Conformity to the Actual

Jacob wrestled. We too wrestle. Who wrestles to win who lies and cheats, and what is the victory?

Two recent posts at www.jihadwatch.org came to my attention, and in response to them I wrote the letters below. The first is on Balkan mafioso smuggling the works for nuclear bombs, and the second is on a girl tortured and mutilated in Pakistan. Both have to do with extra-territorial legalities and international law.
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Criminals and geniuses think and act outside the norm. As a general rule we don't like those who do those things, the non-conformists and irritants of social life. Ali Sina, for example, is a case who would be devastating if he were many in one place. Imagine the social destruction of millions of people changing their foundational beliefs in a short period, abandoning all that they held dear just recently. Chaos wouldn't begin to describe it.

Change, even in revolutions must be gradual if we are to spare ourselves devastation. Even positive change has to be gradual if the majority aren't to suffer extremes of dislocation and neurosis leading to who knows what social problems, most of them likely bad. Criminals thrive on destruction, like bed-bugs coming out in the night to feast on blood. We have to be careful about the fabric of our societies, taking care not to rip them into pieces by carelessness or haste. Criminals don't care, even care to destroy for themselves. They don't care about anything but themselves, if that. And often not that. That's one reason we kill criminals when we can. It's also why we have courts, so we don't go crazy and wreck the social fabric at the same time. We have to move more or less together as a society.

But when the criminals are on the loose, and when they are wholly destructive and immediately so, and when the fabric of society has changed and we haven't adjusted to it out of inertia or stupidity or longing for reaction and romance, then it requires that some take the lead to do whatever they can to ease the transition to a new norm.

Borders, nations, sovereignty, these things mean nothing to the criminal. Within the bounds of reason and useful social practice we must move with the criminals to meet our new reality.

I'll leave it at that.

Posted by: sonofwalker at September 25, 2005 07:24 PM ***

If we break our own legitimate laws of non-interference in the internal affairs of other nations, how do we escape criminality? If Pakistan is non-belligerent, what do we do? If Pakistan is a criminal but lawful regime, then what do we do? We agree to rule by legitimate law, and if it's criminal we have to look at our position carefully. Posted by Sonofwalker

One very simple thing we can do is defend the sanctity of our superior civilization from the ravages of third world Islamic savages and their bestial culture. Multiculturalism is a scourge and a menace to Western civilization. People are not the same and disparate cultures cannot coexist in harmony. Oil and water will never mix and it's time for the left-wing social engineers to face up to that reality. Forced multiculturalism is the perfect recipe for perpetual civil unrest.

Our options to influence cesspits like Pakistan may be limited, but we do have the power to keep its deranged citizens from importing their volatile, incompatible, bellicose, barbaric religion and culture to our countries. It would be much simpler for all concerned to contain Islamic fanaticism and depravity to their indigenous geographical realms. Like any deadly, contagious plague, Islam should be isolated, not unleashed to infect and threaten the entire world.

How did Western societies become self-hating, nihilistic, and suicidal? I'm trying to figure out how I escaped the collective brainwashing that has addled the brains of so many otherwise intelligent people. Human rights mean nothing to imbeciles with human bodies and brains fried by Islam. Islam kills more brain cells than alcohol and drugs combined. I will not tolerate or condone this savage culture of death, depravity, pain and suffering in my world. How could I, when it is the antithesis of universal human rights? It should be blatantly apparent to anyone with even an iota of morality that all cultures are not equal; some cultures should be permanently obliterated for the sake of humanity.

Posted by: Susanp at September 25, 2005 02:12 AM

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The link below better work because it's a beauty, setting up as it should the Islamic Declaration of Human Rights. No, not that jahaliyyah universal standard the rest of us try to abide by but the sharia version of Human rights.

It's a serious project for some of them. Maududi wrote tons of commentary on this, as I recall, and so do others.

The question I posed above, in a perhaps too oblique fashion, not wanting to get myself bounced from here, is what do we do in the face of the contract we have with our societies to which we pledge, however informally, not to break our own laws? We give our states the sole legitimate use of force. We arm our police and military to act violently, if they must, on our public behalf. America, different of course, allows the state to be co-armed with its citizens. But most nations have a monopoly on the legitimate use of force. We, as citizens, agree to abide by our own laws, even if we might not like them all, all the time. We elect representatives to act on our behalf in congress with others. We have levels of conflicting power to keep the bastards off our backs for the most part, and if we can't vote them out we can form a posse comitatus to oust them. So far, given that we voted for these idiots, we can't complain that we aren't getting what we asked for. We can't legitimately act against our own nations' will by being more vigilant than we are here on Spencer's site. We gave up that right when we claimed legitimate citizenship in our respective nations. We are more than private people, we are public citizens. We paid for our admission, and if this show sucks, we're stuck till the next one comes round. We can, if we choose, exit voluntarily. If we remain, and if we violate our own agreements, then we are lawbreakers.

We are not obliged to obey laws that are against our person. Hobbes, in a lovely paragraph, writes that even a condemned man is within his rights to fight for his life. And J.S. Mill points out that even if the majority has the right to rule it does not have the right to abuse the minority in a democracy. And Kant, in spite of some variant readings of him by some of our posters here, puts the rights of Man very clearly in relation to the majority: he does not have to suffer the ill of immorality because it is the duty of the moral man to ensure such things do not occur.

In our civil nations we citizens have freely set aside some of our own rights in favour of allowing others to act on our public behalf. We let the administration of justice to take its legal course in the community in spite of the clear evidence that God invented lamp posts to hang people from. We let the police, the courts, and juries of fellows to deal with criminals by set procedures in codified laws. We base our laws on common convention, on reason and rationality. We, in spite of often being outraged, agree to abide by the rule of law. And more, we agree to a great deal of inequity to come for the sake of preserving the spirit of our laws that are based on reason and rationality. We follow traditions in law that we know will piss us off, and we do so because we do not wish to have revolutions in justice from day to day, regardless of the urgent need on some days for just such. Unstable law is not legal justice even if it's rightly just. Law must be the same for all, everywhere, at all times, not to be set aside for the ocassion. We agree to law because we know what we've agreed to. We don't agree to helter-skelter.

If the law changes radically without our will, then we are not obliged to obey the sundered contract. And if the law changes by the will of the people and still violates the rights of the minority, or even the majority, we are not bound to obey it. If for example, a Muslim majority impose sharia on the nation we are not obligated to obey it. We didn't enter into a contract to be Muslims or dhimmis. We cannot legitimately discard the rights of minorities. Nor can we legitimately violate principles of universal justice and morality. And finally, we cannot act against our own lives even if the legitimate state is going to kill us. In all those cases we are obligated to resist. As much as we might be disgusted by Bush and Blair, we are not in a position to legitimately resist the force of our legitimate legal societies. If Bush and Blair convert to Islam, the story is different only if they try to enforce sharia on us, and it doesn't matter if the majority of the nations convert with them. Until that happens, we must stop at red lights.

But, (and here we ask that Spencer take up time on a speaking engagement,) there is national positive law, and there is universal law, codified and clear. We are under no legal obligation to obey illegitimate law. Excuse me if I'm offensively old-fashioned here but I argue that there is such a thing as personal moral obligation to act for the Good. Who the hell am I, King Tolerance asks? I got lucky there. I thought he never would.

I am, by good fortune, a son of Walker. William Walker. Yes, he would be the nasty little creature who invaded large parts of Central America and killed off anyone who got in his way as he did so. He's the very same man who intended to expand the slave-states of the American South by incorporating Central America into the [pre-]Confederacy, who tried to enslave the native populations of Central America, who intended to import more slaves to the area. Admittedly, he was not as charming as I. But in terms of our discussion on the nature of our reaction to the barbarisms of Islam charm doesn't enter into it.

The difference between the Islamic Declaration of Human Rights and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights isn't anything to do with Islam but with universality. There cannot be universal Human rights for many and exceptions made for Muslims. If exceptionalism, forget universality a priori.

Walker Sr. was in his own way similar to the triumphalist Mohammedans in that he was a universalist. Both share, as do I, a vision of manifest destiny. One lawful ring to bind us all. Walker Sr. dreamed of an ante-American universality, as it were, and he used force to install it on the unwilling, the resistant populations of Central America. We rational people dream of a universalist Modernity, and I for one am prepared to back that up by force of arms. It brings me into conflict not only with Islamic reactionaries but possibly with my own legitimate government.

Where do we part company then, we triumphalists with guns? If they kill people and if I kill people, then what's the difference? If they do so by virtue of codified and positive law as well as by virtue of traditional and natural law and I do so by virtue of my own will, then what makes me moral and legitimate and what makes them evil and worthy of destruction and death at my hand?

Some will argue that there is no objectivity. If there is not, then I cannot argue my point against them. Also, I can legitimately kill them if I choose to. If for no other reason than prudence I refrain. But I go further: I object that there is universal objectivity, and that it is moral and knowable in deed and logic and intuition. I argue too that though we must act on the best evidence of our time we must also follow the wisdom of aporia, of not closing the moral inquiry too soon, if ever. In the meantime we can if nothing else follow Kant in, simply, doing no harm. And in that universality of not doing evil we might do harm to others rightly by not allowing others to do that which must not be done for the sake of not allowing ourselves to do such harm or to stand by while it's done. It is universally wrong to stand by while a girl has her eyes poked out. Any other moral objection to our action of prevention is worthless. Our universal duty to do good includes the demand that we do not allow the act of evil. Poking out a girl's eyes is a bad thing where I come from, that being the planet Earth. The harm done to the girl poked is so far offensive that nothing right can be claimed for it. And it is a moral obligation to stop it if one can. We don't wait for the police. We don't consult the law texts. We kill. It is moral, and it is universally so.

The state does not have a superior claim to your life. It's yours. It doesn't belong to your husband or the landowner or the king or the Church. It's yours because you say so-- by virtue of being able to realize that. Here we are in total conflict with Islam. There's no way out. Man, being rational, is free to choose. Being free, he is obligated to take responsibility for his choices of action. If one chooses to give up ones life for the greater good of the state in a time of war, for example, then it is the free choice of the individual who can otherwise leave or even join the enemy. That subjective choice is objective. It's universally available to all men.

Those who refuse to act in defence of the undefended, who stand by while a girl is mutilated and murdered have crossed the boundaries of morality. It's objectively true because one might oneself fall victim to such harm, and one would not willingly and freely and legitimately call upon oneself such action. One has no right to deem oneself worthy of death by violence. Life itself supersedes that right. One has not only a right to live but a duty to live. If you have that right and duty, so do I. If someone tries to violate your rights and obligations, I have a right and duty to stop that. As do they. And you. The state be damned. In the face of the individual's right and obligation to life itself the state has no higher claim. Every man has a right and a duty to preserve and protect every man's right and duty to make his own free decisions, and that doesn't mean allowing one to let another poke out ones eyes. We have no legitimate right to allow the state to allow the man to poke out a girl's eyes. We have a duty to stop such things, regardless of the conventional law. We have a moral obligation to kill people who do that kind of harm to others.

No man's privacy is any of my concern. When he violates another's right to life it is not only my business, it's my duty to stop him by whatever means required. I do not need the police to advise me. When a nation state violates the rights of individuals it's not a legitimate corporation acting within the confines of legitimate privacy. It's an outrage, and it doesn't require the assistance or permission of the police to intervene. There's no exceptions to be made. It doesn't matter if the criminal is the mayor of the town. Universality is universal. Urgency prevails. The laws be damned.

And here I return to William Walker. He made some socio-political mistakes, granted, but other than that he had a good plan: to conquer and enslave native populations of non-universalists, of primitives who do not have the rule of universal legitimate protection of individual life and privacy. Yes, he killed a lot of people and wanted to enslave the rest, but look at the bright side: If he'd succeeded we would today have a free Central America of prevailing universal Human rights. It's our moral duty to enforce universal freedom and personal privacy. If we have to kill a lot of people to do so that's just too damned bad for the dead.

I'd better end here before Spencer returns from lunch. He gets upset sometimes when I write about things like this.

In conclusion, I write that we do not have to obey illegitimate laws of our own nations even if that puts us in conflict with our own legal systems if the higher law of preventing murder is at risk. I argue that we have a moral obligation to impose freedom and privacy on those who do not have that option now, even if they resist. If in a free environment they choose to give up their rights as autonomous beings in favor of vice, Islam, or suicide, that's a matter of individual choice that we shouldn't involve ourselves in. The fact that our governments and our voting populations might not agree with us is irrelevant in terms of the urgency of stopping harm. I argue that William Walker had the right plan, of intervention into unlawful and immoral non-universalist systems for the greater good of Humanity, however flawed he might have been in practice.

On the other hand, we have the Islamic view of reality.

http://www.alhewar.com/ISLAMDECL.html

Posted by: sonofwalker at September 25, 2005 02:57 PM