Nos Sentiments : Sonts-ils Protégés ?

C’est une question à propos des droits légaux qui se relève d’un forum de Libération (www.liberation.fr) sur une crime homophobe apparente. Un participant y dit que les propos homophobes, etc., ne sont pas simplement des opinions mais des délits « dont il faut rendre compte devant la justice. » Il avance, en outre, qu’il y a un « droit au respect. » Or dans le meilleur des mondes possibles tout le monde se devrait respecter, mais est-ce que le devoir est moral ou légal ? Si légal, où allons-nous en train de passer ?? Si respecter les autres n’est pas une marque de bon comportement ou des devoirs d’un code moral ou religieux, mais en plus une loi qui en porte des peines de l’infraction, gardera-t-on un droit quelconque de dire ce que l’on veut dire ? Je ne le pense pas.
La démocratie n’est pas une forme de gouvernement concernant les sensibilités des citoyens. La loi ne nous protège pas des insultes blessantes, même les plus cruelles, ou allons-nous avoir des lois qui proscrivent que l’on appèle quelques-un menteur ou méchant ou indigne de confiance? Ce sont des termes blessants, n’est-ce pas ? Il y a, bien sûr, des lois contre diffamation qui nous protègent des calomnies qui, plus que nous blessent, font de l’injure à notre réputation propre à nous-même. Mais si l’on vous appèle putain parce que vous êtes prostituée, qu'en peut-on faire ? Si on vous appèle tante parce que vous êtes homosexuel c'est, nous croyons, un autre ordre de chose. Mais évidemment celui qui nous appèle une telle chose n'est pas d'accord. Il est haineux, ses propos sont blessants, mais voulons-nous vraiment faire de lui un criminel? Si ses propos vont au-delà une opinion propre à lui-même et passent aux incitations à la violence, il y a déjà des lois qui proscrivent cette activité. Il y a des lois qui interdisent la discrimination dans l'emploi et le logement; où elles sont inadéquates, dans cette instance de nouvelles lois se justifient. Et si dans un lieu d'emploi un collègue fait un enfer vivant de la vie de travail d'un associé, à cause de l'homosexualité de la dernière, de bonnes lois requerraient que le patron châtie le coupable, même le limoge si les choses sont dégradées tant de le justifier.

Quand des propos blessants atteignent le niveau d'un harcèlement, la loi y est aussi proprement impliquée. Oui, il est quelque fois bien difficile de déterminer si une ligne rouge a été franchie, mais il y a des lois contre la perturbation de l'ordre publique qui peuvent s'y employer. La ligne peut se décider en justice. Donc, si on les applique, beaucoup de lois pourraient s'utiliser pour prévenir que quelqu'un souffre trop des bigoteries d'un haineux. Aucune loi contre l'expression libre ne peut être autrement qu'un très sérieuse contrainte de nos libertés. Je suis ébahi qu'elles soient avancées si souvent.

To Beat or Not To Beat......

.....Or waterboard, electroshock, submit to extreme temperature; in fact, to torture or not: That is the question being asked by Congress and the President. The rest of the world watches in amazement as the land of the free and the home of the brave, Homeland to the largest system of prisons and incarceration for profit in the world, argues within its government whether or not to make torture legal. The recent compromise, announced between renegade senate Republicans and Bush, draws certain red lines but leaves the president with the sizeable authority to decide on his own if this or that action is....well.....actionable. It has not fooled anyone, except maybe the administration and certain members of congress. The day it was announced the opening page of Libération (1) on-line carried a headline: The United States in The Process of Legalizing Torture. Subsequent articles followed up on it. No less than six about torture from 9/21 to 9/23 appeared on the front page. An editorial in Le Monde, http://www.lemonde.fr/web/article, calculating that the administration is likely to win in the final vote, adds, “At the moment where a report of the ‘intelligence community’, divulged by the New York Times, considers that the Iraq occupation has not weakened the terrorist threat, but on the contrary, has aggravated it, Mr. Bush plays his habitual card: advances the fear of terrorism prior to any reflection on the means to combat it.”

For those who are tempted to believe that these are the ravings of U.S.-bashing Frenchmen consider this: The staid Economist has an article about Bush’s fear-mongering entitled The Uses of Scare-Talk http://www.economist.com/world/na/displaystory.cfm?story_id=7946091 where it notes, “Republican strategists think the best way to minimize their losses on November 7th is to talk non-stop about terrorism.” In another article entitled Five Years On the magazine takes the Bush people to task for the way they responded to 9/11/01, recognizing that the number of Jihadist has multiplied and “multiplied, moreover, partly as a result of the way America responded.” The immediately following section of the article is headed. Half success in Afghanistan, Total Failure in Iraq. One cannot accuse The Economist of harbouring  habitual America bashers or crazed liberals.

The United States’s abandonment of universal principles of human rights has earned it the scorn of the entire world. Sarkozy and Blaire may be in Bush’s corner, but the French and English people are not. We have been hoodwinked into believing that in order to endure we must bury values enshrined in the Declaration of the Rights of Man, and subsequently given legal weight in the Geneva Convention. Bush’s assault, though, reaches much further back into the history of law. The habeas corpus he wants to rip away from “enemy combatants”, thus maintaining the judicial never-never land he’s been operating since 9.11.01, dates from the 13th century, with precedents as early as the twelfth, and has been repeatedly considered by the courts of this country as the cornerstone preventing state abuse of power. The ninth circuit, in Brown vs Vasquez in 1991, wrote that the Supreme Court has "recognized the fact that`[t]he writ of habeas corpus is the fundamental instrument for safeguarding individual freedom against arbitrary and lawless state action.'

Clearly, it is “arbitrary and lawless state action” that Bush and his cronies most want to safeguard. Their assault on well established legal rights could not be plainer. They demand the power to throw into a dungeon anyone that they have arbitrarily determined to be a terrorist, to keep him there as long as they see fit without bringing charges against him, and to deny him the rights of habeas corpus that would allow –simply -- judicial review of whether his incarceration is legally justified. Dungeon is not too strong a word, for the consequences of Bush’s magisterial disregard for human rights enshrined in age-old legal procedures could well help jurisprudence to “evolve” backwards. His sense of the powers of the executive branch is monarchical, but of a monarchy prior to the Magna Carta. In short, he is power mad and views any challenge to the power he has assumed as an affront to his person and the absolute authority he repeatedly claims.

It is a short step from such madness to asserting that bad is good, black is white, torture is interrogation, and that my will, and my will alone, is the law. And, yes, as in Orwell's 1984 that war is peace.

1.http://www.liberation.fr/php/pages/pageSearch.php?recherche=torture&select=http%3A%2F%2Fwww

Fifth Anniversary Thoughts on 9/11/01

What follows is a letter I sent to my local paper that it did not print.  Written on that day of endless, empty remembrances, to the cynical drumbeat of politics as usual, it has not been edited to conform with this subsequent post.

September 11, 2006. Five years ago today,the world began to change, maybe significantly, although it did not have to. Terrorism had been with it a long time, so instead of treating the awful events of that morning as a new war, with all the wasted resources implied, the U.S. could have set about tracking those responsible -- quietly, relentlessly, legally, using law enforcement and with the support of the world -- instead of sending armies after criminals. In lieu of that, cheered and egged on -- lest current poll numbers make us forget -- by a large majority of the American people, the Bush administration squandered the nation's military might in a war on terror in which the enemy has successfully and consistently refused to become a military target, thus frustrating the chest-thumping fantasies of the neo-conservative war machine. Along the way, it squandered a promising beginning in Afghanistan, where the Taliban resurgence is pronounced, by shifting resources needed there Iraq, the first domino to be toppled in its mad scheme to recreate the Middle East. It thereby helped Iranian ambitions immeasurably and started an Iraqi civil war. Saddam Hussein hadn't much changed his treatment of Kurds, Shiites, and other opponents since the days when we were supplying him with all the materials he needed to make poison gas to use against them when Bush decided to attack. The given justifications, as we know now, and had every reason to know then, were all lies. But scorning a "reality based" foreign policy on the advice of neo-conservative ideologues, Bush managed to lose the respect of the rest of the world while flouting international and domestic law, assuming unprecedented powers for the executive branch, and waging a full frontal assault on the Constitution.

 Now reality has caught up with those who scorned it. There has not been another attack here, but security experts know it is just a matter of time. The United States is more hated and less safe than at any time during the last sixty years, and the theocratic murderers that attacked us have gained prestige among hundreds of thousands of new enemies we have made. With an arrogance of mythic proportions, claiming that the U.S. would make its own reality, Bush & Co have helped to create a whole class of jihadist super-stars, whose forbidden but ubiquitous images help focus hatred on America and act as recruitment posters for their cause.

It did not have to be like this, and it is time, in November’s elections, to hold to account the makers of this fake war based on lies and waged with a psychotic level of pride. It is time to stop letting the Bush administration used 9/11 as it's own political bludgeon, dishonoring the dead of that morning, and to demand a true accounting of the dangerous and unnecessary consequences it has imposed.

Je vous respecte, mais vous allez en enfer

J'ai discuté aujourd'hui avec des amies sur les propos du Pape. Bien que je n'aie pas plaidé pour ses remarques,  j'ai souligné fortement que les citations qu'il a faites doivent se voir en contexte. En contexte, faisant partie d'un argument abstrus, elles ne sont point aussi détestables qu'on se dit. Or, je n'aime pas le pape:  Ainsi, je ne le défends pas souvent. Néanmoins, je crois que si quelque chose est dite pendant un discours à l'Académie on doit faire la tentative de la comprendre dans les termes et formes qu'elle a soi-même empruntées. Que les médias n'ont pas compris ce qu'était dit c'est claire. Donc, pour faire des nouvelles, ce qu'ils ne pouvaient pas faire d'un assez médiocre oeuvre de philosophie, ils se sont emparés de la chose qu'ils se sont crus comprendre, l'ont tordu, et pour mettre le feu aux sensibilités Musulmanes, l'ont cité encore et encore une fois hors de tout contexte. J'insiste sur ceci: c'est la responsibilié des medias de ne pas rapporter ce qui n'a pas eu lieu, et le pape n'a jamais dit pour soi-même les mots que la presse lui a attribués. Voilà ce qui s'est passé au-dédans des murs de l'université. 

Hors ces murs? Aurait-t-il dû les citer? Non, sans doute. En outre, il n'est pas au-delà de toute possibilité que dans son âme Benoît XVI recèle de la rancune de l'Islam, ou peut-être seulement de la pitié. Pour je crois c'est bien difficile de respecter ceux qui l'on croit leurrés. La même chose sur l'autre côté. Les musulmans ne peuvent pas vraiment respecter ceux pour qui Mohammed n'est point le prophète, même si souvent dans la passé ils les ont toléré mieux que les chrétiens ont toléré les "incroyants". Mais hors des mots pieux et conciliants, les gens des religions, surtout les Abrahamiques, en effet, disent l'un à l'autre: "Je vous respecte, mais je sais que vous avez tort et puisque vous ne croyez pas comme moi, vous allez malheureusement mon ami en enfer." C'est surtout le cas avec les chrétiens, pour qui le salut ne s'obtient pas si on ne crois pas à Jesus comme Sauveur et comme Dieu. Est-ce possible de respecter celui que vous croyez est en cours de mériter sa damnation? Pour moi, c'est là l'incroyable --l'infâme d'écraser.



 

Une Bêtise Embarrassante

Je viens de faire une erreur assez bête dans une contribution à un forum de Libé. Au lieu d'écrire guerre sainte j'ai écrit, et puis j'ai soumis un texte au forum qui dit, guerre santé. Sacrebleu! Comme on dit. Je ne sais pas ce que je pensais! Si on va au dit forum, ne me pensez pas trop bête.

CAN WE CRITICIZE RELIGION?

In English this time, continuing the last post on the question of whether or not one can criticize relgions. The answer I posted on the Libération forums is, in a nutshell, that yes we can and, moreover, we must if we're not to descend into the violence of religious anarchy. What follows is an excerpt from an essay I wrote previously on the dangers of religious modes of thought in civic discourse.

The dangerous reintroduction of religious discourse into public life is the primary motive for this essay. In the past month Senator Obama has called for the introduction of religious discourse in the politic of the Democratic Party; an Islamic group in France attempted, fortunately unsuccessfully after a previous success in Geneva, to have a production halted of Voltaire’s play Mahomet le prophète ou fanatisme; Hilary Clinton, along with John Kerry, continues to make a great show of her deference to religious values; President Bush, motivated by his religious convictions, has vetoed legislation authorizing the federal financing of certain kinds of stem cell research, apparently likening it to murder; and around the globe, as if to answer the incomprehensible temptation of American politicians to humor the religious impulse, people are slaughtered daily in the name of religious claims.

The “religious discourse” (his words) that Barak Obama is inviting into civic debate almost infallibly has proved to be an incendiary force in political life. Virtually every democratic advance in the world, as well as every scientific discovery, has been opposed, often violently, by entrenched religious reaction. Women, not fit for the priesthood or ministry were deemed thereby equally unfit to exercise the franchise. If Wilberforce and other English Methodists helped end the slave trade in the empire, other protestant divines, in the American south, provided generous biblical justification for Negro slavery and the sub-human status of Blacks. The religious wars of Europe produced a bloody stain on Western history that will never be effaced. We can only hope that, equally, it will never be forgotten.

None of this is beside the point. Bill Moyer’s new series on Faith and Reason shows us that even forums considered intellectually respectable have taken up the issue and ask the question, with no tongue in cheek, if in a democracy religion is protected from “insult”. The question itself is ominous, and the short answer to it, hopefully for the long term, is no. To the extent that it is thus protected, there is a confounding of religious values with law and a resulting loss of freedom. With due respect for Muslim religious sensibilities, those of us who are not Muslim can depict Mohammed; we can even depict him insultingly or demeaningly. To suggest otherwise shows a profound misunderstanding of Western political values and, I would add, of Western political humor, where good taste is not always of the first importance. The spectacle of local Catholics picketing outside movie houses playing Dan Brown’s excellent fiction, The DaVinci Code, gave one pause and provided an opportunity to recall that the founder of Opus Dei was a favorite of Generalissimo Franco. Nor must we forget Pat Robertson’s frequent calls to assassinate this or that leftist leader not to his (and presumably God’s) liking, as well as his vicious suggestion that New Orleans was almost wiped off the map through God’s anger at the open ---OPEN!! --- (one should add joyous and outrageous) homosexuality its citizens allowed to be displayed there.

It will be objected that the examples cited above do not exhaust the religious spectrum, which is broad indeed, even within the Roman Catholic church encompassing both the reactionary Opus Dei and the Maryknolls working in South America for the forgotten and dispossessed; that it has given us Dr. Martin Luther King as well as the Inquisition. It is a valid observation but it does not change what will be the fundamental contention of the following pages, that the terms of civic debate must remain vigilantly secular. Recently many have mistaken the accomodation of religion within civil society with an absolute protection for the feelings of its adherents. Then to make things worse they have seeminly decided that to keep feelings from being hurt we must engage the religious within their own peculiar discourse. This means nothing if it does not mean allowing notions of salvation, sin, redemption, and religiously determined punishment, etc. into civic debate, from which they were ejected, not all that long ago, after sometimes bloody battles where they proved their incompatability with political freedom. Apostasy is still a capital crime in certain Islamic countries. Until recently divorce was unavailable in Ireland, and only orthodox marriages were recognized in Israel. And in the U.S. doctors providing abortion services were murdered in God’s name.

The desire of the religious imagination for temporal power is very much alive in the world, and if we accomodate its terms of reference we risk, dangerously, giving it a path to increase its control over the intellectual and political life of society. If Roman Gods were tolerant of other dieties, the God of the Hebrew scriptures that gave rise to all the Abrahamic faiths –Judaism, Christianity, Islam—notoriously was not. He was a “jealous” God. He laid down the law, and if one did not follow it, or was not sufficiently deferential, he enthusiastically ordered the slaughter of you and yours unto x generations to come. His commands are absolutely binding and are not subject to debate or compromise. The religious traditions that grew out of belief in him are all more or less legalistic, intolerant, and brook no argument. They can form no healthy basis for a democratic body politic.



 

PEUT-ON CRITIQUER LES RELIGIONS

Sur les forums de Libération il y en a un ( lien sur le titre au dessus) qui pose la question, « Peut-on critiquer les religions ? » Je viens d’ajouter ma voix (sous le nom d’utilisateur « jallajalla ») aux deux autres qui, avec plus d’éloquence que moi, ont dit « Oui, et c’est incroyable, cette question, deux cent ans après Voltaire ». Je suppose que le controverse autour des propos du pape a déclenché cette interrogation, mais elle me semble mal fondée. Est-ce qu’un homme libre peut lui répondre autrement que « oui » ?

J’ai peur que l’humanité, effrayée de l’incertitude qui est son destin, vient de demander avec toute la violence de son cœur déçu, un niveau de pleine certitude qui pour combler, on doit se mentir. Pour où, dans tout ça, joue la foi son rôle de soutenir l’âme de l’homme pendant ces crises de « sans savoir ». Beaucoup d'hommes « de foi » soi-disant vont au-delà de ce que la foi soi-même promet et veulent des connaissances que quels dieux qu'il y aient ne leur ont pas donnés. C’est, dans un sens assez religieux, la péché d’orgueil.

La théologie soi-même critique la religion, même s'elle épargne les dogmes de la foi. Nous qui ne sommes pas croyants de ceci ou cela parmi les choix embarrassants des fois devons aller plus loin. D’une telle critique ne veut pas dire nécessairement que l'athée seule a raison. Elle a plutôt le sens : Il y a des choses que l’on peut sait, qui sont vérifiable encore et encore une fois publiquement, et il y a des choses, ce que quelques-uns croit même plus importantes, auxquelles nous devons placer notre foi. C’est à dire la connaissance et la croyance ne sont pas même pareilles.

A Word About the Name/ À Propos le Nom

First, a word about the name of the blog. It comes from the formula that Voltaire used through much of his life when signing his letters and translates roughly to, "Crush the vile thing". In the context of the rest of his preoccupations it seems clear that the "thing" was a composite of religious intolerance, fanaticism, and, more generally, all the hateful irrationalities that drive humans to kill each other. I've chosen it because I find Voltaire's general attitude remarkably pertinent in a superstitious 21st century where, to the still supurating sores of religious conflict is added the post-modern fantasy that economics is a law of nature rather than something coerced out of human choices. We are furthermore imformed by the political elite of the West that we will be financially globalized whether we like it or not because some vague physics of history is pushing us in that direction. There is a religious fervor surrounding these assumptions, very likely because they cannot be proved. But we will revisit the theme again and again, so there is no need to belabor the point here.

My intention is to post both in English --where, flattering myself, I assume that I have some competence -- and in rather execrable French, which I am trying to "améliorer" after thirty years of neglect. Thus voilà:

D’abord, des mots sur le nom du blog. Il provient de la formule utilisée par Voltaire pendant beaucoup de sa vie en signant ses lettres. Je l’ai choisi parce que je retrouve remarquablement pertinente l’attitude de Voltaire dans le 21ieme siècle, superstitieux encore, où aux plaies suppurées encore des conflits religieux s’ajoute le fantasme que l’économie est le résultat d’une loi de la nature au lieu d’une chose contrainte, se levant des choix humains. En outre, les élites occidentales nous disent que le monde sera mondialisé que nous le voulions ou non .................................................................................J’ai intention de poster ici en anglais et en français tous les deux. Mon français est assez exécrable après trente ans pendant lequel je ne l’ai utilisé. Sentez-vous libre de me corriger.