I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: if you aren’t already reading feministe, you should. And if you’re reading this blog already, then you may be interested to know that while Ms. Lauren takes some much-deserved rest from blogging, I am once again filling in as a guest writer at feministe. (I did a couple of posts’ worth of this back in June.) Enjoy:

• feministe 2005/02/02: Bombing for Choice, which is a lot like GT 2005/02/01: Bombing for Choice, except somewhere else.
• feministe 2005/02/02: Free Rodi Alvarado and all political prisoners!, an update on the bureaucratic logjam at La Migra that is holding a battered woman in legal limbo while it dithers over whether or not to send her back to an almost-certain death
• feministe 2005/02/05: Trans In Iran, highlighting a fascinating story from the Los Angeles Times on the growing acceptance of transgender people in Iran, of all places, and how a fatwa of Ayatollah Khomeini, of all people, spurred it on. Some pointed questions follow from me and I hope some discussion ensues.

Mythistory Monday is on a holiday break this week. Since today is the observation of Martin Luther King Jr. Day, I’m inclined to take a bit of a break from knocking knuckle-headed distortions of history for a bit of a celebration of something that most of us know.

There is a lot to complain about in the way that Dr. King’s life and career have been handled–both in the uncritical hagiography that has been made of his life and also in the way that that same process has obliterated so much of his real thought and political commitments from living memory that even hard Rightists who spent their college years fighting the civil rights movement tooth and nail, or happily working alongside those who did, can now come back and claim to be speaking in Dr. King’s voice by piously intoning a few words snipped from a single sentence out of his most famous speech. There’s a lot to complain about, but for it all, there’s a hell of a lot to celebrate too. Underneath the television specials and the holy martyr imagery, there is a real man, who has been put on a pedestal, who has been abused, who has been ignored at the same time as he is piously invoked, but who, after it all, cannot be struck out of our memory and who remains a testament, in living memory, to what is possible for this world.

That’s what I want to remember today: the living Dr. King. No holy martyr, but a real person, a Black preacher who found himself in the midst of the most profound struggles of American history. In spite of his work with the Montgomery Improvement Association and in forming the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, he was always more of an agitator than an organizer–a maker of speeches and a preacher of sermons who often showed up late in the game for campaigns that others had started. He was frankly prone to showboating at times, and frustrating on more than one occasion for the men and especially the women who did the long, hard, thankless work of organizing in groups such as SCLC and SNCC–from Rosa Parks to Ella Baker to Bob Moses to Fannie Lou Hamer. And yet also an indispensible man–not just as a symbol, but as a thinker and an actor and a moral guide, who gave long years of his life to the struggle to end Jim Crow, who remained, through that struggle’s greatest triumphs and its darkest hours, in the face of agonizing doubt and the ugliest sorts of violence, to a new kind of nonviolent politics on behalf of freedom and compassion for all. We must avoid the lazy politics of invoking Dr. King’s name as a way to deride just revolutions or calls for forceful self-defense; we have to be careful about how we universalize the lessons of the Freedom Movement; but I don’t think anyone can reasonably deny that the nonviolent politics that Dr. King and Ella Baker and others developed, drawing from and expanding on the past examples of Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Sanger, and Mohandas Gandhi, is a force that has changed the world–and changed it for the better.

• Jason at Negro, Please links to his MLK Day post from last year, noting, sadly, that nothing relevant has really changed since he wrote it.

• David Grenier and Jeffrey Tucker remind us of Dr. King’s statement against the war on Vietnam:

  Even when pressed by the demands of inner truth, men do not easily assume the task of opposing their government’s policy, especially in time of war. Nor does the human spirit move without great difficulty against all the apathy of conformist thought within one’s own bosom and in the surrounding world. Moreover when the issues at hand seem as perplexed as they often do in the case of this dreadful conflict we are always on the verge of being mesmerized by uncertainty; but we must move on. …

  As I have walked among the desperate, rejected and angry young men I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems. I have tried to offer them my deepest compassion while maintaining my conviction that social change comes most meaningfully through nonviolent action. But they asked — and rightly so — what about Vietnam? They asked if our own nation wasn’t using massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted. Their questions hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today — my own government. For the sake of those boys, for the sake of this government, for the sake of hundreds of thousands trembling under our violence, I cannot be silent….

  These are the times for real choices and not false ones. We are at the moment when our lives must be placed on the line if our nation is to survive its own folly. Every man of humane convictions must decide on the protest that best suits his convictions, but we must all protest….

  — Beyond Vietnam, 4 April 1967, New York City

• Rox Populi offers an MLK Random Reader, including:

  For nonviolence not only calls upon its adherents to avoid external physical violence, but it calls upon them to avoid internal violence of spirit. It calls on them to engage in that something called love. And I know it is difficult sometimes. When I say love at this point, I’m not talking about an affectionate emotion. It’s nonsense to urge people, oppressed people, to love their oppressors in an affectionate sense. I’m talking about something much deeper. I’m talking about a sort of understanding, creative, redemptive goodwill for all men.

  — Address at the Freedom Rally in Cobo Hall, 23 June 1963

• Amazonfemme gives us this from Dr. King’s acceptance speech for the Nobel Peace Prize:

  I accept this award today with an abiding faith in America and an audacious faith in the future of mankind. I refuse to accept despair as the final response to the ambiguities of history. I refuse to accept the idea that the “isness” of man’s present nature makes him morally incapable of reaching up for the eternal “oughtness” that forever confronts him.

  I refuse to accept the idea that man is mere flotsom and jetsom in the river of life unable to influence the unfolding events which surround him. I refuse to accept the view that mankind is so tragically bound to the starless midnight of racism and war that the bright daybreak of peace and brotherhood can never become a reality.

  I refuse to accept the cynical notion that nation after nation must spiral down a militaristic stairway into the hell of thermonuclear destruction. I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word in reality. This is why right temporarily defeated is stronger than evil triumphant.

  I believe that even amid today’s motor bursts and whining bullets, there is still hope for a brighter tomorrow. I believe that wounded justice, lying prostrate on the blood-flowing streets of our nations, can be lifted from this dust of shame to reign supreme among the children of men.

  I have the audacity to believe that peoples everywhere can have three meals a day for their bodies, education and culture for their minds, and dignity, equality and freedom for their spirits. I believe that what self-centered men have torn down, men other-centered can build up. I still believe that one day mankind will bow before the altars of God and be crowned triumphant over war and bloodshed, and nonviolent redemptive goodwill will proclaim the rule of the land.

  “And the lion and the lamb shall lie down together and every man shall sit under his own vine and fig tree and none shall be afraid.”

  I still believe that we shall overcome.

  — Acceptance Speech at Nobel Peace Prize Ceremony, 10 December 1964

• I close with two of my favorite quotes. Only one of them is by Martin Luther King Jr.; the other is about him:

  It is time to reorder our national priorities. All those who now speak of good will and who praise the work of such groups as the President’s Commission now have the gravest responsibility to stand up and act for the social changes that are necessary to conquer racism in America. If we as a society fail, I fear that we will learn that very shortly that racism is a sickness unto death.

  — Martin Luther King Jr., 4 March 1968

  And, on the subject of King’s real radicalism, and the role of radicalism generally in the struggle for justice, Malcolm X has this to say:

  I’ll say nothing against him. At one time the whites in the United States called him a racialist, and extremist, and a Communist. Then the Black Muslims came along and the whites thanked the Lord for Martin Luther King.

  — Malcolm X

• That first quote, by the way, I lifted from a remix of Dr. King’s speeches that I couldn’t possibly do justice to with a description. You really should listen to it.

All of these things happened while my parents were in college, not 40 years ago. Think of what Dr. King’s efforts, and the efforts of the countless heros–those whose names we know and the thousands of ordinary people who haven’t made it into the books or the teevee specials–have meant for the world in those few years. Yes, we are living through dark days, but think of what it was like just within living memory of today. As Dr. King put it: Let us remember that the arc of the Universe is long, but it bends toward justice.

I hope so. Happy Martin Luther King Jr. Day.

For the past few decades, libertarian and Leftist critics of U.S. foreign policy alike — from Noam Chomsky to Murray Rothbard — have put a lot of work into documenting and exploring the subtle mechanisms of control that the American government has developed to ensure that our supposedly free press is still reliably at the service of U.S. government policy. What their efforts have have revealed is an interlocking system of interests and manipulation, which manages to effectively carry out the aims of an extensive propaganda system without taking on the formal structure of one.

But it looks like here, as in so many other places, the Bush administration is committed to bolder leadership than its predecessors:

• New York Times (2005-01-7): Bush’s Drug Videos Broke Law, Accountability Office Decides

  WASHINGTON, Jan. 6 – The Government Accountability Office, an investigative arm of Congress, said on Thursday that the Bush administration violated federal law by producing and distributing television news segments about the effects of drug use among young people.

  The accountability office said the videos constitute covert propaganda because the government was not identified as the source of the materials, which were distributed by the Office of National Drug Control Policy. They were broadcast by nearly 300 television stations and reached 22 million households, the office said.

  …

  In May the office found that the Bush administration had violated the same law by producing television news segments that portrayed the new Medicare law as a boon to the elderly.

  The accountability office was not critical of the content of the video segments from the White House drug office, but found that the format — a made-for-television “story package” — violated the prohibition on using taxpayer money for propaganda.

  …

  A spokesman for the drug policy office said the review’s conclusions made a mountain out of a molehill.

• USA Today 2005-01-07: Education dept. paid commentator to promote law:

  Seeking to build support among black families for its education reform law, the Bush administration paid a prominent black pundit $240,000 to promote the law on his nationally syndicated television show and to urge other black journalists to do the same.

  The campaign, part of an effort to promote No Child Left Behind (NCLB), required commentator Armstrong Williams to regularly comment on NCLB during the course of his broadcasts, and to interview Education Secretary Rod Paige for TV and radio spots that aired during the show in 2004.

  …

  Williams said he does not recall disclosing the contract to audiences on the air but told colleagues about it when urging them to promote NCLB.

  …

  The contract may be illegal because Congress has prohibited propaganda, or any sort of lobbying for programs funded by the government, said Melanie Sloan of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. And it’s propaganda.

  The Nation Capitol Games (2005-01-10): Armstrong Williams: I Am Not Alone:

  And then Williams violated a PR rule: he got off-point. This happens all the time, he told me. There are others. Really? I said. Other conservative commentators accept money from the Bush administration? I asked Williams for names. I’m not going to defend myself that way, he said. The issue right now, he explained, was his own mistake. Well, I said, what if I call you up in a few weeks, after this blows over, and then ask you? No, he said.

  The Blue Lemur (2005-01-12): Columnist Bush paid to promote No Child law still on Bush fellowship board (via Wendy McElroy @ Liberty & Power 2005-01-12):

  Armstrong Williams, the columnist paid $240,000 by the Bush Administration to surreptitiously promote Bush&’s No Child Left Behind Law remained listed on the White House website as a member of the President’s Commission on White House Fellowships as late as Wednesday, RAW STORY has learned.

  The discovery, first reported by D.C. Inside Scoop, suggests that the White House has declined to sever ties with the discredited pundit. Williams was terminated by the company syndicating his column, Tribune Media Services, last Friday.

• Financial Times (2005-01-11): Allawi group slips cash to journalists (via Strike the Root 2005-01-11):

  The electoral group headed by Iyad Allawi, [U.S.-installed] interim Iraqi prime minister, yesterday handed cash to journalists to try to ensure coverage of its press conferences, in a throwback to Ba’athist-era patronage ahead of parliamentary elections on January 30.

  After a meeting held by Mr Allawi’s campaign alliance in west Baghdad, reporters, most from the Arabic-language press, were invited upstairs where each was offered a gift of a $100 bill in an envelope.

  Many of the journalists accepted the cash, equal to about half the starting monthly salary for a reporter at an Iraqi news-paper, and one jokingly recalled how the former regime of Saddam Hussein had also lavished perks on favoured reporters.

Welcome to the mainstream news media for the new millennium, in which Noam Chomsky has become obsolete: they aren’t even trying to hide it anymore. Interlocking interests and subtle mechanisms of control aren’t even the point anymore; the Bush machine and its clients now pass out government-manufactured news segments and lucrative tax-funded bribes for useful political commentators. The Bush League may not be making government smaller, but they are making radical critique simpler–may God help us all.

On 6 December 1989, fifteen years ago today, Marc Lepine murdered 14 women at Montreal’s Ecole Polytechnique. He killed them because they were women; Lepine told men to leave and shot at women as he screamed I hate feminists.

6 December is a day of remembrance for the women who were killed. They were:

• Geneviève Bergeron, aged 21
• Hélène Colgan, 23
• Nathalie Croteau, 23
• Barbara Daigneault, 22
• Anne-Marie Edward, 21
• Maud Haviernick, 29
• Barbara Maria Klucznik, 31
• Maryse Leclair, 23
• Annie St.-Arneault, 23
• Michèle Richard, 21
• Maryse Laganière, 25
• Anne-Marie Lemay, 22
• Sonia Pelletier, 28; and
• Annie Turcotte, aged 21

The Montreal Massacre was horrifying and shocking. But we also have to remember that it’s less unusual than we all think. Yes, it’s a terrible freak event that some madman massacred women he had never even met because of his sociopathic hatred. But every day women are raped, beaten, and killed by men–and it’s usually not by strangers, but by men they know and thought they could trust. They are attacked just because they are women–because the men who assault them believe that they have the right to control women’s lives and their sexual choices, and to hurt them or force them if they don’t agree. By conservative estimates, one out of every four women is raped or beaten by an intimate partner sometime in her life. Take a moment to think about that. How much it is. What it means for the women who are attacked. What it means for all women who live in the shadow of that threat.

To be serious about creating a free and just society, we have to be serious about ending violence against women. As Andrea Dworkin puts it (speaking about sexual assault), I want to see this men’s movement make a commitment to ending rape because that is the only meaningful commitment to equality. It is astonishing that in all our worlds of feminism and antisexism we never talk seriously about ending rape. Ending it. Stopping it. No more. No more rape. In the back of our minds, are we holding on to its inevitability as the last preserve of the biological? Do we think that it is always going to exist no matter what we do? All of our political actions are lies if we don’t make a commitment to ending the practice of rape. This commitment has to be political. It has to be serious. It has to be systematic. It has to be public. It can’t be self-indulgent. And the same is true of every form of everyday gender terrorism–stalking, battery, rape, murder. How could we face Geneviève Bergeron, Hélène Colgan, Nathalie Croteau, Barbara Daigneault, Anne-Marie Edward, Maud Haviernick, Barbara Maria Klucznik, Maryse Leclair, Annie St.-Arneault, Michèle Richard, Maryse Laganière, Anne-Marie Lemay, Sonia Pelletier, and Annie Turcotte, and tell them we did anything less?

Take some time to keep the 14 women who were killed in the Montreal massacre in your thoughts. If you have the money to give, make a contribution to your local battered women’s shelter. And, as Jennifer Barrigar writes:

Every year I make a point of explaining that I’m pointing the finger at a sexist patriarchal misogynist society rather than individual men. This year I choose not to do that. The time for assigning blame is so far in the past (if indeed there ever was such a time), and that conversation takes us nowhere. This is the time for action, for change. Remember Parliament’s 1991 enactment of the National Day of Remembrance and Action on Violence Against Women — the glorious moment when every single womyn in the House stood together and claimed this Day of Remembrance. Remember what we can and do accomplish — all of us — when we work together. It is time to demand change, and to act on that demand. Let’s break the cycle of violence, and let’s do it now.

Remember. Mourn. Act.

(Links thanks to the lovely folks at No Treason.)

From the paleo-deviationists to the neo-deviationists, let’s now consider the recent fuss over the latest incisive moral theorizing from Humane Studies wunderkind Vlad Dracula:

If boiling people alive best served the interests of the Wallachian people, then it would neither be moral or immoral.

Since Vlad has since complained that the infidel are distorting what he said (and playing dirty pool, too!), let’s make sure we have it all in its proper context. Vlad has argued at length in several places that the notion of universal human rights is ultimately nonsensical: rights are, on his account, political artifacts, not natural facts, and so claims of rights only make sense within the context of a constitutional order. He argues, further, that because rights are not natural facts, the citizens of one country have no objectively binding obligations to respect the lives, dignity, or autonomy of people in other countries. He cavils that gratuitous cruelty might not be justified; but that this is merely a matter of a sentimental, not a normative should. One of his infidel challengers had the temerity to point out:

His position on the moral significance of foreigners is also incoherent. If they do not have rights, why should we treat them with decency? Can’t we just smash their heads in with hammers, or nuke them, or boil them alive? What is a sentimental should and where does it come from?

To which Vlad replied:

If boiling people alive best served the interests of the Wallachian people, then it would neither be moral or immoral. It would just be grotesque, or indecent, or harsh. But since it doesn’t have any strategic value, we don’t boil people or nuke them. A sentimental should means that most of us find such behavior unsavory, even barbaric–but it doesn’t match up against any grand moral standard etched into a Libertarian Rosetta Stone. To momentarily digress into pop-philosophical obscurantism, it’s intersubjectively wrong, not objectively wrong (i.e. politically circumscribed).

Prince Dracula is well within his prerogatives to demand some direct approach to addressing this more nuanced perspective. So let’s see what we can do by way of a logical response to the argument.

1. If you can’t make significant rights claims independently of a constitutional order, then there is nothing wrong with boiling innocent foreigners alive to serve Wallachian interests, as long as you don’t mind it.

2. But there is something wrong with boiling innocent foreigners alive to serve Wallachian interests, even if you don’t mind it.

3. Therefore, you can make significant rights claims independently of a constitutional order. (M.T. 1, 2)

Thus, Prince Dracula is wrong, and Bargainer and Logan are right. Q.E.D.

You might claim that I have dealt with the Impaler’s (subtle! nuanced!) position in far too short a space; you might even go so far as to claim that I have begged the question against him. No, I haven’t. In fact, he has begged the question. Just as there are no non-question-begging arguments for terrorism, there are no non-question-begging arguments for the permissibility of boiling innocent foreigners alive in order to further Wallachian interests. If Vlad’s argument is valid, the most that he has shown is that his premises are, in fact, incompatible with points of human decency far more clear than any murky Hobbesian musing about the contextuality of rights claims or an alleged state of nature–and having shown that the Hobbesian argument is incompatible with such a plainly obvious point of human decency is as good a reason as any to deny at least one of the Hobbesian premises. It’s certainly not any reason whatever to dismiss human decency. (For more on the nature of proof and the issue of question-begging, see footnote 2 on my argument against Honderich.)

That it is wrong to boil innocent foreigners alive, and that it is wrong because you are doing something wrong to them is blindingly obvious. In fact, it’s so blindingly obvious that even Dracul admits that it is true; his problem is that he cannot live up to his own moral decency intellectually, and so he invents the weasel category of a sentimental should in order to sidestep the dilemma. (It’s worth pausing to note that this is exactly the same move that is made by some who claim that we have no direct moral obligations towards animals–in order to weasel around the fact that they know perfectly well that it’s wrong to inflict gratuitous cruelty on animals. That Vlad’s argument uses the same tactic towards human beings from outside of your own state is telling. And not in a good way.)

The problem here is trying to make sense of the notion of a sentimental should—why is it that we feel horror at contemplating pitching innocent foreigners into the cauldron and boiling them alive? It seems that the sentiment of horror is either a rational or an irrational reaction to the situation. If it’s an irrational response to the situation, then clearly there are no grounds at all to pay the sentiment any heed in making decisions about what we ought or ought not to do; an irrational feeling as such cannot weigh against a course of action. If it’s a rational response to the situation, on the other hand, what would it be that makes it an apt response to the situation? That the deed being done is in fact a ghastly thing to do to another human being no matter what his or her nationality? But Vlad cannot take this stance and still hold onto his Hobbesian argument.

Is the feeling of gut-wrenching horror justified by something else? If so, what? Rule-utilitarians might claim that it’s justified by the fact that cultivating feelings of horror at such human suffering is conducive to respecting the rights of those who Vlad would allow to have legitimate rights-claims (fellow citizens and parties to relevant treaties). But that would make the feeling of horror at boiling foreigners alive into nothing more than a projective error–useful, perhaps, for people who can’t compartmentalize their feelings for foreigners from their feelings for fellow citizens; but the emotional constitution that would be most reflective of the actual state of affairs would be one that sharply distinguishes between the real obligations not to torture fellow citizens and the free-for-all that is (according to Vlad’s argument) permitted against aliens.

Or you might, instead, claim that, because we’re talking about sentimental attachments here, questions of justification by some state of affairs outside of the sentiment don’t even make sense–it’s just part of being a human being that a horror at torturing other human beings is part of your emotional frame. But this won’t do, either: the sentimental should that Vlad wants to invoke is supposed to be something that enters into our reasons for action; that is, it is something that forms a part of why we do or do not act in a particular way. Emotions are not bludgeons that blindly knock us in one direction or another; they express reasons for or against actions, and as such have to stand or fall as reasons for action, justified or unjustified by how accurately they express the real fact of the matter.

The fact of the matter is that when you throw someone into the cauldron and fill it with boiling water while they scream in agony until they die, you have done something wrong–even if they are not subject to the same state as you are, and even if the state you are subject to is in a state of war with the state that they are subject to. You have done something wrong because you did something wrong to the poor fellow you just boiled alive. If Vlad thinks he has an argument against that, let him bring it out–but he shouldn’t be surprised when it receives nothing more than a certain gesture of the hands.

Update 2004-12-05: Sorry, I got things mixed up a bit. Turns out this was actually about Max Borders writing about the interests of the American people, not about Vlad the Impaler and the Wallachian people. My bad.