My Disenchantment with Church and State—Part 2 The State

Noam Chomsky? Amy Goodman? Heard ‘em. Read ‘em. Won’t comment on ‘em. Won’t comment on anything from this post for fear of being run out of the Bloggernacle on a rail. Oddly enough, my views on much of this stuff, though moderate by any objective standard, are heterodox out here. So, I’ll just congratulate you on the thought that has gone into this post.

Amy Goodman…runs the best radio show on the planet – are you serious? That statement speak volumes about your thinking. Your white-anglo guilt is dripping. I got over mine a few years after reading ‘Bury my Heart at Wounded Knee’ in 6th grade. After years of working with whites, blacks and native americans, I have formed a few opinions:

1. Every culture has positive/negative elements. Painting a culture with a broad brush is simplistic and generally not accurate.

2. Organizations are rarely competent enough to pull off grand conspiracies.

3. Human interaction is generally complex – for example, the answer to the question, are the Israelis or Arabs at fault in this conflict, the answer is yes.

3. If perfect knowledge was avalable – we probably wouldn’t have supported Saddam Hussein.

I think the fact that you were so sheltered in your youth explains your apparent overreaction and also the difficulty you have in parsing out the difference between more legitimate criticisms and criticisms that have little basis or are hyperbolic exaggeration of facts.

Furthermore, historical context and motivations are important to understanding these events. Most of which hardly deserve the term “atrocity” particularly in comparison with typical governmental actions. Additionally counter factual assessments must be made, as the actual outcomes must be compared to other probable outcomes if our actions were different. Comparing the unhappy mistakes of our history with simply how we think things ought to have worked out is inaccurate, because it assumes full control was in our hands and ignores the actions of others.

Furthermore, in regards to anarchy, to quote Indigo Montoya “I do not think that word means what you think it means”.

Anarchy simply means the absence of systematic government. Now in a world full of righteous people, this would probably be a good thing. But as people by nature seek power and dominion over others, anarchy usually means “law of the jungle” which is rather bad for most people.

Capitalism is inherently immoral. However, it does come with a strong sense of property rights which is quite better for the weak and poor of the world than most other economic systems. I find it disturbing how often attacks are leveled on Capitalism in the name of the poor and downtrodden, and then once all the protects of private property are weakened to get at the bad and amoral corporations, those in power start seizing the property of the weak and poor and giving it to powerful and rich. In the end the poor and downtrodden are worse off than before.

Similarly, I fully understand that democratic government is intrinsically evil. It just happens to be the least evil of all forms of government that we can make work in this world full of imperfect people. True Christian Theocracy would be the best theoretical form of anarchist society as it has God making the decisions, and the is based on persuasion rather than force. (Government = Force). However, the millennium will come on the Lord’s schedule not ours, and humans tend to make things much worse and preform their greatest atrocities when in the devote themselves to some attempt to create a utopian society, because they inevitably resort to force when they discover that persuasion fails to work fast enough for them to see the results.

The biggest giveaway of your confusion, is your depiction of the Iraq war as illegal, which is simply without foundation. First of all, there is no actual worldwide law making body. Which means that illegality according to the UN is a monumental fiction. Often a useful fiction, but not based on any moral foundation. (As opposed to say democratic government which claims the delegation of authority by the citizens, or even kings or theocracy which claim divine right, the UN has no reasonable moral claim to authority).

Secondly, Iraq repeatedly fired upon American planes patrolling the no-fly zone as outlined by UN directives. That’s an act of war, pure and simple. There may have been other motivations, but that is irrelevant to a question of legality. So all this talk of illegalities is silly, as all the traditions of relations between foreign powers (which is what we really mean by “international law”) include the idea that “if you shoot at our guys, that means you want war, and we get to shoot you and take your stuff”.

Finally it’s a way of implying a false answer to the pertinent question, which is: Was the Iraq war moral?

Whatever the flawed nature of the reasoning for war, or of the implementation of it, I find it impossible to argue that invading Iraq and deposing Saddam Hussein was immoral. Now it might very well have been boneheaded and stupid. It might have cost more lives than it saved, but stupid is not the same as immoral.

Finally, your call for change through non-violence is either duplicitous or naive. As you claim to be wanting to change the actual system of government, but that can only be accomplish through violence- or in actuality you want to preserve the current system and just make sure that the people controlling the system are people who agree with you, and are using this talk of changing the system to make it sound like you have greater plans than you actually do.

In short your ideas are rather fuzzyheaded and probably sound nice and feel great because they allow you to feel part of something bigger than yourself, but in any concrete term they are just a bunch of college-age fantasies.

My suggestion is to spend your time worrying about more concrete things like having kids, how good the local schools are at teaching reading, writing and arithmetic, and how often you do your hometeaching. These concrete steps do more to change the world into the utopia you desire than making “demands” about economic and foreign policy in the political system.

Dude, you have some issues here.

Although I agree with some of your beliefs because abuse has certainly happened, and happens in the church with corrupt leaders, I have to disagree with many others.

For example about the IMF ‘dealings in creating a world of subordination’ isn’t quite true. No one forced Peru, Brasil or Argentina to reach the levels of debt that they had -but both Brazil and Argentina have now paid off the entire IMF debt and both hold good foreign currency reserves now. (Argentina’s bonds are another matter nowadays). Some African nations are close to payoff as well.

Also the British have done some terrible things in the past. Here by 5th/6th grade we are taught about how terrible they where and how they ‘exterminated’ an entire race of people -the tasmanian aboriginal- and I use to think that this was the worst ever until I found out about the Spaniards in Peru. But overall you’d have to agree that those countries which followed British common law are better off and have more freedoms than those which didn’t, and those that had common law once but turned to dictatorship, like Zimbabwe, are in trouble still with freedom.

And certainly Bush/Blair did wage an illegal war –but aren’t they paying for it? Blair with his job and legacy and Bush with lost US treasure and lives? And the US did support all dictatorships from Chile to Brazil because at the time these governments where right wing who fought communist insertion; sure they abused the war, dirty war, but today those nations are in relative peace compared to the Columbia where the once communist now run cocaine, and kidnappings.

Look I don’t want to write too much here, but I really suggest you take another look at some of these things and at least recognize that you are free to criticize your government and not end up in jail. Also you could possibly end up working for one of those ‘evil corporations’ -who only chase the almighty dollar, not malice, although abuse does happen from time to time but isn’t it up to the governments to regulate this and prosecute the bad ones –which they do from time to time.

From all the discussions above, I notice there is very little interest in looking at what the gospel has to say on many of these topics. Now, consulting scripture will not always lead us to the same conclusions, we all have different world views and experiences and different knowledge, but i think doing so would be positive. in my view, the scriptures encourage us to have a society in which there is no war, and in which there are no poor. We can certainly argue about how to go about that, but i think we can all agree that there is too much war in the world, and too much poverty. that tells me that there is alot of progress that needs to be made, and that looking closely at how our economic systems, and systems of government are working, is important to make any progress. Additionally, doing so is our responsibility as Mormons. For some reason there is the view that issues like gay marriage and abortion are moral issues, while war and poverty are not. In my view preventing war and preventing poverty should be some of our major Gospel undertakings, in addition to home teaching, attending church, etc.

In regards to international law, much of it was written and agreed upon by delegates from the UN member states as a direct response to the things hitler did, in particular invading countries pre-emptively. It doesn’t mean that international law is God’s word, but it does provide a good guide to help us think about what is right and wrong. Hitlers activities led to millions of people being killed unnecessarily, and therefore if anyone else appears to be engaging in similar behavior, such as Bush’s calls to invade Iraq pre-emptively, or current suggestions to bomb Iran pre-emptively, we should take a close look at whether this is really necessary, moral, etc. One important aspect of Anarchism is that it encourages to look at closely at the activities of those in authority, and lay the burden of proof on them as to whether going to war is right. Had the US media done that in 2002, the war would have been averted, as people would have seen that all the Bush administrations justifications to go to war just don’t hold up. Many lives could have been saved if the US media and the US population in general had approached the issue this way. Instead, the media simply repeated Pentagon press releases mindlessly, assuming that those in power would never say anything that wasn’t true. Joseph Smith suggested that power tends to corrupt, and that those in power tend to abuse their authority, and therefore this anarchist principle should be a corner stone of any Mormon attempts to evaluate questions of war, and to evaluate whether we should or should not support a particular war, or even oppose it.

“The modern conservative is engaged in one of man’s oldest exercises in moral philosophy: that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.”

This statement proves nothing other than that JK Galbraith was skilled at polemics. There actually is a body of research that seeks to find correlation between political affiliation and charitiable acts, and the conclusions don’t justify this. In fact, if you believe Galbraith’s statement is literally true, it just proves you are delusional, which makes your comment about reality being biased in favor of liberalism pretty funny.

Stephen, Mark was probably referring to the research of Arthur Brooks, a professor of public policy at Syracuse University. He found that Americans who self-identify as conservatives and Republicans give substantially more to *secular* charities than do self-identified liberals and Democrats, even after controlling for all demographic variables available to him (wealth, education, age, race, gender, etc.). Of course, because American conservatives and Republicans are much more likely to attend church than liberals and Democrats, the disparity in generosity is exacerbated when religious giving is included.

He’s also found that conservatives and Republicans are substantially more likely to donate blood and volunteer, even after controls are held constant. The book summarizing his research is “Who Really Cares?”

As for your post itself, your analysis (and William Vanwagonen’s, too) presupposes the moral legitimacy of international boundaries, national sovereignty, and self-declared national leaders like Saddam.

Very fascinating study…thank you for referring me onto that. Speaking for myself, I pay a regular tithing, attend church regularly, donate money to charity through my masonic fraternity even though I am a student, always try to buy fair trade, and am going this afternoon for a blood donation actually. So, speaking for myself, I try to do all of those things.

Anarchism is unique in the sense that it takes both conservative values and liberal values and blends them together. Social Libertarianism basically…freedom to cooperate. There are many schools of conseravtivism but the branch I am most drawn to is that of the classical conseravtive such as Friedrich Von Hayek, Milton Friedman, Adam Smith and Thomas Pain.

According to Richard Hudelson in Modern Political Philosophy he says “Classical liberalism is not to be confused with the ideology that is commonly called “liberalism” today in the United States, as “classical liberalism” is actually closer to being a tendency of “conservatism” in the U.S.”

Now, my attack on conservatives is more aptly aimed at Neoconservatives who I feel…by wiretapping phones, have socially irresponsible policies, cronyism, and jingoism are not the conservatives I respect.

And dont mistake Anarchism as being “liberal”…it assumes that people ultimately want freedom to cooperate with eachother. In Mormonism we believe in the inherent goodness of the individual as Thomas Monson has said in GC. Anarchism takes this and runs with it allowing people the freedom to create or maintain society as they wish without coercion by illegitimate power. It doesnt mean, as a political philosophy, chaos, destruction, or removal of all morality…not at all. Much of the argument over anarchism is about the human nature.

Don’t get me wrong…Saddam was a despot and what he was doing to the people was awful. But he was put into place, supported and maintained by the CIA up until the Gulf War. After that the US and Britain bombed Iraq and the Iraqi people whilst also putting them under sanctions(which hurts the poorest people) for 10 years before invasion. This is a difficult issue hear…and I am glad to see him gone…but the means do not justify the end results…because the result in this case is hatred for Americanism all around the globe…something neither you nor I want.

William nor I do not presuppose the moral legitimacy of any leaders that are coercive, despotic and totalitarian. Anarchism is about challenging coercive and unjust authority. We are the first to denounce Saddam, Mugabe and all other dictators. However…we do agree with the moral legitimacy of international law when created and agreed to by the people and the leaders of the countries that the people elected. Just as we agree to uphold national and local law although it may be coercive…that is where civil diobedience comes in.

Yes….the Iraqi people should be listened too….BUT THE US ISNT LISTENING TO THEM!!! Polls have shown they want US troops to leave their country, and to let them control their oil Matt, be careful that you are not the one presupposing here.