We Got Fooled Again!

Nothing Bush has done has invited as many comparisons to Watergate as has the recent US Attorney Scandal.

New Developments in the U.S. Attorney Controversy: Why Bush Refuses to Allow Karl Rove and Harriet Miers to Testify Before Congress, and What Role New White House Counsel Fred Fielding May Play

US Atty Scandal Shines Light on Bush Adminstration Voter Suppression Efforts

Bush Administration's Stubborn Stonewall Stands In The Way Of The Truth

Gonzales' former aide rode the fast track

While many Bush abuses may be more ominous from a Constitutional standpoint, a partisan, wholesale firing of US attorneys summons a lot of bad memories. Most notably Nixon's Saturday Night Massacre. Nixon ordered Attorney General Elliot L. Richardson to fire Watergate Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox. When Richardson refused, Nixon fired Richardson, tapping Solicitor General Robert H. Bork to do the dirty deed.

Nixon abolished the office of the special prosecutor and turned over to the Justice Department the entire responsibility for further investigation and prosecution of suspects and defendants in Watergate and related cases. It was then that we understood the degree to which Nixon was guilty of high crimes and misdemeanors. It was then that his fate was sealed. Eventually, the task of prosecuting Watergate fell to a Texan -Leon Jaworski of Houston:

In July 1974 he argued the case of United States v. Nixon before the United States Supreme Court and won a unanimous decision ordering President Richard Nixon to turn over to the district court magnetic audio tapes that implicated him and members of his staff in a conspiracy to obstruct justice. Shortly thereafter, President Nixon resigned from office. Jaworski published his account of the Watergate prosecution as The Right and the Power (1976).

--The Handbook of Texas Online

Watergate is memorable for its Orwellian use of phrases like executive privilege. It is more reasonable to assert that executive privilege is a mere fiction, invented by presidents to enhance their power. The process began with George Washington:

The Constitution nowhere expressly mentions executive privilege. Presidents have long claimed, however, that the constitutional principle of separation of powers implies that the Executive Branch has a privilege to resist certain encroachments by Congress and the judiciary, including some requests for information.

For example, in 1796, President Washington refused to comply with a request by the House of Representatives for documents relating to the negotiation of the then-recently adopted Jay Treaty with England. The Senate alone plays a role in the ratification of treaties, Washington reasoned, and therefore the House had no legitimate claim to the material. Accordingly, Washington provided the documents to the Senate but not the House.

Eleven years later, the issue of executive privilege arose in court. Counsel for Aaron Burr, on trial for treason, asked the court to issue a subpoena duces tecum--an order requiring the production of documents and other tangible items--against President Thomas Jefferson, who, it was thought, had in his possession a letter exonerating Burr.

After hearing several days of argument on the issue, Chief Justice John Marshall issued the order commanding Jefferson to produce the letter. Marshall observed that the Sixth Amendment right of an accused to compulsory process contains no exception for the President, nor could such an exception be found in the law of evidence. In response to the government's suggestion that disclosure of the letter would endanger public safety, Marshall concluded that, if true, this claim could furnish a reason for withholding it, but that the court, rather than the Executive Branch alone, was entitled to make the public safety determination after examining the letter.

-A Brief History of Executive Privilege from George Washington through Dick Cheney, Michael Dorf, Findlaw

Executives will continue to raise the issue. When the right wing has packed the court, it will raise the issue yet again, hoping that a friendly court will give an ambitious, would-be dictator a favorable ruling on the issue of executive privilege.

In the meantime, the recent scandals remind us that the legacy of Watergate is but the latest in some three decades of GOP corruption, lies, and incompetent mismanagement.

Alas, the lessons that we thought had been learned by Watergate were not learned by the GOP. The GOP learned all the wrong lessons. The GOP learned how not to get caught. Reagan was more successful in hushing it all up than was Nixon. Though it is fondly remembered by the GOP faithful, the Reagan administration put the Nixon White House in the shade. If you are truly concerned about Iran's alleged nuclear weapons program, then you must surely remember that it was Ronald Reagan who armed Iran in a convoluted plan to arm and finance the "contras" in Nicaragua. Arming an avowed enemy of the United States is treason.

Was Reagan himself involved? I believe he was and so did Lawrence Walsh, the special prosecutor charged with investigating what must surely have been a case of high treason:

The underlying facts of Iran/contra are that, regardless of criminality, President Reagan, the secretary of state, the secretary of defense, and the director of central intelligence and their necessary assistants committed themselves, however reluctantly, to two programs contrary to congressional policy and contrary to national policy. They skirted the law, some of them broke the law, and almost all of them tried to cover up the President's willful activities.

-Lawrence Walsh, Concluding Observations, Final Report of the Independent Counsel for Iran/Contra Matters

The lessons of Watergate were not learned by the GOP. Think of it -with the possible exception of Gerald Ford, a light weight -every Republican President since Richard Nixon has been either a crook or a liar. It is easy to conclude that the GOP, therefore, is not a political party. It's a crime syndicate, a criminal conspiracy. As Viet Nam was winding down and Watergate heating up, we vowed not ever to be fooled again. What went wrong?

Those who do not remember the past are condemned to relive it.

-Georges Santayana, American Philsopher

HOME

The Existentialist Cowboy

Imperialism
Bush,
War Crimes,
Iraq

Bush plays American people for fools, "treads dangerous waters"

Now that the Democrats have majorities in both houses, it may be too little too late. For that, we have a timid congress to blame. The GOP congress was eagerly complicit in Bush's crimes while Democrats fear a frontal assault on Bush abuses. The Bush gang sees Congress as a rubber stamp, or worse.

Now Bush is intent upon ignoring the will of a very large majority of Americans by escalating a failed war, by repeating a failed strategy. Bush doesn't care that an overwhelming majority of Americans across the spectrum oppose him on almost every issue. An independent Congress might have held a rogue President in check. The case of Richard Nixon is often cited. But even that tends to point up what might prove to be a fatal flaw in the American system of government. The US Constitution clearly states the powers of Congress in a time of war. But, when it counts most, where are the teeth?

Consider the case of Richard Nixon.

In the very early days of the Watergate Scandal, when it had not yet hit the front pages, Nixon was bombing Cambodia and lying to the American public about it.

Some writers have said that it was the Viet Nam war -until Iraq, the most controversial war the United States had ever conducted -which led ultimately to the collapse of the Nixon administration. By the time Nixon targeted Cambodia, the public had already soured on what looked like an endless war, George Orwell's perpetual war. It is fair to say that Congress found in Watergate a way to check a rogue President.

How does Congress oversee a secret war? Nixon planned to destroy what was called Area 353. To do so, the Pentagon would send 60 B-52s to bomb so-called "legitimate" targets in South Vietnam. But most - 48 of them - would be secretly diverted to Cambodia upon a signal from the Joint Chiefs of Staff.


Nixon lied about about the bombing, he lied about Cambodia's neutrality, he lied about "winding down the war". In The Price of Power, Seymour M. Hersh confirmed that rather than checking Nixon's rogue administrion, Congress, then as now, seemed all too compliant. No congressman wanted to be seen as "weak". No congressman wanted to oppose plans to "... ferret out the Viet Cong headquarters" as Congress had been told of the "mission".

Nixon committed atrocities in Cambodia and lied about them. Cambodia was a neutral nation that had not attacked the US and had not taken sides in Viet Nam's internal conflict. Nevertheless, American and South Vietnamese troops together committed war crimes consisting of the destruction of villages and towns. It does not excuse Congress that Nixon lied to them and got away with it. It does not excuse Congress that no attempt was made at "oversight". It does not excuse Congress that Presidents have become dictators.

Indeed, it is a pity that a fourth article of impeachment was rejected by a Congress that seemed willing, even in triumph, to subvert its charge and abrogate its duties under the US Constitution. The rejected fifth article of impeachment against Richard Nixon reads:

In his conduct of the office of President of the United States, Richard M. Nixon, in violation of his constitutional oath faithfully to execute the office of President of the United States and, to the best of his ability, preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States, and in disregard of his constitutional duty to take care that the laws be faithfully executed, on and subsequent to March 17, 1969, authorized, ordered, and ratified the concealment from the Congress of false and misleading statements concerning the existence, scope and nature of American bombing operations in Cambodia in derogation of the power of the Congress to declare war, to make appropriations and to raise and support armies, and by such conduct warrants impeachment and trial and removal from office.

Article V, Articles of Impeachment against Richard M. Nixon

Bush is no Nixon. Less intelligent, he is more dangerous. Nixon had hoped to pacify Congress or, at least, distract it. The war in Viet Nam was said to have been "winding down" as combat roles were transferred to the "government" in South Vietnam, as Bush would love to do now in Iraq but cannot. Like Nixon before him, he will escalate the war; unlike Nixon and more like Hitler, he will do so in "...full view of the world". ( the phrase ...in full view of the world". was used by Hitler to describe his persecution of Jews) For an unexpurgated history of Nixon's war crime against Cambodia see: Lying for Empire: How to Commit War Crimes With A Straight Face by David Model.

To be fair, Viet Nam tainted every President since Eisenhower. To be fair, it is not only this Congress that has fallen down on the job. It is not only Republicans who actively conspire with war hawk executives. It is also Democrats who fear to be seen as weak.

It takes courage to oppose a tyrant. Until the Democrats in congress find the courage to oppose a rogue and tyrannical chief executive, the Iraq war will not "wind down" nor will the Iraqi people, blamed unfairly for Bush's war crime against them, step up to pull Bush's fat out of the fire.

It is easy to make analogies to Nixon but few are in as good a position to do so as John Dean, White House Counsel to Richard Nixon.




You will find Dean's book, Conservatives Without Consciences, reviewed on this blog.

And now for something completely different --Oscar Peterson and Andre Previn:

woodstock 1969 santana
Uploaded by fanstes

Peter Nero Plays Gershwin


HOME

The Existentialist Cowboy

Imperialism
Bush,
War Crimes,
Iraq

Time to impeach, convict, and remove Bush

At last, the "I" word is spoken aloud. Dare we hope that America has emerged from a self-imposed neo-Stalinism? The issue, of course, is not Iraq or Bush's numerous other outrages. The issue is this administration's firing of US attorneys under questionable, suspicious circumstances.

Washington is abuzz with talk of Watergate, comparisons are made to Richard Nixon's Saturday Night Massacre. Even now, Bush seems safe from actual impeachment. What is refreshing is the new willingness on the part of many to take Bush on. Some of his most acerbic critics can be found in his own party.

The level of discourse is a measure of just how bad things have become, how desperately people need accountability. Don't get excited just yet. It was, arguably, an honest House that drew up the articles of impeachment against Richard Nixon. The House today is still packed with ideological Bush loyalists and corporate Republicans. At best, a country club, at worst -a cult. Actual impeachment will require substantial if not miraculous changes in GOP attitudes.

Of course, the framers understood that despite safeguards, a rogue president might harm the nation, the Constitution, the people, the world. This President has most certainly done that by subverting the mechanism of justice, abusing the courts and the separation of powers. During the Watergate Scandal, the "...House Judiciary Committee determined that (Presidential) abuses did not have to violate the criminal code" to warrant impeachment and removal. The standard they established was whether or not “great and dangerous offenses" subverted the Constitution.” Findlaw columnist, John Dean, White House Counsel to Richard Nixon, most certainly thinks that Bush's conduct meets that test in several areas.

In truth, much more is at stake here for both the Congress and the White House than this bare description of the conflict would indicate. These issues strike at the heart of what post-Watergate conservative Republicans seek to create: an all-powerful presidency. Thus, for the same reason that Vice President Cheney went to extreme lengths to block Congress from getting information about the work of his National Energy Task Force, as I discussed in prior columns such as this one, I expect President Bush to take what will appear to be a similar irrational posture. For both Bush and Cheney, virtually any limit on presidential power is too great.

-John Dean, Former White House Counsel, Findlaw

Of course, Bush abused the powers of his office with regard to the "firing" scandal. But even before this scandal reached the mainstream media, Bush was known to have flouted law and Constitution as egregiously in other ways. Certainly, he should be impeached, tried, and removed from office. The will to do so is something else again. Three main issues seem to be converging amid growing outrage.

Bush told numerous lies in order to begin his war of aggression against Iraq. He told many more after the fact to justify it. John Dean, writing for Findlaw, asked: Is lying about the reason for a war an impeachable offense?

As Dean points out, Bush "...made a number of unequivocal statements about the reason" for the US attack and invasion of Iraq, a sovereign nation. And just as significant, in my opinion, is the fact that when WMD were not found in Iraq, Bush mounted a full court press to sell numerous ex post facto cases for war. None of them have turned out to be true.

Bush deliberately deceived the American people, the Congress, and the United Nations. It is impossible write a single sentence that adequately conveys the magnitude of this crime, a crime that has cost some 3,000 American lives, and, by the best estimate, more than 650,000 Iraqi lives, most of which are civilian.

The war itself is a war crime, a crime against humanity. It could not be mitigated politically even if what we now know to be lies had turned out to be true. Nothing mitigates mass murder even when it is perpetrated with the military powers of a sovereign state.

The conduct of the war is cause itself to impeach George W. Bush. Specifically, Bush facilitated the "mistreatment of detainees" in violation of the Geneva Conventions, U.S. statutes (including the War Crimes Act of 1996 and US Criminal Codes, Section 2441), the Nuremberg Principles, and other treaties to which the US is bound. Bush himself, by his directive, exempted alleged al Qaeda and Taliban "detainees" from those protections and did so in the absence of probable cause.

But GITMO and Abu Ghraib abuses were intended to be kept secret. It didn't work out that way and the entire world was outraged. The American effort in Iraq was lost when the abuses became public. Bush lost the moral high ground, if he ever had it. As John Dean points out, "Bush failed to conduct thorough investigations or to ensure that those responsible" would be brough to justice. The investigations most certainly have not gone further than the lower level show trials that were served up to distract the public and the media.

Related to the war of aggression in Iraq, is the deliberate "outing" of Valerie Plame, an undercover CIA operative. As Bill Maher angrily declared: "Traitors don't get to question my patriotism." Indeed, the cynical act of retaliation against Joe Wilson for daring to question Bush's WMD rationale must certainly rank as high treason -endangering the life of an undercover operative, subverting national security, covering up bald faced lies told by the Bush gang of criminals and traitors to the nation. It typifies a criminal administration willing to do anything in order to cover up its many heinous crimes

At last, amid the numerous abuses, all of which are most certainly impeachable by established standards, just being "out to lunch" and "asleep at the wheel" may be among the most important. As Bill Maher points out, when told "America is under attack", Bush just sat there. Pulling faces. Squirming. Crossing his eyes.

Additional resources:

• Kucinich: “I'm Talking About Impeachment”
  
• Is lying about the reason for a war an impeachable offense?
  
• The Origins and Scope of Presidential Impeachment (Hinkley Journal of Politics)
  
• Former attorney general says Bush should be impeached

Because news about the Bush administration is always heavy and depressing, I have decided to post something of a positive nature at the end of every "Bush-oriented" post, something that might even make you happy. Something that might make you smile. I love music of all types, but today, after "auditioning" Leonard Bernstein conducting Gershwin's "Rhapsody in Blue", some Glenn Gould, and other great music, I decided that what our times need right now is some pure, unadulterated Ragtime -Scott Joplin's immortal Maple Leaf Rag

The text link takes your to an audio file of "Maple" by a different pianist -Bob Ringwald. Both versions are good.

The Existentialist Cowboy

Imperialism
Bush,
War Crimes,
Iraq
Bush

Spread the word:

A Challenge for our Time: Would You Rather Die Than Think?

Many people would rather die than think; in fact, most do.

-Bertrand Russell

Bertrand Russell (1872-1970) wrote extensively and profoundly throughout his long lifetime. He won the Nobel prize for literature for his History of Western Philosophy and co-authored the Principia Mathematica with Alfred North Whitehead.

Two essays, however, are among his monumental contributions; they are must reads for lay people and non-professional philosophers today. One is entitled Ideas That Have Harmed Mankind and the other --Ideas That Have Helped Mankind. Despite his frail appearance, Russell was of the "tough minded" school of philosophy and, in that respect, had more in common with Jean-Paul Sartre than he would ever admit. In this short audio file, Russell states succinctly the stark choice that we faced in 1950 and still face today.

In his Autobiography, Russell wrote a fitting prologue for his work:

Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind. These passions, like great winds, have blown me hither and thither, in a wayward course, over a great ocean of anguish, reaching to the very verge of despair.

Later, we find the source of that despair:

Communists, Fascists, and Nazis have successfully challenged all that I thought good, and in defeating them much of what their opponents have sought to preserve is being lost. Freedom has come to be thought weakness, and tolerance has been compelled to wear the garb of treachery.

-Bertrand Russell,Autobiography

Though much of Russell's lasting contribution to world culture rests upon his achievements in pure logic, he was primarily a humanist and a humanitarian. Social activism and politics "ran in the family". He not only wrote about the social issues of his day, he actively tried to influence the tide of history.

Russell was not content to write for academia and other philosophers. He reached a wider public with The Problems of Philosophy (1912) and A History of Western Philosophy (1945). Both books did much to educate several generations -including mine. Russell did not arbitrarily separate education from the pressing issues of the day; rather, he linked progress in education with social progress in general. He is famous for debunking fallacy, propaganda, and, most memorably, superstition and religion. He believed widespread superstition has unwelcome social consequences.

It is tragic that American society did not take to heart Russell`s simple admonition:

I wish to propose for the reader's favourable consideration a doctrine which may, I fear, appear wildly paradoxical and subversive. The doctrine in question is this: that it is undesirable to believe a proposition when there is no ground whatever for supposing it true.

That simple doctrine might have replaced political ideologies of all sorts in America. The tragic regime of George W. Bush might have been avoided. We might have avoided the catastrophe that was Ronald Reagan.

It is easy to understand the rise of Reagan. The GOP faithful would say: "He made us feel good about ourselves". It was an era in which the rapacious greedy felt good about economic plunder. "Greed was good" became a motto. Reagan made it possible for republicans to sleep well at night even as "trickle down" economics was known to displace millions by exporting the very heart of America`s "heavy industry". Perhaps some people ought not feel good about themselves. Some ought not sleep so easily at night.

It is a mistake to think that Russell died a disappointed man because the world had not and could not live up to his hopes. Had he foreseen recent developments in modern America he might have. No! Though easily depicted as a "disembodied intellect", Russell was made of sterner stuff.

This has been my life. I have found it worth living, and would gladly live it again if the chance were offered me.

-Prologue to Bertrand Russell's Autobiography

Russell, though a logician who wrote disparagingly of Sartre's Existentialism which he considered to be almost incomprehensible, Russell was himself, in the finest existentialist tradition, the architect of his own life. Thus, he was himself an "Existentialist" --if not a cowboy.

HOME

The Existentialist Cowboy

Imperialism
Bush,
War Crimes,
Iraq

Why I moderate comments

• SPAM: 'comments' that link to junk, 'get rich' schemes, scams, and nonsense! These are the worst offenders.
• Ad hominem attacks: 'name calling' and 'labeling'. That includes the ad hominem: 'truther' or variations!

Also see:

• A Spiritual Mind Movie
• How the US Became a Vassal State of China
  
• Terrorism is Worse Under GOP Regimes
  
• The US Army Document That Proves the US is the World's Number One Sponsor of World Terrorism
• Dissecting the Scrambled Brains of the GOP
  
• Why the CIA is the World's Number One Terrorist Organization
  [w/LINKS]
• Why the CIA is the World's Number One Terrorist Organization [PDF]
• How the GOP Pays Off its 'Base' of Elites
  

Published Articles on Buzzflash.net

Subscribe

Add to Google

Add Cowboy Videos to Google

Spread the word

Civilization: Amid Old Triumphs, New Threats from Fascism

Bertrand Russell, in his Wisdom of the West, put forward a simple thesis. Western Civilization is essentially Greek civilization.

There is no civilization but the Greek in which a philosophic movement goes hand in hand with a scientific tradition. It is this that gives the Greek enterprise its peculiar scope; it is this dual tradition that has shaped the civilization of the west.

--Bertrand Russell, Wisdom of the West

In support of his thesis, Russell points to the authoritarian, theocratic natures of earlier civilizations --Egypt and Babylonia. Religion, Russell stated, seems inconsistent with the Greek spirit of free inquiry typified most famously by Socrates and the Platonic tradition that followed. It is because Greek civilization was primarily secular, Russell believed, that the spirit of "free inquiry" took root in the west. This spirit, he believed, was incompatible with both authoritarianism and religion itself.

A Renaissance of Western Civilization was associated with the pre-eminence of Lorenzo Di Medici in Florence and specifically his support of a new Plato Academy. Eminent scholars -Marsilio Ficino, Cristoforo Landino, Angelo Poliziano and Demetrios Chalkondyles depicted (above) in Domenico Ghirlandaio's fresco, Zaccaria in the Temple -refocused European attention on the Greek classics and inspired a renewed interest in learning. The plights of Giordano Bruno and Galileo make clear the fact that despite the Greek revival an Eastern religion, Christianity, was, in fact, at odds with the secular nature of inquiry and learning.

But to point that out gets ahead of the story, a story told by Lord Kenneth Clark in his famous Civilization series for the BBC and, most recently, by Thomas Cahill who authored a short but influential book entitled How the Irish Saved Civilization.

Although we associate our Western civilization with "the new learning", it was Scholasticism, kept alive throughout the Dark Ages by clerics, that survived well into the Rennaisance. Russell points out that throughout the 7th through the 9th Centuries, Europe witnessed a Papacy walking the treacherous, narrow line between warring barbarians on the frontiers and Eastern Emperors who had inherited the trappings of the Roman Empire -bureaucracy, a rule of law, various standards of civilization. The barbarians, by contrast, ruled by force. Byzantium was at least civilized and would, in fact, survive the Middle Ages, described by William Manchester as A World Lit Only by Fire.

If civilization is best described as a thin veneer over the otherwise rude necessitudes of sheer survival, it fell to clerics to keep alive the more ephemeral ideals -literacy, the rule of law, the faith itself. That story, of course, began well before the 7th century, well before the fall of Rome itself.

It must surely be one of the great ironies of history that the task of saving civilization may have fallen to the monks of Skellig Michael, a steep rocky crag of an island west of the coast of County Kerry, literally, the cold, dank remote reaches of Ireland.

Never immune from barbarian raids, Ireland's remoteness may have made it the standard bearer of civilization. In one of two surviving documents attributed to Patricius, otherwise known to history as St. Patrick, an interesting tale is told. A young Patricius, having been kidnapped by "wild Irish pirates" at the tender age of 15 years, escaped his captivity in County Mayo. In his "Confession", St. Patrick tells of sailing to Europe with a band of trader/pirates. On the continent, this unlikely band encountered scenes of desolation, abandoned villages, ruined farms, a worrisome lack of food.

And after three days we reached land, and for twenty-eight days journeyed through uninhabited country, and the food ran out and hunger overtook them; and one day the steersman began saying: 'Why is it, Christian? You say your God is great and all-powerful; then why can you not pray for us? For we may perish of hunger; it is unlikely indeed that we shall ever see another human being.' In fact, I said to them, confidently: 'Be converted by faith with all your heart to my Lord God, because nothing is impossible for him, so that today he will send food for you on your road, until you be sated, because everywhere he abounds.' And with God's help this came to pass; and behold, a herd of swine appeared on the road before our eyes, and they slew many of them, and remained there for two nights, and the were full of their meat and well restored, for many of them had fainted and would otherwise have been left half-dead by the wayside.

-The "Confessio" of St. Patrick

If ever there was a time for prayer this was it. The faithful will believe that Patricius's prayer worked.

It is easy to conclude that Patricius and his erstwhile friends had encountered the very twilight of empire, the devastation left in the wake of retreating legions. This is arguably the most concrete picture we have of Europe at that time. It's a picture of European civilization surviving "...by the skin of our teeth", clinging desperately to life like the lichens on the barren rocks of Skellig Michael itself.

This is a notion not easily dismissed and too easily romanticized. After all, we are left the Book of Kells, produced by Celtic monks around AD 800. This work is a testament to the stubborn human impulse to rage at seemingly inexorable forces of chaos, decay, and oblivion. Even atheists must recognize the achievements of quiet, impoverished clerics and scholars over a period of several hundred years. But for their efforts, civilization might simply have faded into a highland mist like so many tales of Avalon.

Is it accurate to give so much credit to Ireland? In his book, How the Irish Saved Civilization, Cahill concedes that Greek literature and the Hebrew and Greek Bibles survived independently elsewhere. "Latin literature would almost surely have been lost without the Irish," he concludes. But, he speculates, "...the national literatures of Europe might not have emerged had the Irish not forged the first great vernacular literature of Europe."

By the time of the Renaissance, however, it fell to the secular minds of men like Leonardo da Vinci and Galileo to advance the spirit of inquiry. A broader view is taken by Russell who saw a broad departure from ancient priesthoods originating in Greece and taking shape over centuries of European history. He also saw the persistent threat of anti-democratic authoritarianism which would be associated in his time with fascism and Nazism:

"There is over a large part of the earth's surface something not unlike a reversion to the ancient Egyptian system of divine kingship, controlled by a new priestly caste. Although this tendency has not gone so far in the West as it has in the east, it has, nevertheless, gone to lengths which would have astonished the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries both in England and in America. Individual initiative is hemmed in either by the state or by powerful corporations, and there is a great danger lest this should produce, as in ancient Rome, a kind of listlessness and fatalism that is disastrous to vigorous life. I am constantly receiving letters saying: 'I see that the world is in a bad state, but what can one humble person do? Life and property are at the mercy of a few individuals who have the decision as to peace or war. Economic activities on any large scale are determined by those who govern either the state or the large corporations. Even where there is nominally democracy, the part which one citizen can obtain in controlling policy is usually infinitesimal. Is it not perhaps better in such circumstances to forget public affairs and get as much enjoyment by the way as the times permit?' I find such letters very difficult to answer, and I am sure that the state of mind which leads to their being written is very inimical to a healthy social life. As a result of mere size, government becomes increasingly remote from the governed and tends, even in a democracy, to have an independent life of its own. I do not profess to know how to cure this evil completely, but I think it is very important to recognize its existence and to search for ways of diminishing its magnitude."

-Bertrand Russell, Authority and the Individual, p. 18-19:

Have we come all this way only to lose civilization to a new and corporate dark age?

The Existentialist Cowboy

Conservative Lies
Greek Civilization
Free Inquiry
Bush

Spread the word: