The Psychic Costs of Wars

FOCUS: Army Admits Violating Geneva Convention
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/032705X.shtml

FOCUS | Army Admits 24 Homicides, Refuses to Try 17 Accused
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/032605Z.shtml

FOCUS | From War Hero to Homeless
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/032605Y.shtml

WHITE HOUSE LETTER
President Bush's New Public Face: Confident and 'Impishly
Fun'
By ELISABETH BUMILLER
White House officials say that the frisky president people
are seeing in public is simply the one he has kept private
for the last four years.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/28/politics/28letter.html?th&emc=th

......................................................................

After WW1 the term was "shell shocked." I don't recall a special term to describe either the WW2, Korean, or Viet Nam war returnees who were psychically blown away by the experiences of war, but I encountered a good number of them who had graduated onto the streets -- often after prison terms for their drinking and/or drug addictions that had started over there. One could moralize about such individuals, but let us remember that most were terribly young -- teens or not much older before they were thrown into situations far over their heads.

I well recall my special loving uncles who returned from WW2. While their sisters had all completed college and entered into productive lives -- several as professionals -- neither completed high school from which they had volunteered. Each had a 'drinking problem', and each got through lives vastly distorted by the nightmare experiences of war that each described in moments of extreme drunkenness -- a tent in italy with many buddies hit by a shell which killed all but my uncle, Ted. Bill's ship broke loose in a major French ammunition storage harbor (Cherbourg), plowing a huge gash in a loaded ammunition ship and barely avoided blowing it and the surrounding city to hell and beyond -- only sleeping crew members killed in their quarters where the bow of the ship happened to penetrate deeply.

We now call it post traumatic stress. It obviously kills something essential for good living in far too many young people thrust into the hell of killing or being killed.

Thus when one reads of the costs of today's wars one must agree with Machiavelli who wrote the original war handbook -- but who quotes Livy below in my signature. And we are even hiding the coffins of our war dead from public attention? This is not a time when one ought vacation blithely with the distractions presented to us by our visual and audio media.
--
"A war is just if there is no alternative, and the resort
to arms is legitimate if they represent your last hope." (Livy)
--
Ed Kent 718-951-5324 (voice mail only) [blind copies]
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/CollegeConversation
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/PeaceEfforts
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/EndingPoverty
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/440neighborhood
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/StudentConcerns
http://BlogByEdKent.blogspot.com/

Mill, Libertarianism, David Lyons and the Practical Limits of Moral and Political Principles

John Stuart Mill is sometimes charged with being the original author of libertarianism because his defense of it argued that the only limit on liberty should be the restriction of harm to others. As is the case with so many other past philosophers, what appeals as self-evident principle turns out all too often on wider practical application to produce skewed results not intended (or foreseen) by its author(s).

For example we are today watching the wrenching case of Terri Schiavo. What principle should determine the right thing to do with a person so terribly brain damaged as to be by all appearances unable to think or act? One's instincts are to try to preserve such a person in hopes that somehow she might be restored to personhood or at least some minimal level of active consciousness. Such after 15 years, however, does not seem to be likely with Terri who has only been kept alive these many years by the wonders of modern medicine -- antibiotics, new methods of feeding and cleansing, and the labors of many caring health workers -- 12/365. The question then arises as to whether all human life should be sustained at great cost to someone -- either families or the public expenditures for Medicaid and/or legal costs attendant thereupon? No neat and tidy principle alone answers the critical question at hand -- should Terri (or more accurately, her body) be allowed to die?

Similarly Mill's 'no harm' principal defense of liberty can be variously applied? Does it mean that one has a duty only not to harm others with no obligations to help those in need? As one studies Mill's life and career of service it would be hard to believe that he would be uncaring in the face of human need and/or injustice. As a young utilitarian he defended the rights of oppressed peoples and even in the context of his defense of liberty his examples sometimes war with his limiting principle as it is applied by the hard line libertarians who cite him as an authoritative source.

Interestingly for Brooklyn College students, one of our own distinguished philosophy graduates, David Lyons:

http://www.bu.edu/philo/faculty/lyons.html

in his writings has pointed out that some of Mill's examples along "good Samaritan" lines do war with the limitations of his no harm principle and raise the question as to whether Mill, himself, a century and a half later, would reject any community obligation to act through our state instrumentalities to help others at home or abroad or decline to render positive justice where it is due to those who have suffered the discrimination of racism, gender biases, unequal opportunities -- or who need public assistance in recovering from or living with life's inevitable misfortunes?

Perhaps the bottom line here is that our rules, principles, laws, policies must constantly be reexamined as we apply them to present realities and revised when necessary to do the right thing? Certainly this is one of the principal lessons that has emerged from our major American legal theories of the past century:

Pound's Sociological Jurisprudence:

http://ps.psychiatryonline.org/cgi/content/full/49/8/1099a

American Legal Realism's skepticism about legal rules and facts:

http://encyclopedia.laborlawtalk.com/Legal_realism

Critical Jurisprudence's suspicions about current legal practices:

http://www.law.cornell.edu/topics/critical_theory.html

and a host of variants along similar lines with links below:

http://gsulaw.gsu.edu/pwiseman/home_pages/Jurisprudence/readings.html
--
"A war is just if there is no alternative, and the resort to arms is legitimate if they represent your last hope." (Livy)
--
Ed Kent 718-951-5324 (voice mail only) [blind copies]

Making Peace, Not War, Stupid!

As I was sitting down to start composing what follows, Bud Trillin's piece popped up on my screen. FOCUS - Calvin Trillin | A Fallen Soldier's Family
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/032005Z.shtml

Bud was a year behind me at Yale and took on the chairmanship of the Yalie Daily the year after I had done my stint in 1956, so we are both dated as children of WW2, draft eligible during the Korean War, experienced with the Viet Nam fiasco, and presumably sentient in the face of the horrendous smoke screens that blur any serious news about war and peace today available to the great bulk of Americans on their TV screens.

Were one to rank importance of national affairs per these media and their print counterparts, one would be led to believe that America is in the throes of a murderous epidemic of wife murders, devastated by child molesters and those who would emulate the Nazis by exterminating all disabled persons. At least such is to what our attention is constantly being directed as we seek serious news about matters of war and peace and the real threats that face us and our children -- terrorism, drugs, environmental degradation, hunger, cruelly rationed medical care, homelessness, unemployment -- all undoubtedly setting the stage for crime and punishment and more killing down the line -- both at home and abroad.

With a slight shift in the breezes this morning and then all too briefly I caught a glimpse of our military Chief of Staff, General Richard Meyers, on Meet the Press, trying to explain to Tim Russert, among other things, why those Iraqi soldiers and police that we are trying to train to replace our troops keep mysteriously disappearing? I felt sorry for General Meyers as he bumbled along. He is trained to fight wars, not to make peace in a nation traditionally torn by its warring factions -- Kurds, Shiites, Sunnis, and other fragments, religious and secular. And how can he explain our other Middle Eastern 'conquest' -- Afghanistan -- which we have reconverted back into the heroin producing capitol of the world? 'Gosh, wow, they have had elections over there and the morale of our troops is excellent! Twenty nine of them told me they were planning to re-enlist when I visited them the other day!'

Help! Can no one see that those Iraqis that we are training are going to be shooting at each other -- and some would claim are already some of the ones that are shooting at our troops? Ish! If our men cannot even speak the language, let alone understand the culture, how can they possibly guess who is what or what will be the outcome of our training efforts? All that one can say of both Iraq and Afghanistan is that they are economic basket cases and war zones -- with things likely to get much worse?

Well, back to the distraction of Terri Schiavo. It is manifestly more comforting to our pols to be saving the life of one extremely disabled person than to take responsibility for the killing and maiming of many thousands of innocents -- both ours and theirs -- over there!

Thanks, Bud, for your contribution. It is reassuring to know that there are still a few caring voices speaking, even if they are mainly being drowned out by those who get their jollies out of killing!

Yes, I weep, too, for so many needlessly being killed. I also have a new grandchild, Conor, born this past November 18, and I fear for his future. But I thank the gods that his mother, who saw our military as a peace-keeping organization, resigned to do her medical training privately just before 9/11. She is now sustaining lives in intensive care and cannot be recalled into this madness where I fear too many of her military buddies may now be. What a waste! What a waste! What a waste! Ed Kent
--
"A war is just if there is no alternative, and the resort
to arms is legitimate if they represent your last hope." (Livy)
--
Ed Kent 718-951-5324 (voice mail only) [blind copies]
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/CollegeConversation
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/PeaceEfforts
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/EndingPoverty
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/440neighborhood
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/StudentConcerns
http://BlogByEdKent.blogspot.com/

Getting It Together

Were I forced to choose between the current right/left renditions of the terms "liberal" and "conservative," I would be forced to say that I could be neither.

I certainly can't identify with the ugly distortions to which both of these terms are being subjected. I am NOT a libertine 'liberal', i.e. bent on wasting public revenues and exploiting people in the pursuit of personal pleasure. Nor could I endorse the greed implicit in excluding wide swaths of people from the basics that a prosperous modern society must make available to all its members (and guests) -- food, shelter, medical care -- human dignity -- which seems to be a subsidiary aim of the libertarians/neocons who have tried to preempt for themselves the term, "conservative."

One must rather be a 'conservative' in its original sense of being an advocate for a just society that respects the claims and demands of its members. I don't think that we all WANT the same things, so we need not demand economic equality. But it is pretty obvious that we all NEED certain basics to function as human beings and we must not drive people to suicidal madness or criminal rebellion when we deprive them of these. Conservatism means conserving PEOPLE!

Things are moving too fast in our global economy and are facing us with a frightening list of critical challenges -- rapidly diminishing energy reserves, environmental degradation, health crises, challenges to world peace that are bound to arise from the competition for basic resources. As 'liberals' we must challenge the militarists, terrorists, or others who would perpetrate violence rather using peaceful persuasion to accomplish solutions of our common problems.

True liberals and real conservatives share a vital interest in our joint public well-being and we must get ourselves together before it is too late to achieve it in these all too perilous times!
--
"A war is just if there is no alternative, and the resort
to arms is legitimate if they represent your last hope." (Livy)
--
Ed Kent 718-951-5324 (voice mail only) [blind copies]
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/CollegeConversation
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/PeaceEfforts
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/EndingPoverty
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/440neighborhood
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/StudentConcerns
http://BlogByEdKent.blogspot.com/

Where Are All the Jobs Going?

The following are comments from some concerned experts on unemployment. Sumner Rosen, retired from Columbia, is active (Vice Chair) with the National Jobs for All Coalition (includes a large number of non-governmental and religious organizations working in this area of concern):

http://www.njfac.org/

and Stanley Aronowitz, Distinguished Professor of Sociology at the CUNY Graduate Center, has recently done a study( posted to the Student Concerns list) of the shaky situation of U.S. labor in the face of declining jobs and compensation for those that still have jobs (#880, which you can locate by using the Student Concerns Archive search function with Stan's name):

http://web.gc.cuny.edu/Sociology/faculty/aronowitz.html

Students concerned about this problem area in their research papers might want to contact either or both or the the Coalition which has recently relocated near the UN from 475 Riverside Drive where it is still listed on some older web sites.

Sumner M Rosen

stanley aronowitz

njfac@njfac.org

Ed Kent

..............................................

Sumner Rosen's comment:

One dimension of the systemic erosion of labor markets at all levels; among the effects is a steady flow to meet the needs of low-wage employers. "Reform" of social security has among its real objectives to erode retirement benefits and add older workers to this flow. The voluminous discussion of why the Bush proposal must be opposed is silent on this question.

smr

Sumner M. Rosen and Judith Davidoff
tel: 212 580-9787
fax: 212 496-8014
address: 201 West 86th Street, New York NY 10024

...................................

Stanley Aronowitz's:

try not to live past forty five.

Stanley

>> [Original Message]
>> From: Ed Kent
>> To: Student Concerns
>> Date: 3/12/2005 1:07:44 PM
>> Subject: Job Problems for College Grads on West Coast
--
"A war is just if there is no alternative, and the resort
to arms is legitimate if they represent your last hope." (Livy)
--
Ed Kent 718-951-5324 (voice mail only) [blind copies]
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/CollegeConversation
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/PeaceEfforts
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/EndingPoverty
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/440neighborhood
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/StudentConcerns
http://BlogByEdKent.blogspot.com/

The Real Nuclear Threats to Our Future

ECO FOCUS: Nuclear Waste 'Dumped' on Beaches
http://www.truthout.org/issues_05/030605EA.shtml

................................................

As one looks to the future it does not seem likely that a small nation such as an Iran or a North Korea is likely to launch a nuclear attack on a major enemy -- unless its national leaders are totally suicidal. The responses from the major powers to such an attack would be devastating.

Rather the real future nuclear hazards are far more obviously:

1) the spread covertly of nuclear wastes as reported above or fallout such as occurred with the Chernobyl disaster of 1986 (which has been cited as the source of numerous cancers of some of our finest CUNY students from the Ukraine).

2) the move through our loose transportation barriers by terrorists of stray nuclear materials from the former Soviet Republics -- which we have not bothered to collect -- (or from our 'ally', Pakistan, which has notoriously been sharing nuclear know-how here, there, and elsewhere) that could produce either a nuclear explosion in an exposed major population area or a so-called dirty bomb with more limited, but equally deadly effects on those exposed.

Needless to say our major efforts should be directed to:

1) preventing and detecting dangerous nuclear pollution.

2) preparation for emergency treatment of those exposed to dangerous radiation.

Is it out of order, then, in the light of such long-term hazards facing us to call for American troops to exit Iraq on the same time table as the Syrians departing Lebanon so that we might redirect our attention and funding to the real security threats facing us now and in the future? My Flatbush subway entrance still seems to be totally unprotected from whatever one might wish to drag into it and the Ides of March is rapidly approaching. Isn't it time that we stopped dancing to the previous generation's conception of how to fight a war and got on to the next's? Let us not forget France's disastrous dependence on its Maginot Line after WW1:

http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/1491/pagetwo.html

For the benefit of my students who were not around then, the French built what they thought would be an impenetrable line of fortresses between 1939 and 1940 that they assumed would wall out Germany from a surprise attack. The Germans in the meantime had developed the new Blitzkrieg tactics of rapidly moving troops (shock and awe) which simply bypassed the French fortifications and easily defeated the immobilized French troops: http://www.historylearningsite.co.uk/blitzkrieg.htm

And let it be noted that walls have never been effective barriers against determined enemies. Peace-making is a far more dependable way to go. Ed Kent
--
"A war is just if there is no alternative, and the resort
to arms is legitimate if they represent your last hope." (Livy)
--
Ed Kent 718-951-5324 (voice mail only) [blind copies]
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/CollegeConversation
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/PeaceEfforts
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/EndingPoverty
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/440neighborhood
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/StudentConcerns
http://BlogByEdKent.blogspot.com/

Democracy Lite?

Today's NY Times Week in Review features a suggestive article entitled, "What's in It for America?" that explores the possible ramifications of Bush's latest crusade to democratize the Middle East.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/06/weekinreview/06roger.html

I recommend that all three of my classes read this article on the prospect of democratization of the Middle East as background for our discussions this next week.

Political Philosophy (20) will be reading Machiavelli's The Prince. What might he have to say about the democratization of the various regimes in the Middle East -- indeed, around the globe where conflicts, actual and potential, abound between competing ethnic, religious, and political groups?

Philosophy of Law (43) will be getting to H.L.A. Hart's comments on the distinctions between "being obliged" to obey the law and "having an obligation" to do so. Will rapid democratization solve the problems of the broad range of Middle Eastern nations with their diverse political systems and potentially conflicting interest groups? Keep in mind that our Western democracies took centuries to develop relatively stable civil societies as the foundation for the rule of law and orderly political systems.

Somewhat less directly relevant to this article but with some passing references to it, Ethics and Society (6) will be exploring the impact of divisions between poverty and wealth -- both within nations and between them. One of the Middle Eastern problems generated by our European and American democracies has been a bad history both of suppressing incipient democracies there, e.g. Mossadeq in Iran:

http://www.iranonline.com/newsroom/Archive/Mossadeq/

and supporting authoritarian regimes such as Saudi Arabia -- whose 4,000 princes have been our accomplices in our exploiting their resources, i.e. *OIL*. Will we be opening up a Pandora's box by urging rapid democratization of such previously authoritarian regimes? Lest we forget, 15 of the 19 9/11 hijackers were Saudi dissidents. As Plato warned long ago new democracies all too often degenerate into chaos and tyranny. We witnessed this phenomenon repeatedly after WW2 with the withdrawal of the European powers from their colonies. Self-serving demagogues were as likely as democrats to take control of such newly liberated nations (e.g. Nigeria, which was captured by a series of brutal military juntas, which systematically murdered their democratic opponents -- in complicity with our corporate oil interests).

I should add as a footnote (for the benefit of others who have been away from the academic world for a time) that contemporary philosophy has been shifting away from purely theoretical (principle-based) analyses of social, political, and other matters to applied empirical exploration and verification of the effects and limitations of our theories.

In my Ethics and Society class after some independent student thinking about the practical problems raised by the divisions, national and global, between poverty and wealth, I shall sketch the theoretical polar approaches taken to this same subject by the recently deceased Harvard philosophers, Robert Nozick (Anarchy, State, and Utopia):

http://www.humanities.mq.edu.au/Ockham/y64l17.html

and John Rawls (A Theory of Justice):

http://www.commerce.usask.ca/faculty/backman/lectures/HCA434/Ethics/Ethics2/Ethics2.htm

Rawls and Nozick tended to dominate our philosophical discussions (and textbook presentations) on the subject of distributive justice with limited and limiting principles during the second half of the 20th century -- a naive and grossly misleading error IMHO. Ed Kent

Thinking It Through?

Roundtable: The Future of Liberalism
=================

Three magazine editors -- Peter Beinart, Michael Tomasky and
Katrina vanden Heuvel -- were invited to discuss and debate
the present state of liberalism in America, and its future.

Edited Transcript
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/06/books/review/006LIBERA.html?8bu

Audio Selections
http://www.nytimes.com/packages/html/books/libe-popup.html

Recommended Reading on Liberalism
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/06/books/review/06LIBE-READ.html?8bu

..................................

The above will appear in tomorrow's Sunday NY Times Book Review. It is focused on our current political game that from my perspective as a social/political/legal philosopher is maiming American democracy by re-directing attention away from problems needing to be solved by any modern society to the nastiness of derogatory name calling. This game goes back to the ancients -- Socrates/Plato despised virtually all of the sophists of their day who used rhetoric to distort and distract from the truth.

Rhetoric as it was called then, propaganda as propounded by the Nazis and other totalitarians, and simplistic reductions of arguments to ad hominems today -- "He/she is just playing politics!" "He/she is just an X or Y!" -- unfortunately works. As the Nazis and Stalinists taught us, the Big Lie cons the unwary when it is repeated often enough. Distort and distract seems to be the game of our major for-profit hate media -- ranging from Clear Channel Communications Inc. to Murdock's gutter press and Fox News. I am even made uncomfortable by Air America, although I tend to agree with most of its criticisms of Republican tactics and aims as well as appreciating its provision of information that one may otherwise only find embedded in blogs or lower down in the columns of our reputable newspapers and journals -- or sometimes on NPR.

What is wrong with all this information distortion is that the problems we are facing are REAL ones and are increasingly adding up to crises for us and future generations -- our children and grand children are at terrible risk. What are some of these crises in the making?

1) Limited resources are dwindling precisely at a time when the world's population is rapidly expanding and increasing demand for what will not be there when needed -- oil, clean water:

The Bush Team's Abortion Misstep
The American delegation embarrassed itself at a recent U.N. conference on women's equality with a burst of anti-abortion grandstanding.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/05/opinion/05sat2.html?th

Shame on us for sabotaging efforts to confront such problems squarely!

2) We are polluting our environment and spreading diseases (asthma, AIDS, bird Flu?) that are compounding our health problems on a global scale.

3) The divisions of poverty and wealth are widening, which will lead to increasing resentment of the haves by the have nots -- both within and between nations and cultures. We saw on 9/11 how very simple it was for citizens of one of our 'allies' (15 Saudis plus 4 other odds and ends guys) to devastate our American economy -- with 19 box cutters as weapons! Desperate and depressed people are the most dangerous weapons of all times -- suicidal destroyers. All the military might in the world cannot forestall what may turn out to be catastrophic attacks on our homeland that will make 9/11 look like a minor, if tragic, local disaster.

4) The reconversion of Afghanistan to the destitute opium/heroin supplying capitol of the world is a bellwether of what our U.S. military strategies have accomplished.

5) What chaos may emerge in the Middle East from Bush's current crude calls for democratization there that may set traditional enemies once again at each others' throats -- Lebanon? Iraq? Egypt? Algeria? Iran? Syria? Saudi Arabia? Afghanistan? Turkey?

This constant "right/left" chatter is dangerous -- it constitutes a major block keeping us Americans from doing what Dr. Carlos Russell, one of my former Brooklyn College colleagues:

http://www.wlib.com/dr-russell.htm

calls "thinking it through."

Comments?