiquitous, ultimate, universal ‘mandalas’ of our human, habitual, haecceitic modalities; the question is whether we have complexes or they have us. As with R.D Laing’s elaboration on Karl Marx’s ‘mystification’, politics, science and religion alike, continuously experience, substitute and confirm dreams, fantasies, and imagination for ‘authentic’ conflict, memories, and perception; to re-animate ‘sacred imperatives’ – rules to rule by, satisfying our meta-social, meta-physical, and meta-cosmogonic needs. The ‘realities’, emanating from such activities, needs recognition as bona fide phenomena of the individual and society instead of a label as mere illusion; for they represent a relationship that ‘realizes’ a delicate and diverse unification between our state of being and state of expression. Through, the rejection of dominancy and an appreciation of permeability between binary oppositions; the non-dualistic impermanence of the Pāli ‘anicca’ and ‘anātman’ – the acceptance of essencelessness upon the interdependency of all things, and thereby as no thing is singular, every thing is transitory; Nicomachean ethics of liberality, magnificence, and magnanimity - bearing and receiving, like Atlas, the great celestial sphere of life; and an ‘active imagination’ – the willing personification of one’s unconsciousness into conscious realms, we can maieutically transcend our nonchalance from the tabula rasa. This is a ‘spiritual game’ that everyone plays, that determines why dictators or assassinators, albeit beyond most of their awareness, feel they have failed or won; we are no exception, so better start playing well.
[Since this is only a little off topic, I would like to add a rather blasphemous remark on the colloquial ‘political and social sciences’ (you may stone me later). Saying politics and socials is a ‘science’ is similar to what Professor Richard Feynman described as ‘cargo-cult’: “During the war they saw aeroplanes with lots of good materials, and they want the same thing to happen now. So they’ve arranged to make things like runways, to put fires along the sides of the runways, to make a wooden hut for a man to sit in, with two wooden pieces on his head as headphones and bars of bamboo sticking out like antennas – he’s the controller – and they wait for the aeroplanes to land. They’re doing everything right. The form is perfect. It looks exactly the way it looked before. But it doesn’t work. No aeroplanes land.” Certainly, there is a plethora of ‘experiments’, but policy and society are fundamentally an ‘experience’. Family, friends, and collaborators are indeed very ‘useful’, but unless I am strapping some of them to kites to save on hydro bills, it is much easier to remember what Feynman once said (with some paraphrasing): "Physics is like sex: sure, it may give some practical results, but that's not why we do it."]
ReplyDeleteThis week’s topic on the ‘tyranny of choice’ reminded me very closely of a quote from Vicktor Frankl: “Don't aim at success. The more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it. For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side effect of one's personal dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the by-product of one's surrender to a person other than oneself. Happiness must happen, and the same holds for success: you have to let it happen by not caring about it. I want you to listen to what your conscience commands you to do and go on to carry it out to the best of your knowledge. Then you will live to see that in the long-run—in the long-run, I say!—success will follow you precisely because you had forgotten to think about it”; very often we are entranced by the “means” to live, we forget any “meaning” to live for. Daniel Gilbert’s TED presentation on Exploring the Frontiers of Happiness is similar to that of Barry Schwartz’s The Paradox of Choice.
Here is the Link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c-4flnuxNV4
It turns out; we are not only bad at making choices, but equally terrible at judging the value in our choices.
Thank you truly, and I wish everyone a lovely conversation with a jolly good summer break!
Kind Regards,
Sandra
Great words of advice! But I have to say, rules and order can be tyrannical in the "wrong" hands. So solidarity has to be understood to become a basis for a society where assassinations become less necessary, if they at all can be justified? An international court where people are held accountable is lacking and necessary. But enforcement isn't a solution, especially if I look at militarily run countries or Police forces in most countries. Those forces (military or police) deal primarily with the most people that are law abiding, hardly J-Walk folk. Who's assassinating who, and what for? That's a good starting point, but these questions don't seem to be of concerns to the common folk who hardly notice especially when it aint happening on their turf! Makes humans akin to our Ape like relatives, and places tolerance in a whole new realm>
ReplyDelete