Why You are Free and the Right Wing is Not!

by Len Hart, The Existentialist Cowboy

The essence of Sartre is found in a slim volume of just under 100 pages: Existentialism and Human Emotions. In a single sentence, Sartre turned several centuries of conventional thinking on its head: "Existence precedes essence". Sartre himself, however, credits Rene Descartes whose cogito ergo sum or, en francais, Je pense donc je suis; in English: "I think, therefore I am".

Sartre writes:

"For we mean that man first exists, that is, that man first of all is the being who hurls himself toward a future and who is conscious of imagining himself as being in the future.

Man is at the start a plan which is aware of itself, rather than a patch of moss, a piece of garbage, or a cauliflower; nothing exists prior to this plan; there is nothing in heaven; man will be what he will have planned to be. Not what he will want to be. Because by the word "will" we generally mean a conscious decision, which is subsequent to what we have already made of ourselves.

I may want to belong to a political party, write a book, get married; but all that is only a manifestation of an earlier, more spontaneous choice that is called "will." But if existence really does precede essence, man is responsible for what he is. Thus, existentialism's first move is to make every man aware of what he is and to make the full responsibility of his existence rest on him. And when we say that a man is responsible for himself, we do not only mean that he is responsible for his own individuality, but that he is responsible for all men."

--Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism and Human Emotions

"Existence precedes essence", therefore, strikes at the very heart of dogma, prejudice, pre-conceived notions of any sort, ideologies into which humankind is inclined to shoe-horn reality. Existentialism begins with a clean slate. The 'moving finger' may or may not write but most certainly does not dictate what we may or may not make of ourselves.

In existentialism, therefore, there is no place to run, no place hide. It is the price we pay for being free. For that reason, existentialism is liberating. Man is no longer limited by theological notions of his origin with God's breath in the Garden or at the tip of God's finger, as depicted by Michelangelo's Sistine Ceiling. That 'man', alone, is responsible for what he is or becomes is the source of 'existential angst'. And also our freedom.

Existentialism is the enemy of dogma --religious, psuedo-scientific, political ideology. For that reason alone, existentialism is often, though fallaciously, identified with the political left-wing. The 'right wing' undermines itself from within, by what Sartre would call 'mauvaise foi', i.e., bad faith.

'Bad faith' was best illustrated by Bertolt Brecht who summed it up: "A man who does not know the truth is just an idiot; but a man who knows the truth and calls it a lie is a crook!" The photographer Richard Avedon was even more succinct: "You cannot expect another man to carry your shit!"

Thus 'bad faith' defines the 'crook' and, thus, the many American politicians who blame a universe of strawmen for their own failures --minorities, liberals, the world-wide communist conspiracy, Islamic 'terrorists' and left-wing subversives throughout the U.S. labor, anti-war and civil rights movements.

Existentialism is the philosophy that says --grow up! Stop making excuses! Stop blaming others! Existentialism is the tough-minded philosophy of no lies, no excuses, no bullshit!

Jean-Paul Sartre: "I am my liberty!"

Cogito ergo sum

Note: The Existentialist Cowboy is currently bombarded by spam from a lunatic name caller of the right wing ilk! Therefore, comments are moderated. Intelligent comments are, as always, welcome! Ad hominem attacks, spam and psychotic drivel is not! Eventually, the offending party will be committed to an asylum and we adults can once again engage in intelligent, articulate dialogue. Thanks for understanding.

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Doug Drenkow: Tea Party Hypocrisy Exposed

by Guest Author, Communications Consultant Doug Drenkow

So let me get this straight. Tea Party darling and Kentucky Republican Senate candidate Rand Paul says that even though the government should not discriminate on the basis of race in public accommodations, it's "unconstitutional" for the government to stop business from discriminating on the basis of race (etc.) in its private business dealings.

I have just one question: Did President Lincoln step out of constitutional bounds with the Emancipation Proclamation? Here I'd just heard the argument from the "states rights" crowd, that the Northern states were infringing on the power of the Southern states to make their own laws.

But according to Paul and the Tea Partyers, it's even more basic than that: Apparently the government has no right to make any law that "infringes" upon the "rights" of any business or individual to do as it, he, or she pleases, the consequences to any other individuals be damned. The "marketplace" will presumably sort it all out.

News flash: It didn't. With their abominable practice having grown over the centuries into a quite "respectable" institution, the slaveowners didn't set their slaves free in the 1800s -- and innumerable department stores (etc.) didn't open their "whites only" lunch counters (etc.) to African-Americans in the 1900s -- until the federal government made them do so.

Although Rand Paul, Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck, and the rest of the Tea Partyers are usually identified with the Right -- most by far do vote Republican -- they're actually far, far to the Left: What's "Libertarian" to some -- those left unrestrained by any meaningful laws -- is Anarchy to the rest of us -- their victims.

Ironically, insidiously, as the Tea Partyers rail against Wall Street bailouts, it is their very own philosophy that left big business far too unregulated for far too long, with catastrophic consequences for the rest of us.

--Doug Drenkow
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My two cents: The 'Tea Party' movement is neither an 'aberration' nor a grass roots 'movement'. I have alleged that it was 'cooked up' by a GOP-dependent political consulting firm and decided upon after numerous studies, analyses and focus-group sessions. It's all 'top down', the very anti-thesis of 'grass roots'.

This movement has no interest in representing the real concerns of real people. It's raison d'etre is the preservation of the welfare state and by that I mean the 'corporate welfare' state. It is also dedicated to, defined by an equal commitment to the 'warfare' state from which only the Military/Industrial Complex benefits. In fact, there is no 'aberration' so absurd, so nonsensical, so horrible in its effects, that it could not, does not follow inexorably from the right wing raison d'etre, itself best likened unto a puss filled boil crying out desperately to be lanced! The U.S. has tended toward 'fascism' since WWII where it tasted war and liked it.

The tea bagger movement owes its very existence to Fox News which it adores and depends upon for misinformation, i.e. anything designed to reinforce or encourage their prejudices. It is the 'top down' product of the corporate/fascist establishment and mentality that brought you 'corporate personhood', in fact, 'corporate privilege'/people enslavement!

The tea bagger movement is a by-product of the blind eye given Halliburton-BP, the corporate authors of disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. This is the mind-set behind the Reagan 'tax cut' of 1982 which began the transfer of wealth upward so that now just one percent of the population owns more than 95 percent of the rest of us combined.

The tea baggers are enemies of Democracy and our republic. The tea baggers are liars, bigots and hypocrites to a person. Now --we're hooked on war despite the fact that with each passing year, fewer and fewer actually benefit from it. Millions just get a vicarious and perverted thrill via the media. The boardroom perverts, however, are closer to it, benefit financially from it with profits exponentially proportional to deaths. One can almost hear the war mongers cackling among themselves in glass-steel towers, plotting new adventures, new murders, new atrocities.

Limp dicked in every other way, it is their last orgasm before dying. I wish to hell they would get on with the 'dying' part and leave good people alone to live out full and meaningful lives, free of war, lies, bullshit, and oil spills.Down with tea baggers and other traitors to the Constitution, free speech and Democracy.

--Len Hart, The Existentialist Cowboy

Published Articles on Buzzflash.net

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Media Conglomerates, Mergers, Concentration of Ownership, Global Issues, Updated: January 02, 2009

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Hoover's plan to abolish Habeas Corpus linked to his 'closet' lifestyle

The headlines trumpet J. Edgar Hoover's plan to suspend Habeas Corpus for some 12,000 American citizens. Largely unreported are his motives. His repressive attitudes and policies were, in fact, a shield, his protection against critics. J. Edgar Hoover was a closet, practicing homosexual even as he headed the FBI.

Hoover's FBI kept files on almost everyone of any consequence in government, including several Presidents of the United States. Apparently his plan worked. At a time when the gay lifestyle was very much the subject of whispers, everyone was terrified of Hoover because of how he might retaliate. For decades, Hoover did not merely pursue "commies", he pursued, arrested and prosecuted "gay people" for "being gay". The words "colossal hypocrisy" come to mind.

The recently publicized document, however, is a specific case that makes the point: the GOP is an institutional threat to American Democracy. As we might have suspected, Hoover had planned to do what George W. Bush may have succeeded in doing, that is, suspending habeas corpus and imprisoning in concentration camps without trial or Due Process of law some 12,000 people whose names had somehow gotten on his shit list.

Hoover sent his plan to the White House on July 7, 1950, 12 days after the Korean War began. It envisioned putting suspect Americans in military prisons.

Hoover wanted President Harry S. Truman to proclaim the mass arrests necessary to “protect the country against treason, espionage and sabotage.” The FBI would “apprehend all individuals potentially dangerous” to national security, Hoover’s proposal said. The arrests would be carried out under “a master warrant attached to a list of names” provided by the bureau.

The names were part of an index that Hoover had been compiling for years. “The index now contains approximately twelve thousand individuals, of which approximately ninety-seven per cent are citizens of the United States,” he wrote.

“In order to make effective these apprehensions, the proclamation suspends the Writ of Habeas Corpus,” it said.

--Hoover Planned Mass Jailing in 1950

Another famous GOP list maker comes to mind --Richard Nixon, whose "enemies list" was at the very heart of the Watergate Scandal. Habeas corpus, the right to seek relief from illegal detention, is a fundamental principle of law traceable to the Magna Carta.

Before penning the Declaration of Independence--the first of the American Charters of Freedom--in 1776, the Founding Fathers searched for a historical precedent for asserting their rightful liberties from King George III and the English Parliament. They found it in a gathering that took place 561 years earlier on the plains of Runnymede, not far from where Windsor Castle stands today. There, on June 15, 1215, an assembly of barons confronted a despotic and cash-strapped King John and demanded that traditional rights be recognized, written down, confirmed with the royal seal, and sent to each of the counties to be read to all freemen. The result was Magna Carta--a momentous achievement for the English barons and, nearly six centuries later, an inspiration for angry American colonists.

--Magna Carta and Its American Legacy

The Bush administration's decision to hold suspects for years at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, has made habeas corpus a contentious issue for the US Congress and the Supreme Court. But it shouldn't be! It should be sacrosanct. This issue was settled when King John signed the Magna Carta at the behest of the barons who held the upper hand. Why are we debating now an issue that was settled in the year 1215? Why is the GOP so threatened by habeas corpus? Why would the GOP return the US to a theocratic state akin to what might have existed in the Middle Ages? Why is the GOP backward, retarded, dysfunctional? Why are Republicans, like Huckabee, utterly ignorant of law or history? Why do Republicans fear the intellect? Why do they fear freedom?

Hoover's plan was declassified Friday as part of a collection of documents concerning intelligence issues from 1950 to 1955. The plan called for "the permanent detention" of 12,000 suspects at military bases as well as in federal prisons.

The FBI, he said, had found that the arrests it proposed in New York and California would cause the prisons there to overflow. So the bureau had arranged for "detention in Military facilities of the individuals apprehended" in those states.

The prisoners eventually would have had a right to a hearing under the Hoover plan. The hearing board would have comprised one judge and two citizens. But the hearings "will not be bound by the rules of evidence."

Hoover's July 1950 letter was addressed to Sidney Souers, who had served as the first director of central intelligence and was then a special national-security assistant to Truman. The plan also was sent to the executive secretary of the National Security Council, whose members were the president, the secretary of defense, the secretary of state and the military chiefs.

In September 1950, Congress passed and Truman signed a law authorizing the detention of "dangerous radicals" if the president declared a national emergency. But no known evidence suggests any president approved Hoover's proposal.

--J. Edgar Hoover sought mass arrests in 1950, document shows, Herald Tribune

What good is a hearing not bound by the "rules of evidence"? A hearing bound by the rules of evidence is the bloody point! Whenever the power of the state is exercised free of that common sense restraint, you can bet that there is, in fact, no evidence in support of the state's position. "States" throughout history have a lousy record! Why do we put up with it? Why are people so easily fooled?

A state that finds it necessary to lie to its people in order to maintain itself in power is an illegitimate state! Any state which denies to its people the protections of habeas corpus is, by its action, illegitimate and should be --in Jeffersons' words --abolished!! Any state which manufactures a fraudulent state of emergency upon phony terrorist alerts and other lies, is, by its actions, illegitimate and must be voted out or otherwise supplanted. That was precisely the position of Thomas Jefferson who wrote in the Declaration of Independence:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

--Thomas Jefferson, Declaration of Independence

Later, Che Guevarra would say the same thing even more succinctly:

People must see clearly the futility of maintaining the fight for social goals within the framework of civil debate. When the forces of oppression come to maintain themselves in power against established law; peace is considered already broken.

--Che Guevarra, Guerrilla Warfare, Chapter I: General Principles of Guerrilla Warfare

Bush has already broken the peace. The government of the United States is illegitimate and, is in fact, treasonously at war with the sovereign people of the United States!

Also check out:

Is the internet declaring war on the vampire elites?

J. Edgar Hoover's Dirty Hands

GOP, Hoover, Habeas Corpus, Terrorism

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