From mindjustice.org:

“Under the peculiar conditions of psychological torture, victims, isolated from others, form “emotional ties to their tormentors” that make them responsive to a perverse play in which they are both audience and actor, subject and object—in a script that often leaves them not just disoriented but emotionally and psychologically damaged, in some cases for the rest of their lives. “”(A Question of Torture, 10)

Comment:

Those who believe that only physical aggression is “real” violence; that only physical rape is “real” rape, that only physical property is “real” property, should look through the results of the greatest practical inquiry into the functioning of human beings under coercion – the US government’s research into mind-control – and reconsider.

In Language of Empire (Monthly Review Press, 2005), I devoted a chapter – Theater of Pain –  to this aspect of torture.

…and not libertarians.

[Added: I use the word statist not as a pejorative, but to describe accurately. As readers of this blog know, my goal is to subvert these kind of slogans…

But, historically, the use of the government to redistribute after the fact has been understood as statism.

The classical liberal position is  thus not statist.  It was Mises’ position and Rand’s, but not Rothbard’s, although Rothbard also selectively dropped pure anarcho-capitalism (sic) when it came to fractional banking.

The full anti-state position of the right seems so internally contradictory that in my estimation it returns one to socialism and the left…

Again, I am being descriptive. I don’t demonize the whole left or socialism as such and I distinguish between types of socialism…and communism…and between voluntary communism and state-enforced communism.

Whether that return to socialism was Rothbard’s intention all along is my fear…or suspicion…or unhinged paranoia….]

Bleeding hearts are very nice statists, of course.

Cultured, well-read, and much better to invite over for dinner and trust with your silverware or your sons than your average libertarian.

[Here I am talking about real libertarians, not poseurs working hand-in-hand with the financial elites and backed by intelligence……of which there are so many I’ve stopped looking, unless I trip right over them.]

Unfortunately, never having been at the receiving end of government force, and only indirectly of its largesse, bleeding-hearts exaggerate both government power and government virtue.

Their opponents (the Rothbardians) take the other tack.  They exaggerate the evil. But they too over-rate the power of governments.

Governments are merely machinery.

[I deleted the last few lines of this blog-post because they needed explanation and clarification that I’d prefer not give in this venue.]

O. H. Tarzie at the Rancid Honey-Trap reports on the excruciatingly slow leak-rate of the mother-of-all-leakers:

“1. A writer at the Cryptome site recently estimated that at current rates of disclosure, it will take 26 years for the Guardian to reveal all of Snowden’s documents. That estimate was based on an estimate from Greenwald of 15,000 documents, which we now know to be false. The trove is at minimum five times that size and probably much larger.

As savvy reader Paley Chayd pointed out, Cryptome generously equated the vague Leak Keeper word, ‘document’ with the more precise, ‘page.’ Chayd also noted that in Greenwald’s tirade here recently, he claimed that he and his colleagues had published ‘hundreds’ of documents. According to Cryptome, they have published no more than 300 unique pages, a figure that consolidates everything published in the US, British, Brazilian and German press.

2. When The Guardian introduced Snowden to the world, they stressed the meticulousness with which he chose the documents, and emphasized, offensively really, the extent to which this distinguished him from Chelsea Manning, whose trial had just begun. This emphasis on Snowden’s meticulousness, which was picked up immediately by the mainstream press, certainly suggested a relatively small trove, since large troves can not be meticulously gone through by single, better-than-Manning whistleblowers with limited time.

3. Only four news organizations have unlimited access to any part of what looks like a rather large trove: The Guardian, The Washington Post, The New York Times,  and ProPublica. Greenwald has made his lack of interest in distributing documents to other news organizations quite plain. That means whatever we learn about these documents will come through these organizations, plus whatever Greenwald and his colleague Laura Poitras write in partnership with other news organizations and publishing houses.

4. The New York Times received over 50,000 documents two months ago. They have published one story based on The Snowden Leaks so far. Now is a good time to remember that when The New York Times had custodianship over parts of Cablegate, then editor Bill Keller bragged that he checked with the White House before publishing anything.  Greenwald had some thoughts on this at the time,  which  Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting quoted in this write-up on Keller.  Considering Greenwald’s and The Guardian’s current conduct, and FAIR’s entirely unsurprising, cowardly silence about it, it’s amusingly ironic and instructive.

Now, at last, the tale of the living, growing document trove, as told by various news reports:

The Guardian, June 9, 2013

[Snowden:]
“I carefully evaluated every single document I disclosed to ensure that each was legitimately in the public interest,”

Morning Joe, June 10, 2013

Thomas Roberts: What makes Bradley Manning any different from Edward Snowden . . . because Manning is widely considered to be a traitor and not a whistleblower?

Greenwald: … if you ask [Snowden] what the difference is, he will say that he spent months meticulously studying every document. When he handed us those documents they were all in very detailed files by topic. He had read over every single one and used his expertise to make judgments about what he thought should be public–and then didn’t just upload them to the internet–he gave them to journalists who, he knew, and wanted to go through them each one by one and make journalistic judgments about what should be public and what wasn’t, so that harm wouldn’t come gratuitously, but that the public would be informed, and that he was very careful and meticulous about doing that.

Der Spiegel, July 13, 2013

[Greenwald] told [German news show] host Reinhold Beckmann that he and journalist Laura Poitras had obtained full sets of the documents during a trip to Hong Kong, with around 9,000 to 10,000 top secret documents in total.

MSNBC, July 17, 2013

“I think there’s a real misconception over whether he’ll continue to leak,” Greenwald said. “He turned over to us many thousands of documents weeks and weeks ago back in Hong Kong… As far as I know he doesn’t have any intention of disclosing any more documents to us.”

AFP, August 6, 2013

“I did not do an exact count, but he gave me 15,000, 20,000 documents. Very, very complete and very long,” Greenwald said, responding to questions from [Brazilian] lawmakers.

The Telegraph, August 30, 2013

Oliver Robbins, the deputy national security adviser for intelligence, security and resilience in the Cabinet Office, said in his 13-page submission: “The information that has been accessed [from the siezure of David Miranda’s belongings at Heathrow] consists entirely of misappropriated material in the form of approximately 58,000 highly classified UK intelligence documents.

The New York Times, September 5, 2013

The documents are among more than 50,000 shared by The Guardian with The New York Times and ProPublica, the nonprofit news organization. They focus on GCHQ but include thousands from or about the N.S.A.

There you have it, folks: from 9,000 meticulously chosen docs to many times that in just four months. Clearly, The Leak Keepers lied, which is something they seem very inclined to do, and which seems particularly revolting in light of the all the un-Manning shenanigans. More importantly, the surveilled people of the world — and by that I mean everyone — are never going to see most of those docs. Three cheers for old media, doing what old media always do.”

Comment

Tarzie’s blog, Rancid Honey Trap, seems to be the origin of the fine analysis of Snowden that I first found on David Shurter’s blog in the piece by Yoichi Shimatsu  I posted here yesterday.

I traced that piece back to Wayne Madsen, who seems to have rehashed it from Tarzie’s blog.

Tarzie’s blog and Arthur Silber’s have been attacking Greenwald’s performance in the Snowden affair from a left perspective. I see that as especially productive. They too find the gate-keepers of dissent, the activists, even more worthy of resistance and deconstruction than the government.

Politicians after all do not exercise nearly the level of power wielded by the mandarins of the press and the universities.

I differ from Tarzie and Silber in thinking Snowden actively played a role in the deception. I think Silber’s come around to thinking that too, once he’d considered why Snowden should ever have revealed his identity, if  whistle-blowing or leaking was what he was really about.

Yes, why? Ask yourself why Snowden made himself the story, rather than the leaks, and the whole saga unravels.

Point two.

I don’t see Wikileaks and Assange as much different from Greenwald, at least, in the way they/he went about leveraging the secrets they gathered.  WL and JA used power just as state actors would.

It goes back to a theme I’ve hammered on this blog over and over. The state only reflects and amplifies the tendencies of the individual. You cannot fight it while adopting its methods. And the corporation and its methodologies are  creatures of the state.

So if propaganda is the language of the state, corporate advertising, marketing, ideology, mass movements – all of which are kissing cousins of propaganda – cannot be the language of resistance.

Better a lone voice which carries all the inflections of its speaker than a melange of voices that congeal into white noise.

Peter Quin at America on Jean Raspail’s fears of  the brown woman’s womb:

“On the face of it, Raspail’s notion of a conscience-stricken West being overwhelmed by an army of disheveled immigrants is less discomforting than laughable. The West has shown itself perfectly capable of using sufficient force whenever its vital interests are at stake—or perceived as being so—

(Lila: And its vital interests are always at stake…)

as it did most recently in the Gulf War. Indeed, for all the handw-ringing over immigration and the future of the West, there seems little appreciation that for the last 500 years at least it has been the West that has been threatening and battering the rest of the world, colonizing entire continents and waging war to secure the resources it needs. The current virulent reaction against immigrants in France, Austria and Germany—or, for that matter, the U.S.’s recent treatment of Haitian refugees—is hardly a sign of societies suffering from terminal humanitarianism.

The pessimism evinced by Connelly and Kennedy is mitigated somewhat by their call for international cooperation to deal with the underlying causes of the present population crisis. But as with so many descriptions of the threat posed by the third world, the authors’ underlying sense of the West’s vulnerability before the procreative puissance of the world’s nameless poor is far more vivid and forceful than any formulaic list of possible solutions. The threat is from below, from Raspail’s “kinky-haired, swarthy-skinned, long-despised phantoms,” from the teeming races that Rudyard Kipling once described as “lesser breeds without the law.”

(Lila: That is, without Western law. Of course, there were always Hindu, Chinese, and Islamic laws…)
“In the United States, the question of intelligence as a distinguishing characteristic between greater and lesser breeds has come to center stage with The Bell Curve (1994), the best-selling treatise by Charles Murray and the late Richard J. Hermstein. Unlike The Camp of the Saints, this sedate and statistics-laden book is not directly concerned with immigration, and its central thesis—that I.Q. is a function of race—is more subtle and complex than the horrific vision evoked by Raspail.

Despite their differences, however, there are similarities. At the heart of The Bell Curve and The Camp of the Saints, as well as of Connelly’s and Kennedy’s article, is a world in which the central divisions are racial and in which, when all is said and done, the white race is endangered. In fairness to Murray and Hermstein, they credit Asians with higher I.Q.’s than white Americans. Yet here again is found the implicit threat of a Caucasian community being challenged by another race, one that has been traditionally credited with being shrewder and craftier—in its own “inscrutable” way, smarter—than Westerners.

(Lila: Notice that when  the IQ in question is lower than that of Caucasians, it is seen as a mark of inferiority and brutishness. But when IQ is higher, then it is a mark of craft, duplicity, and moral inferiority. In other words, at the heart of racist tropes, is a confirmed and unmerited sense of one’s global superiority over others. A sense founded on ignorance of real history from subjection to decades, if not centuries, of imperial propaganda. That is, at the bottom of such racist ideologies and narratives, you  inevitably find the state.

And where the state is the strongest (I use the term state to mean not just government but the entire complex of government organs, including  corporations, media, and academia) – in the West – there too mass indoctrination is at its greatest).

“The fear that white civilization is growing steadily weaker and is at risk of being overwhelmed by barbarians from within and without marks a new life for an old and ugly tradition. The most infamous manifestation of that tradition is the Ku Klux Klan and the host of so-called Aryan resistance groups that continue to spring up on the periphery of American political life. But its most powerful and enduring effect was not limited to cross burnings or rabble-rousing assaults against blacks and immigrants. There was a far more respectable, educated version of this tradition that clothed itself in the language of science and not only won a place in the academy, but helped shape our laws on immigration, interracial marriage and compulsory sterilization of the mentally ill and retarded.

The movement derived its authority from the work of an Englishman, Francis Galton—Darwin’s cousin—who in 1883 published his masterwork, Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development. In it Galton advocated the modification and improvement of human species through selective breeding and coined a name for it as well: eugenics. In Galton’s view, which was shared by many of his Victorian contemporaries and buttressed by a wealth of pseudo-scientific skull measuring and brain weighing, the races were totally distinct. Eugenics, he believed, would give “the more suitable races or strains of blood a better chance of prevailing speedily over the less suitable.”

At the turn of the 20th century, the United States was ripe for the gospel of eugenics. The country’s original immigrants—Anglo-Saxon and Scots-Irish Protestants—were feeling battered and besieged by the waves of newcomers from southern and eastern Europe (i.e., Italians, Slovaks and Ashkenazi Jews) who were judged so immiscible in appearance and conduct that they would undermine the country’s character and identity. According to the eugenicists, the racial “germ plasm” of these groups was riddled with hereditary proclivities to feeble-mindedness, criminality and pauperism. These suspicions were given scientific justification by studies that purported to trace family behavior across several generations and discern a clear pattern of inherited behavior.

By the eve of World War I, eugenics was taught in many colleges. Its research arm was generously funded by some of America’s wealthiest families, including the Harrimans, Rockefellers and Carnegies. Alfred Ploetz, the German apostle of “racial hygiene,” hailed the United States as a “bold leader in the realm of eugenics,” a leadership that consisted of the widespread ban on interracial marriage and the growing emphasis on compulsory sterilization.

In the wake of the First World War, the eugenicists helped direct the campaign to halt the “degeneration” of the country’s racial stock by changing its immigration laws. As framed by Henry Fairfield Osborn, the president of the Museum of Natural History (at that time a center of eugenic fervor), America would either stop the influx from southern and eastern Europe or it would perish: “Apart from the spiritual, moral and political invasion of alienism the practical question of day by day competition between the original American and the alien element turns upon the struggle for existence between the Americans and aliens whose actions are controlled by entirely different standards of living and morals.”

The eugenicists played an important role in achieving the Immigration Restriction Act of 1924, a victory noted and approved by Adolf Hitler in his book of the same year, Mein Kampf. In fact, nine years later, when the Nazis took power in Germany, they would hail U.S. laws on immigration, intermarriage and sterilization as models for their own legislation.”

Note (added):

Fleming is a member of what’s been called the neo-Confederate movement. While admiring many things about the  old South, I am not.  My interest is mostly in figuring out the agendas at work in various strands of political activism.  I’m also happy to have company in thinking that a lot of modernist thinking is really on shaky grounds..

And yes, that includes revered figures of vast scholarly accomplishment, like Mises and  Rothbard. Rand at least managed to write novels that still get read on their own merits, whatever her failings as a philosopher.

ORIGINAL POST

Thomas Fleming at Chronicles is a writer I’m delighted to have discovered. It seems  I really have some solid ground to find LRC libertarianism substantially at odds with Christianity.

I found this response in the comments section especially enlightening.  Fleming says his friends at Mises, including the very sharp David Gordon, have plenty of private misgivings over Mises on philosophical issues.

“I should say that I am sorry if I seem rather curt in my short responses, but I hate using my Iphone, as useful as it is, which leads to a brevity this at can sound acerbic. I have absolutely no desire to debate Mises or Rand or Walter Block. Let their followers discuss their supposed virtues. My critique is designed to show the fundamental principles and therefore failings of the liberal tradition, from its godfather Montaigne to its ugly stepchildren the libertarians.

I am not going to go into what various Misesian friends of mine have conceded about Mises privately, (Lila: David Gordon, writes Fleming elsewhere).

because I have already done enough harm by even hinting at it. Let us just be content with the statement that Mises was not a philosopher but someone who took over a body of liberal thought uncritically and turned it into a more extreme direction. He may be the greatest economist who ever lived but his philosophy is little better than a reductio ad absurdum of Mill et al. It is like the Straussians who write books on ancient literature and philosophy–not worth the time it takes to discuss.

Ordinary people should not be discussing the problems in Scripture but accepting the tradition through which we read the Scriptures. We have the central teachings of Christ as a means of interpreting the OT Scriptures and we have the epistles to clarify those teachings and the early apostolic fathers who show how they were received and taught authoritatively. This leaves a rather small area for controversy. Marx, Hegel, Locke, Mises, et al are entirely irrelevant to any serious discussion of Christian thought. One has to choose. Either follow Locke, Mises, and/or Marx or Christ, Paul, and the Fathers.

– See more at: http://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/2010/02/22/abuse-your-illusions/#sthash.zTqnmDlT.dpuf

Ed Feser, summing up what is somewhat the premise of this blog:

” The irony is that while New Atheists and others beholden to scientism pride themselves on being “reality based,” that is precisely what they are not. Actual, concrete reality is extremely complicated. There is far more to material systems than what can be captured in the equations of physics, far more to human beings than can be captured in the categories of neuroscience or economics, and far more to religion than can be captured in the ludicrous straw men peddled by New Atheists. All of these simplifying abstractions (except the last) have their value, but when we treat them as anything more than simplifying abstractions we have left the realm of science and entered that of ideology. The varieties of reductionism, eliminativism, and the “hermeneutics of suspicion” are manifestations of this tendency to replace real things with abstractions. They are all attempts to “conquer the abundance” of reality (as Paul Feyerabend might have put it), to force the world in all its concrete richness into a straightjacket.”

Chuckle.  A bit mean, but PiedCow blog has the best recent comments on the passing strange tale of Edward the Confessor:

High ArkaJune 16, 2013 at 4:24 AM

The hipster goatee thing Snowden has going on immediately makes his story 54% suspicious. That and the glasses pushes it over 61%.

If you were on a psychological operations planning committee, and you wanted to release a mole to make the voting public feel that liberal dissent was strong in this country, who would you choose? A white guy, of course. Hipster goatee and glasses with a sort of IT professional look–the guy you trust to fix your computer. Not in the military, because so many liberal people feel uncomfortable about military guys. But, has to have a “security” job so that he’s a confirmed insider.
Reply
Replies

William DueckJune 21, 2013 at 3:23 PM

Also, he made nice pay (therefore he qualifies as One Of Us) and worked in exotic locales (therefore “progressive”).

I am sorta surprised they could not find a black Jewish woman to tick a few more Stuff White People Like boxes. Wasn’t Whoopi Goldberg available?
Reply

William DueckJune 21, 2013 at 3:18 PM

It’s funny that in 2006 when Mark Klein revealed what he learned about NSA and AT&T / Verizon colluding to have warrantless NSA eavesdropping on telecommunication, Glenn Greenwald didn’t care and didn’t pay any attention to it. After all, Greenwald is an expert on civil liberties and constitutional issues, while Klein was just an expert on telecommunication network security who physically witnessed the hardware and software that enabled the NSA eavesdropping. So of course Greenwald’s paying it no mind was “the truth,” and Klein’s revelations just more conspiracy insanity.

Fast forward 7 years and a handsome metro-sexual boy named Edward Snowden approaches Greenwald with the very same news Klein shared in 2006, and Greenwald’s BS Detector (TM) didn’t sound a single alarm. Instead Greenwald dutifully reported Snowden’s story as “breaking news” (despite 7 years of age) and hurriedly wrote numerous essays and countless tweets about the heroism of that lad… (Lila: I deleted an irrelevant personal attack)

Every essay Greenwald writes confirms he’s not an expert on civil liberties or constitutional law, yet his fame grows each year and the myth of him being the Real Expert is almost bulletproof now.

It’s not like Snowden didn’t know working as an NSA contractor through BAH employment would entail eavedropping on average Joes and Janes. He’d have learned that in his job interview. So the question becomes, why did Snowden accept the job and conduct himself in that role for several years until only just recently?

Greenwald doesn’t want to know

Robert Higgs of the Independent Institute has a great, great piece on how, like Jesus, society should give up its allegiance to violence:

“Love turns us in the opposite direction. It seeks to build up, whereas the state seeks to overawe and kill in the service of the self-interested elites who control it at the expense of the people at large. Love has no need to flex violent muscles or seek vengeance time and again. Love intends the good of the other for its own sake, not as a means toward the end of one’s own aggrandizement. Love is patient and long-suffering; power is impatient and easily provoked.

Love does not keep score; international rivals do so in numerous dimensions. Love leads to inner peace and cordial relations with others, whereas the state remains always at war, if not against other states, then certainly against its own subjects, on whom it preys ceaselessly in order to sustain itself and to gratify the rulers’ insatiable ambitions for personal acclaim and unchecked power.”

Obviously,  this rules out the court system (upheld by violence); as well as the current dollar regime (enforced by violence); the sub-national state and municipalities (upheld by violence); private security forces (upheld by violence); as well as corporations (created by laws upheld by violence)….

Of course, to be a bit more searching, Jesus himself never told the Roman Centurion to leave his position in the Roman army, nor did he tell Peter to get rid of his sword altogether.

And  he struck a fig tree sterile when it didn’t yield figs for him to eat.

Of course,  Jesus himself said that the next time he came, it would be with a sword.

Still, I’m all agog.

When is The Independent Institute going to get rid of copyright and put my name on its books (or at least, not take me to the courts should I do some such thing)?

When is it going to stop using blood-drenched dollars?

(Just to be clear, I’m in favor of copyright laws and I hold dollars, not from love but necessity).

When is the Independent Institute  going to run a piece calling out Edward Snowden as a CIA psyop?

Except for Ivan Eland (props to him), Independent Institute scholars were out promoting Assange, an obvious New World Order mouthpiece.

So, is the national (American Christo-Zionist) police-state evil, but the international (pagan-anti-Zionist) police -state just fine?

Is a War on Terror re-branded  as “defense of private property” a different game?

Is violence the only thing Jesus was against, or was this teaching part of a complete morality that proscribed lying (including false advertising), stealing (including market fraud), greed, covetousness, murder (even of statists), bribery (even of public officials), licentiousness (even masked as women’s reproductive rights), blackmail, condemnation of others (even of evil statists), blasphemy, and many other things not mentioned  (or heartily approved of) by some Rothbardian libertarians?

(Not all).

Did Jesus preach only mercy and not also justice?

That would set him in opposition to the Jewish law.

But he said he came to fulfill Jewish law.

To put it another way, does Jesus hate lies and the father of lies, but make an exception for  CIA psyops?

Just asking…