Republicans And The-End-Justifes-The-Means in Politics

The damage the Republican party has done to itself by following the-end-justifies-the-means principle throughout speaker Boehner's tenure is unparalleled. In possession of the biggest majority since 1929, they succumbed to the Marxist policies of Barack Obama, undoubtedly the worst and politically and culturally most damaging president we all have seen and will ever see in our lifetime. The Republicans failed to repeal the Affordable Care Act, they didn't defund Planned Parenthood, and they let Obama get away with his destructive immigration policies. In fear of being blamed for government shutdowns, they avoided them, rather than going all the way and making clear to the public that the blame is on the dogmatically progressive president. 

In November 2013, I published an essay on the troublesome predominance of the ends-justifies-the-means approach in politics (https://www.edwinseditorial.com/2013/11/the-end-justifies-means-but-one.html). At the time, a host of domestic and international issues provided the profound background to analyze the damaging effects of a mere consequentialist approach in political decision-making. 

 

The performance of the Republican Party of the Congress since their landslide win in the Congressional Elections in 2014 adds a new chapter to the book of consequentialist horror. Not even conservatives comprehend that any policy disregarding the principles of righteousness and justice and aims exclusively at temporary opportunistic expediency is doomed to fail in the medium and long term. 

  

This treacherous path to yield and surrender principles the political right in this country is supposed to stand for appears to be continued with the election of Rep. Paul Ryan as the successor to John Boehner. Ryan has a reputation for being pro-amnesty and in favor of quite open borders. His support for the Trans-Pacific Partnership (T.T.P.) trade deal, which has been coined "Obamatrade' by hardcore Republicans, is not popular in many quarters of his party. His softness and personal tendency to surrender became visible in his vice presidential debate against Joe Biden when Ryan was unable to rein in the hysterically laughing Biden, losing a TV-debate he would otherwise have won on conceptual grounds. 

The appointment of Paul Ryan as the new speaker of the house heralds the continuation of the unfortunate course of consequentialist politics most likely pursued by the Republican party. The most alerting reason Ryan was not the right choice derives from the fact that Barack Obama and many in the Democratic caucus welcome his appointment. They believe that Paul Ryan will represent that compliant and accommodating counterpart they are used to from the days of Speaker Boehner. 

But let's hope they are wrong and, if Paul Ryan is elected new speaker, he will remind himself of the real values his party stands for, steer a more proper course, and takes the lessons from his poor debate performance into consideration.

U.S. Political System in Process of Degeneration

As the pundits on all major news outlets are surmising over who won the first Democratic Presidential Debate on CNN, I heard nobody mention the only real loser of that debate - the American political system and, therefore, the American people.

The decisive moment happened even before the candidates were introduced and entered the stage. At the outset, Barack Obama addressed the Democratic candidates and the viewers in a taped video message, advising them to work and fight hard to keep the White House in 2016. Mind you, if a Head of State, who has to be the leader of all people, addresses only the candidates of his political party, something is seriously wrong. It was a clear sign that the United States' political system degenerates ever more into a caricature of what it is supposed to be.
   
When it comes to the institutional pillars and the bipartisan principles of the political system he is constitutionally bound to serve, a president ought to rise above party politics and exercise some measure of political neutrality that his office demands. In other words, if Obama addressed both Democratic and Republican candidates, encouraging a fair and constructive race for the presidential elections in 2016, he would raise respect for the office he is holding. To abuse a video message before the debate of Democratic candidates for cheap partisan propaganda is repulsive.

But this is but one manifestation of the decline of the political culture in the U.S., besides the constant lying of even the highest political representatives, the shirking of responsibility for policy failures, and the polarization between political forces to the degree of outright hatred and attempted annihilation.

That the political system in the U. S. is degenerating into the lows of a Banana Republic is no longer an unfounded assumption. To initiate a swift turnaround is the call of the hour.

Can A Muslim Be President? Why Dr. Ben Carson Was Right

Dr. Ben Carson got caught off guard when he stated in an interview that he couldn't possibly envisage a Muslim exercising the office of the president of the U.S. Yet, in principle, his answer was right on. The outcry in American-Muslim and progressive quarters demonstrates once again the want for proper erudition on significant subject matters of political and cultural affairs in this country. 

Islam's limited appeal to open and democratic societies stem from the absence of a dogma separating religion from State. What is still missing in the Muslim creed is something similar to the two-swords or two-kingdoms doctrine that Christendom has articulated, reaching back to St. Augustine and his De Civitate Dei. 

When Augustine distinguished the Civitas Dei, the City of God, and the Civitas Terrena, the City of Men, or the Earthly City, he laid the foundation for the separation of Church and State.  By separating the heavenly and spiritual realm from the temporal earthly domain, Augustine paved the way for developing the dualist Christian doctrine that sees the Church control the spiritual kingdom, whereas, in contrast, the State is in charge of worldly affairs. While the spiritual realm stands hierarchically higher and allows the Church to influence politics and societal matters, the doctrine excludes the City of God's enforcement upon the City of Men. In other words, a Christian theocracy would collide with the dogmatic principles of the religion itself.  The wisdom of this corresponds with Jesus' sayings, "My kingdom is not of this world" (as stated in John 18:36) and "Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and unto God the things that are God's" (Matthew 22:21). On the basic tenet that the Kingdom of God awaits the Christian believer in a different world, one of divine and spiritual nature, it is proper and suitable to establish and submit to earthly authorities in Man's worldly existence. In the vein of this accepted wisdom of western thinking, the concept of the nation-state evolved and spread across the globe, with its original idea of a separation of powers and monopolization of force by secular political entities.
 
Unlike Christianity, Islam does not separate religion from politics. Attempts to reconcile Islamic tenets with secular governance are barely visible. Sharia law is prevalent, which means, strictly speaking, that divine law imposes upon earthly conditions. Jurisprudence in Islam is merely the expansion and application of Sharia onto worldly circumstances. In other words, in its most serious interpretation, Islam is a religion that aims to manifest God's kingdom in the realm of men. The objective is to establish the Ummah, the community of the true believers, of all Muslim people, sharing the same ideology, culture, and beliefs, dictated and held together by (divine) Sharia law. 

Islam must provide a straightforward solution to the separation of Church and State, religion and politics, a division between the ecclesiastical and civil sphere, and the divine and secular realms. Until accomplished, any representative of this religion will unavoidably be in collision with either his/her Muslim belief system or the political environment of a Christian-based society in which he/she wants to live. 

This circumstance does not impair or curtail religious freedom that Christian societies usually grant other faiths by allowing them the free exercise of their religion. As shown, the restriction to hold individual political offices emerges from the dogma of Islam's religion itself. 

However, particularly concerning the First Amendment to the United States Constitution, the discussed aspect highlights the general problem of equal treatment of all religions in a political system based on Christianity's intellectual, cultural, and social heritage.  The question is how this heritage, as it reflects itself in the customs, laws, and cultural configurations of this very society, be upheld if religions whose traditions and spiritual principles are in many respects irreconcilable with the Christian host environment are considered equal? 

The question directed at Dr. Ben Carson could ensue consequences and entail a public debate that might lead far beyond the aspect of whether or not a Muslim could become president of the United States of America. It brings to the fore a weakness in the First Amendment that the founders didn't foresee when they adopted this amendment on December 15, 1791. 

We have to assume that in those early years of the new republic, the legislators could not have possibly anticipated that the Christian roots of this new nation would ever be discredited or put in doubt. And neither that somebody could seriously raise a question of the kind directed at Dr. Carson. 

Though this be madness, yet there is method in it!

Shakespeare's aphorism from Hamlet comes to mind when one looks into the state of affairs in global relations. With every day, the evidence becomes overwhelming that what I considered to be the political blunder of a U.S. administration run by a presidential dilettante of hitherto unknown proportions is part of a grand, albeit pathological, globalist strategic design.

The plan appears to aim at a New World Order under the exclusive leadership of the United States. Going back to the Project for the New American Century (P.N.A.C.), a neoconservative think-tank of the late 1990ies, this foreign policy approach has guided U.S. foreign policy in principle ever since. Despite its roots in the Republican party, the Imperialist idea of establishing a Pax Americana, a New World Order enforced and controlled by the U.S., was willfully extended by the governing regime of the Democratic Party under Barack Obama. While slamming the Bush-Cheney administration for the Iraq War and attempting to take military control over the Gulf region, he aggressively continued shaping foreign affairs policies and implementing an international security order according to American interests. Since Obama took office, we could witness the instigation of the Arab Spring by the support of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt against President Mubarak, the backing of insurgents in Libya and Syria, and the turning of both nations into failed states. Furthermore, the Obama administration enabled the formation of ISIS and caused the death of tens of thousands of people and the displacement and flight of hundreds of thousands. Those policies drove the world into chaos, thus far unparalleled in our lifetime.
 
However, American imperialism, hiding behind alleged democratic principles and presumed policy necessities, landed one of its probably most sanctimonious achievements in Ukraine by orchestrating a coup d'état against the democratically-elected, albeit allegedly corrupt, government of then-president Yanukovich. By establishing the Washington and Berlin-backed Poroshenko administration in Kyiv, the U.S. and the E.U. drove Ukraine into a fratricidal civil war and severely damaged Ukraine's and Russia's economy. In the usual reversal of cause-effect realities, the mainstream media and the U.S. State Department blamed Russia's aggression and Mr. Putin's expansionism. Since then, the military build-up on the Russian and NATO side has drastically increased, laying the seed for what quite a few commentators consider to be the initial charge for World War III.

From a western and transatlantic alliance perspective, though, a most disturbing development has to be seen in the unleashing of a wave of mass migration from the Middle East's conflict regions toward Central Europe, particularly toward the more developed and geographically conveniently located nations within the European Union. While many speculate where tens of thousands of destitute refugees get the money from to pay people smugglers and traffickers, the suspicion arises that the leading proponents and do-gooders launched a grand strategic design for a New World Order against their allies on the European continent. Ethnic and cultural subversion shall help synchronize and conform to the masses and thereby facilitate (world) governance under U.S. preeminence.

We are confronting new faces of contemporary warfare - mass immigration of people from Muslim parts of the world into countries of Christian provenance; de(con)struction of the cultural and moral fabric of western societies; the advancement of progressive secularism; obliteration of traditional family structures; legalization of drugs.

The quarter-century of post-Cold War (world) order did not see the emergence of a definite geostrategic posture based on traditional territorial scenarios and clear front-lines. Instead, an ever-increasing (world) disorder materialized, pushed by global players' reckless policies that side with the U.S. government and its international dominance goal, unchallenged by other nations or regional powers.

The path to this centralized and quite totalitarian World Order is paved, at the bottom, by the weakening, and, in the long run, dissolution of the nation-state concept. A subject matter that will warrant a comprehensive analysis on its own; one that I will provide in a forthcoming essay.

If there is truth to this rough outline of global affairs, then indeed, the madness does have a method!

The Phenomenon of Violence and the Myth of a White Hate Crime Wave Targeting Blacks

Be it on an individual level or a political scale, specific manifestations of violence have always been beyond the reach of rational comprehension. Based on a proper ontological design underlying human existence, it might be safe to say that the phenomenon of violence for the mere sake of violence has accompanied humankind forever.

Let's remind ourselves of last-judgment day sectarians or similar chaotic associations who are driven by apocalyptic visions and are often willing to use violence solely for the sake of power, without any further justifications. Also, let's think of those lone-wolf killers who could not transcend their aggression and self-hatred and their discontent with how life presented itself to them. They magnified their desire for death and self-annihilation by extending it to as many other humans as possible. I consider the Germanwings co-pilot Andreas Lubitz, who took 149 passengers with him when he decided to put an end to his own life, the most recent sad, as well as evident, an instance of the described phenomenon.

We will never know precisely why Dylann Roof, who killed nine people in a church in Charleston, South Carolina, was intellectually and psychologically incapable of rising above his hatred toward black people. Were his white supremacy convictions merely an expression to cover his feelings of inferiority? Was it his desire to become "famous," to be recognized and enter history forever, albeit as a vile criminal, that made him do what he did? Psychological evaluations might give us an idea or provide an ensemble of the reasons which led him and others to his despicable deed. Yet, we can never be sure. We will never know any of this for certain simply because psychology is not an exact science, and absolute rational psychology is a myth that only faces those who are lacking profound erudition.

However, we know that the hate crime perpetrated by Dylann Roof is NOT evidencing a general hate-crime disposition of whites to commit crimes on blacks. While liberals are speedily trying to exploit the tragic Charleston incident by making us believe that a wave of hate crimes committed by whites against blacks is in full swing, it doesn't exist.

If FBI statistics are correct, although being outnumbered by whites five to one, blacks commit eight times more crimes against whites than the other way around. A white male is 40 times more likely to being assaulted by a black person than the reverse. And the number of blacks killed by other blacks vastly outnumbers the number of blacks killed by whites. Let's be clear. I have quite a few black friends, and I do not feel threatened by blacks per se. These are mere statistical data, but they tell and contradict the idea of a hate-crime wave of whites on blacks.

Are there white supremacists out there who fuel racial division? Of course, there are. But their influence pales compared to the degree to which others have given impetus to this country's racial division - for instance: The Black Lives Matter Movement, or Reverend Al Sharpton, or the Obama Justice Department under Eric Holder. Most of all, Barack Obama incited racial division in this country, which has worsened in the past few years at an alarming pace.

I am running out of superlatives to describe what's going on - i.e., the lack of judgment in large parts of the population, the disingenuousness of politicians and media, and people's overall tendency to give precedence to ideological prejudice over objectivity and impartiality.

"Draw Muhammad" - Freedom and the First Amendment Misunderstood

Any type of blasphemy is utterly irresponsible and morally unjustifiable. In my blog essay below of March 31, "The Crisis of Morality" (https://www.edwinseditorial.com/2015/03/the-crisis-of-morality.html), I outlined the connection between freedom and responsibility, in fact making clear that both are but two sides of the same coin. We can't think of freedom without responsibility; responsibility is void unless somebody is free to act. Consequently, human freedom is about responsible freedom. Irresponsible freedom, the arbitrariness of doing what one wills, epitomizing itself in unconstrained ego-centrism, gives only the illusion of freedom. Whoever is a prisoner of his impulses and indifferent selfishness is not free; but rather held hostage by his deficient personality, always inclined to act irresponsibly. 

From my morality essay below: "True human freedom is finite freedom, limited by the conditions of social coexistence and the legitimate aspirations of all other individuals. We must not mistake freedom as independence from everything, but rather has to be considered as a choice to something."

From this quote, it becomes clear that our responsibility as human beings extends, in any given social and political context, to all other human entities and living organisms, as far as they assume significance in terms of our own actions. And the line of demarcation between our freedom, and the freedom of every other, in a most formal and universally applicable way, is what we call justice. Injustice, therefore, is the extension of one's freedom beyond the boundary of justice into the realm of somebody else's freedom, encroaching upon the entitlement to make use of their freedom. If we meet the claims of righteousness by our own volition, we exercise justice morally. Conversely, the purpose of human law, which always connects to enforcement capabilities, is to outline this line of demarcation we call justice and, when violated, to implement and enforce it. This explanation also establishes the perennial task for the legislator to determine justice in relevant existential contexts at any time and in any place. As we can see, while the application of justice is dynamic and ever-changing, as it has to consider the evolution of human coexistence, the idea of justice is timeless and unchanging. However, this also explains why positive law stipulations, which lose sight of this normative principle, can represent unjust legislature.

 

This concept is universal and normative and also sound in religious terms. The face of the Other is "Where God passes" (Emmanuel Levinas), bestowing upon us, in the social condition of our existence, the primary responsibility, which is ethical and arises from the equally valid claim to freedom that our fellow man asserts. 

Having said this, we become aware of how utterly irresponsible, and thus unnecessary and (morally) unjustifiable, any form of blasphemy is. No matter what law allows for, never is it ethically justified to mock or ridicule other people's faith. To provoke Muslims by making fun of their Prophet Muhammad is as misplaced as provoking Christians by deriding Jesus Christ in works of satire and art. In Paris, Charlie Hebdo was misguided and irresponsible in using his satirical magazine to mock religious figures, as was Ms. Pamela Geller in her "Draw Muhammad" cartoon competition in Garland, Texas. Both were pushing their ideological and monetary aims by hiding behind a clear misinterpretation of the free speech principle, be it expressed in the form of the 1st Amendment to the U.S. Constitution or in the form of a moral-philosophical ideal. 

Genuinely free and therefore utterly responsible people have long understood that responsible behavior does never exhaust itself by merely abiding by law regulations. They have comprehended the fact that the legal provision, first and foremost, establishes the conditions one doesn't have to suffer. In contrast, moral responsibility determines what we have to do and how we ought to act. 

If, however, somebody engages in blasphemy under the guise of artistic creativity or political free speech, could we think of any ethical-moral severe concept that would justify killing this person? Of course not. Interestingly, the blasphemous act tells us something about the individual's moral character or group of individuals carrying it out. The reaction of the recipients of the wicked action tells us even more about their concept of humaneness.

Same-Sex Marriages - The Supreme Court in Charge of this Society's Future

In 2010, at a time when Barack Obama and hosts of other politicians and media pundits championed the states to decide the issue of same-sex marriages, I argued that such profound cultural questions "must not be left to regional sentiments and the arbitrariness of state legislatures." Readers can found the respective blog essay below under the title of "Ideological Misuse of Federalism leads to Bad Governance" (https://www.edwinseditorial.com/2012/05/ideological-abuse-of-federalism-leads.html)

Boy, was I right! One beauty of proper philosophical reasoning is the timelessness of its findings. Like most of my other writings, this essay is as topical as when I published it on Oct 9, 2010. In the case of Mr. Obama, who had just departed from his previous conviction and come around to embrace same-sex marriages, it was quite apparent that it was about shirking responsibility along with political expediency that made him espouse that stance. 

Now, roughly four years later, the Supreme Court has to decide the issue for the entire country. As was to expect, the court is profoundly divided over the issue. In the following, I outline the why and provide the solution and answer to this subject matter: 

What underlies this and, more or less, all socially contested issues is an undifferentiated misconception and misuse of the principle of equality. In addition to the false philosophical conception of the equality notion, ideological strategies are applied in the public and political realms to protect the idea and prevent a fierce debate from taking hold. Whoever attempts to question equality aspirations is being denigrated as discriminating, antiquated, a violator of human rights. As far as the issue of same-sex marriages is concerned, opponents are even called homophobic. This intolerable state of public debate needs urgent change. The essential prerequisite for a turnaround would be the proper theoretical understanding of the notion of equality, as, with Aristotle, only sound theory can ultimately provide for good (political) practice. 

 

It is clear that in terms of their human dignity, all men are equal – male and female, people of any ethnic descent, skin color or sexual orientation, infants and geriatrics, everybody. Yet, in addition to their biological and sexual differences, all humans are different regarding their concrete way of being. How would we otherwise justify different income levels, responsibilities and entitlements, property, and tenure? 

For the proper dealing with the idea of equality, it is thus inevitable to differentiate two levels of equality – the formal or primary one, on which all men are equal; and the factual or secondary one, based on the former, on which differentiation and disparities are allowed. The fact grasped that equality clearly forbids a schematic equal treatment and not only affords but even demands differentiations that have to be justified by objective and factual rationales. The only thing the principle of equality forbids is arbitrary and baseless differentiation. 

This outlined dualism of form and content forbids the schematic and straightforward treatment of gender issues and any other aspect of social disparity, including the issue of same-sex marriages. 

"To treat the latter different from traditional marriage does not at all violate the principle of equality. The (moral) imperative to upkeep traditional marriage in its exclusivity – as a religious sacrament as well as a civil union – derives from the idea that every social claim has to be designated its proper place in the cultural cosmos of (occidental values) and ideas."

This cultural underpinning cannot and must not be altered by impulses of individual hedonism and personal gratification, which seem to have become the driving social forces in our societies. Instead, the stakes of the common good and humanistic considerations have got to return to our public, political, and legal discourses. 

But in the given context, we must not deceive ourselves over the fact that when it comes to the claims of the gay communities and particularly same-sex marriages, it is about more than merely the desire to satisfy individual sensitivities and personal preferences. When we deal with gender issues and related topics, we face claims that aim to create new power structures and identity designs that substantially alter our societies. The termination of the traditional binary gender code in the name of equal treatment and anti-discrimination, as a precondition for the destruction of traditional marriage, is supposed to pave the way for an amorphous society that allows for all possible combinations of social coexistence and ways of life. 

The burden resting on the Supreme Court judges' shoulders is no small one, for the future of this society will depend in no small measure on their decision. A community losing its capability to enclose itself in a "bounded horizon" (Friedrich Nietzsche), losing its sense for differentiation and the power to accept a hierarchy of values, its instinct for rank and distance, is destined to perish.