On Calls for a Genocide of the Jews: Harvard vs Yale

A university administration can be susceptible to creating an unlevel playing field in the name of truth but with political ideology in the driver’s seat.  Amid controversial political disputes wherein ideology is salient and tempers are flaring, free speech can be arbitrarily and prejudiciously delimited as academic freedom is eclipsed by ideological intolerance. More abstractly put, the ideology of an organization’s dominant coalition can be stultifying. During the fall 2023 semester at Yale, for example, I attended a lecture at which the lecturer, a faculty member, held his own topic hostage by deviating to an unfounded ideological presumption of systemic racism in Hollywood. The leap in his assumption evinced an ideological agenda capable of blocking even his intellectual reasoning, and the resulting irrational intolerance easily impaired the academic freedom of the students to even question the unfounded assumption or ask what had happened to the advertised topic. Whether the label is systemic racism or antisemitism, the highly-charged application thereof into a political dispute can be act as a weapon to weaken or block outright an unliked political position and thus unfairly limit free speech and even academic freedom. I have in mind here calls for a genocide of the Jews as Gaza ceasefire rallies were occurring on college campuses. Which is more fitting: university codes of conduct against hate-speech or the protection of free speech, which is vital to academic freedom and a university’s academic atmosphere? In other words, are such calls more accurately classified as hate-speech or political speech?

The full essay is at "Genocide of the Jews."

European Federalism: Beyond “Sticks and Stones"

Domestic governance is perhaps more difficult than international relations in that real enforcement mechanisms are in force only in the former. Flaunt a UN resolution and that feckless organization is unchanged; if a state official flaunts a federal law, on the other hand, the viability of the federal system can collapse as governors and legislators in other states get the same idea. Before long, the states are once again sovereign. Unfortunately, it is easy to get distracted by political theater and miss such existential threats from the point of view of the viability of a system of public-sector governance. Yet we depend so much on governments, so to tamper with necessary beams (or cards, as in a house of cards) is quite dangerous. Along with the governors of Hungary and Slovakia, Poland’s top official knowingly compromised the viability of the European Union (E.U.) in 2023, but, unfortunately, I don’t think many people stood up and paid attention to the danger. Political theater staged for election purposes is more tantalizing, which raises the question: who in the E.U. was watching the proverbial store?

In response to Ukraine’s President Zelensky’s depiction of Poland’s government as engaging in “political theater” in making a “thriller” in objecting to the E.U.’s lifting the ban on Ukraine crops traveling through and being bought in the union, Poland’s Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki to the Ukrainian “never to insult Poles again.”[1] To remark that a politician, especially one up for re-election, is using hyperbole to appease Polish farmers for electioneering purposes is not to insult the Polish farmers or the Polish people as a people. So it is outlandish, not to mention a bit strange, that Poland’s prime minister told journalists, “The Polish people will never allow this to happen, and defending the good name of Poland is not only my duty and honor, but also the most fundamental task of the Polish government.”[2] If so, then the Polish people had a terribly reckless judgment concerning the rationale for war and the prime minister lapsed terribly in not knowing that the primary responsibility of a government is to protect a people from being attacked from abroad. Retaliating for one insult is not generally viewed by political theorists as a legitimate (and even smart) reason to go to war. Furthermore, “Never insult us again!” strikes me as childish. Were Zelensky to resort to that jejune mentality, he might have replied, sticks and stones may break your bones but names will never hurt you, and then stuck out his tongue just for effect.

One of the benefits of representative democracy is that reflection by elected representatives who enjoy the buffer of a term in office can hold statescraft off from the momentary excitements of a mob. Both Plato and Aristotle viewed the mob as the bad form of democracy. To Plato, reason in a just person and polis controls the appetites, or emotions. Indeed, structures of governance, both public and private, are instituted in order to subject flaring passions to reasoned-out routes. As a E.U. state, Poland committed an egregious error when Morawiecki refused to recognize the federal (i.e., E.U.) change of policy lift the ban on Ukrainian grains in the E.U. In this respect, the prime minister’s political tactics could compromise the viability of the E.U. as a system of public-sector governance (i.e., a system of government). The E.U. is hardly alone; the U.S. has also been susceptible to resistance from the governments of member states.

In 1832, the legislature of South Carolina decided that it could lawfully void any federal law from being valid within South Carolina; it was a matter of that republic defending its interests. President Andrew Jackson sent troops to the wayward member state, whose government had even drawn up an “exit” document, which was used in 1861 to exit the U.S. In 2023, Alabama ignored the U.S. Supreme Court decision affirming “a lower court that had ordered the state to redraw its seven-seat congressional map to include a second majority-Black district or ‘something quite close to it.’”[3] After the decision in June, the Alabama legislature “again approved a congressional map with only one majority-Black district.”[4] Just as the history of the E.U. has included instances in which state governments, and even state supreme courts, have ignored decisions by the European Court of Justice, the government of Alabama was saying, in effect, that rulings by the U.S. Supreme Court could be ignored. Considering that this was hardly an open question, considerable gall as well as denial went into the recalcitrance of the state officials. The judges of the lower court whose ruling the U.S. Supreme Court reaffirmed wrote, “We are deeply troubled that the State enacted a map that the State readily admits does not provide the remedy we said federal law requires.”[5] Flouting federal law is no small matter, as the supremacy of the federal judiciary in adjudicating on federal law had long been established by U.S. Supreme Court Justice Marshall’s ruling in Marbury v. Madison (1803).

In 2023, the governors of the E.U. states of Poland, Hungary, and Slovakia announced that they would continue to ban Ukrainian wheat even though the E.U. had just lifted the ban. Specifically, the European Commission rejected the state bans on Ukrainian grains, dairy, sugar, fruit, vegetables and meats.[6] A spokesperson for the Commission said, “In this context, it is important to underline that trade policy is of EU exclusive competence and, therefore, unilateral actions are not acceptable.”[7] Yet those states persisted. In fact, Slovakia and Bulgaria enacted bans! In so doing, all of those states weakened Ukraine, which was defending its territory against the Russian invasion.  The states indirectly aided President Putin.

Because the E.U., like the U.S., was aiding Ukraine militarily, the illegal state bans thwarted E.U. foreign policy too. The E.U. had “decided to suspend duties and quotas on a long list of Ukrainian exports . . . , including many agricultural goods, in a bid to help the war-torn country cope with the economic fallout from Russia’s war and facilitate trade for Ukrainian farmers.”[8] So at the federal level, the decision taken involved an acknowledgement that helping Ukraine as a matter of foreign policy to thwart Russian aggression would entail economic costs within the E.U.

The governors of Poland, Hungary, Slovakia, Romania, and Bulgaria had jointly written a letter to E.U. President von der Leyen, “If market distortions causing damage to farmers in our [states] cannot be eliminated by other means, we ask the Commission to put in place appropriate procedures to reintroduce tariffs and quotas on imports from Ukraine.”[9] As states being directly represented at the federal level in the European Council, the recalcitrant five were obliged to abide by federal law rather than be sore losers when their joint request was denied. For each state had agreed to cede some sovereignty to the E.U. even in the federal qualified-majority-voting procedure itself—not to mention the exclusive competencies, such as trade—so to continue as semi-sovereign states and yet act if those states were sovereign state, just as South Carolina had done and Alabama would do, is nothing short of duplicitous and egoist.  

A federal system simply cannot function viably if every state can decide for itself whether a certain federal law is valid within the state’s boundaries. Such a federal system would reduce to a confederation, in which governmental sovereignty resides with the members (i.e., states). Just as the U.S. discovered from 1776 to 1789 in the Articles of Confederation and the E.U. was discovering in 2023 both with regard to raising money and enforcing federal law, a confederal system has too many vulnerabilities to be viable except internationally. With a bicameral legislature (i.e., the Parliament and Council of the E.U.), an executive branch (i.e., the Commission), and a supreme court (i.e., the European Court of Justice), the E.U. is not an international body; rather, like the U.S., both national and international principles of governance are included in the system.

So even though not nearly as childish as making threats on the basis of an insult erroneously inferred to be against the people, Poland’s refusal to recognize a federal law is much more significant than even whether Poland would permit Ukrainian wheat to pass through (or be bought within) the state, and definitely more important than whether someone insults the Poles. When I was a kid in America, telling Polish jokes was a stable. In hindsight, it seems so silly, and only a fool gets upset over childish things. Certainly, heads of governments should not. Chief executives of governments, and CEOs for that matter, should not talk to each other as if drunk in a bar. Dick Fuld of Lehman Brothers swore like a sailor and was very immature in his “empire building” of real estate, and his emotional immaturity was one reason why the investment bank collapsed. Governments, however, cannot simply collapse, and so people who represent others have a responsibility to talk like adults rather than children. Being an adult includes being willing to submit to constraints, such as federal laws, and even international law were they to be given any enforcement power.

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[1] Maija Ehlinger and Mariya Knight, “Never ‘Insult Poles Again,’ Poland’s Prime Minister Tells Ukraine’s Zelensky,” CNN.com (September 23, 2023).
[2] Ibid.
[3] Ariane de Vogue and Fredreka Schouten, “Supreme Court Rejects Alabama’s Attempt to Avoid Creating a Second Black Majority Congressional District,” CNN.com, September 26, 2023 (accessed September 30, 2023).
[4] Ibid.
[5] Ibid.
[6] Robert Greenall, “EU Rejects Ukraine Grain Bans by Poland and Hungary,” BBC.com, April 17, 2023 (accessed September 30,2023).
[7] Jorge Liboreiro and Sandor Zsiros, “’Not Acceptable’: EU Decries Bans on Tariff-free Ukrainian Grain Imposed by Neighboring Countries,” Euronews, April 17, 2023 (accessed September 30, 2023).
[8] Ibid.
[9] Ibid., italics added.

Oppenheimer

An artificial sun rose on an otherwise dark night when the nuclear-bomb test named Trinity ushered in the era wherein our species’ aggressive instinct could render homo sapiens extinct. Given the salience of that instinctual urge—for we are related to the chimpanzee species—the wise (i.e., sapiens) species can be its own undoing. For it took a lot of intelligence in sub-atomic physics to invent the nuclear bomb, yet very little smarts went into deciding to use it against Japan, an enemy that would have lost anyway, in order to save American lives from having to invade the mainland (as if conventional bombs could not have reduced the casualties). Even less thought was put into the need to contain the proliferation of nuclear bombs. Expediency without heeding long-term risk is not a virtue. Kant wrote that even if our species were to institute a world federation, presumably having nation-states that would be semi-sovereign as a check against global totalitarianism, peace would merely be possible, rather than probable. This does not speak well of human nature, and this in turn renders the Trinity test something less than redeeming. “Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds,” In the film, Oppenheimer (2023), Robert Oppenheimer reads from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad Gita, as a woman is on top of him in sexual intercourse. The irony of him being an instrument of mass destruction as director of the Manhattan Project and yet being engaged in potentially reproducing life with a woman is doubtlessly the point of that scene. Hindus who leap to the conclusion that Nolan is insulting their religion miss this point. Had the director included a scene in which Oppenheimer is praying, for example for the Jews in Nazi Germany at the time, a quote from the film, Gettysburg (1993) would have been similarly fitting. In that film, Col. Chamberlain of the Union army remarks, “What a piece of work is man . . . in action how like an angel!” Sgt. Kilrain replies, “Well, if he’s an angel, all right then . . . But he damn well must be a killer angel.” In the nuclear age, killer angel takes on added significance. The question is perhaps whether we have left angel behind as our species’ intelligence has outdone itself, whether in terms of developing nuclear weapons or heedlessly emitting so much carbon that the Earth could someday be unsuitable for us. Or, can we catch up by inventing antidotes? 

The full essay is at "Oppenheimer."

Applying Justice to Nazi Jurists in the Context of the Cold War

Judgment at Nuremberg (1961) is a serious film that enables the viewers to wrestle with the demands of justice for atrocities enabled by German jurists in NAZI Germany and the post-war emerging Cold War between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R., for which the American military needed the support of the German people against the Soviet Union. The film accepts the need of such support as being vital in 1947, when the actual trial took place (the film has it as 1948). To the extent that acceptance of this assumption is deemed spurious, the viewers would likely view the tension as being between the need for justice, a virtue, and expediency, a vice. Accordingly, the pressure from an American general on the prosecutor to recommend light sentences so not to turn the German people against the Americans and thus from helping them in the Cold War can be viewed as being astute political calculation in the political realist sense of international relations, or else undue influence or even corruption of a judicial proceeding. 

The full essay is at "Judgment at Nuremberg."

Turkey’s President Enables Euroskeptic Ideologues

The European Union is not a military alliance, like NATO or the ancient Spartan League. Nor is the E.U. merely a free-trade agreement like NAFTA. In terms of the history of federalism, the E.U. instantiates “modern federalism,” wherein governmental sovereignty is split between federal and state levels, rather than confederalism, wherein all such sovereignty is retained by the states. Both the U.S. and E.U. instantiate modern federal systems, although ironically the U.S. was originally a confederal system of sovereign states. In likening the E.U. to NATA in 2023, President Erdogan of Turkey unwittingly committed a category mistake. This in turn weakened his attempt to leverage his power in approving Sweden as a country in NATO with his demand that the E.U. admit Turkey as a state.

Just prior to the NATO meeting in June, 2023, Erdogan stated at a news conference, “First, let’s clear Turkey’s way in the European Union, then let’s clear the way for Sweden, just as we paved the way for Finland.”[1] Becoming a state in a political union, whether it is the U.S. or E.U., is qualitatively different than joining a military alliance. Joining the latter does not involve a transfer of some governmental sovereignty to a federal executive branch (e.g., the E.U. Commission), legislative branch (e.g., the Council of the E.U. and the E.U. Parliament), and judicial branch (e.g., the European Court of Justice). A state in such a federal system is qualitatively different than a country being in a military alliance because an alliance itself has no governmental institutions and sovereignty.

To characterize a state in a union and a country in a military alliance both as “member states” is misleading. In fact, efforts to do so may stem from an ideological “state’s rights” (or Euroskeptic) effort to deny that the E.U. is in fact an instance of modern federalism rather than confederalism. In remarking that “almost all NATO member countries are European member countries,” Erdogan unwittingly fell into the trap of the ideologues who refuse to recognize that the E.U. and U.S. fall within the same genre of unions of states (i.e., modern federalism rather than confederalism).[2] Because the term country implies full sovereignty, both E.U. and U.S. members are states in the sense of being semi-sovereign political units in a federal system. The U.S. states are members of the U.S., because they joined the U.S. from being formerly sovereign countries (or assumed to have been of such status) and the members of the U.S. Senate, which is based on international rather than national law. The Council of the E.U. is also founded on international principles, wherein political units rather than citizens are the members.

It follows that the countries that are members of UNESCO, the UN, and other international organizations are not states thereof, and should not be referred to as member states. To do so in an attempt to imply that the E.U., unlike the U.S., is also an international organization flies in the face of the very existence of the E.U. Commission, the European Court of Justice, and the European Parliament. International organizations do not have legislatures and high courts and executive branches to implement law and federal judicial rulings. That the Euroskeptic ideology denies this just shows the downside of ideology in general as being intellectually dishonest as regards empirical facts. To want to remake things as they presently are is one thing; to claim or insinuate that things are already different than they are is quite another. I contend that the Turkish president fell into the trap laid by the intellectually dishonest ideologues in Europe.

1. Hande A. Alam and Christian Edwards, “Erdogan Links Sweden’s NATO Bid to Turkey Joining the EU,” CNN.com, July 10, 2023.
2. Ibid.

Putin's Fear: Autocratic War Triggering a Russian Revolution

Having watched Oliver Stone's lengthy interviews of Vladimir Putin, President of the Russian Federation, which had been taped several years before Russia's invasion of Ukraine, I noticed something very different about the autocrat's demeanor in a video made after a year of the war: his shifty eyes.[1] It was not difficult to infer that the former KGB spy's trained suspiciousness of people had intensified. At the very least, the man looked pensive or nervous. A few weeks earlier, an anti-Putin Russian group may have been responsible for flying a drone over the Kremlin to blow up the dome, and even more recently such a group may have attacked militarily on Russian soil elsewhere. Putin may have been afraid of being assassinated. It is even possible that he had realized that a full-blown revolution could happen. 

Days after an anxious Putin had sat down with the head of Russia's constitutional court, the head of the mercenary military Wagner group, which fights for Russia, warned that if Russia continued to suffer more casualties, "all these divisions can end in what is a revolution, just like in 1917."[2] It is highly improbable that Vladimir Putin would release power as easily as the weak Russian emperor Peter III did after just six months of his reign when Russian troops loyal to Catherine enacted a coup even though she was German and the Russians had been fighting a war against Fredrick's Prussia. 

Whereas the Russian revolution in 1917 was in line with Russia's autocratic-state historical culture, a revolution against Putin could be in democratic direction because Putin had squandered the opening for democracy in the 1990's by incrementally tightening his reigns until it could be said that he had become a dictator. Russians were being locked up during the war just or calling the conflict a war; protests against the war were firmly put down by police wielding clubs. Police initiating violence against non-violent people, as if they were disobedient dogs, naturally triggers the impulse for democratic accountability rather than for tightened autocracy. While this impulse was up against a formidable cultural headwind when absolute monarchy was the norm in the world, the world in 2023 provided the prospective Russian revolutionaries with enough functioning democratic republics abroad for there to be a tailwind in moving in a democratic direction. 

Of course, I am biased in that I was born and raised in a democratic system in which the ideology was instilled in me even when I was a child. Even so, I have not read of a country in which its dictatorship has been held accountable from within the system of government. Furthermore, Rousseau had a good argument against dictatorships in claiming that we are born free but live our lives in chains. The liberty is innate whereas the chains are artificial, hence, I submit, a natural right can be derived. 

1. "Putin's Latest Move Includes a Map of the 17th Century," CNN, May 23, 2023 (accessed May 24, 2023)

2. Rob Picheta and Mariya Knight, "Wagner Chief Warns Russians Could Revolt If Invasion Continues," May 24, 2023. (accessed same day)