Category Archives: Republicans

Hegel and the State of Exception (updated 8/18/10)

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Thus I use the term ‘state of exception’ to make clear a set of political and juridical phenomena which we are trying to define. This term, which has come from the German tradition, is Ausnahmezustand. This term is extraneous to the French or Italian scholars who prefer to speak of …… [in a language I cannot understand] or in the Anglo-Saxon tradition the corresponding terms are ‘martial law’ or ’emergency powers.’ In this sense the choice of the term ‘state of exception’ involves taking a position with respect to the very nature of phenomena. For instance the ‘state of siege’ or ‘martial law’ expresses of course a relation to war, the state of war which has always been important in the origin of this institution. But they show in the final stage to show themselves to be inaccurate as to the fact and stage of the [illegible]. That’s why it is necessary to have a state of siege, political fictitious state of siege etc. The state of exception is not a special juridical order (the law which regulates the state of war,) rather it is a suspension of the whole juridical order itself which marks it for the limits, the threshold of the juridical order. It is for that reason that in public law there is not such a thing as a theory for the ‘state of exception.’ Although the proximity between the state of exception and sovereignty has been established by the German jurist Carl Schmitt in his 1922 book ‘Political Theology,’ his obvious definition of the sovereign as the ‘one who decides on the state of exception’ has been widely debated. Nevertheless the jurist could continue to ignore this phenomena and treat it more as a quaesti facti than as a true juridical problem. According to opinions which are very common, the ‘state of exception’ constitutes a point of imbalance between public law and politics which, like civil war, insurrection and resistance, is located in an ambiguous zone at the border between the juridical and the political. But precisely for that reason it seems to me that the question of the state of exception’s limits becomes particularly urgent.

Giorgio Agamben. The State of Exception – Der Ausnahmezustand. Lecture at European Graduate School. (1)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dW5hl0-w7P8
http://www.egs.edu/faculty/giorgio-agamben/articles/the-state-of-exception/ (This is a transcript of the lecture but the link does not always work.)

Does the perpetuity of the state of exception necessitate the perpetuity of revolution? Thomas Jefferson thought that “no society can make a perpetual constitution or even a perpetual law” and “every law, naturally expires at the end of 19 years. If it is to be enforced longer, it is an act of force, and not of right.”(2) In excerpts from Giorgio Agamben’s article, “State of Exception” he states:

The textual basis of the conflict lies first of all in Article 1 of the constitution, which establishes that “the Privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it” but does not specify which authority has the jurisdiction to decide on the suspension (even though prevailing opinion and the context of the passage itself lead one to assume that the clause is directed at Congress and not the president). The second point of conflict lies in the relation between another passage of Article 1 (which declares that the power to declare war and to raise and support the army and navy rests with Congress) and Article 2, which states that “the President shall be Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States.” (3)

A Brief History of the State of Exception (4)
http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/009254.html

The state of exception is not merely an exception to the “Writ of Habeas Corpus” in the US Constitution which would apply only to American citizens. While Habeas Corpus has a history much longer than the history of the United States, the notions embodied in the US Constitution of democracy (rule by the people) goes all the way back to the Greeks. For Jefferson, the Constitution embodied a living constitution of a society of people committed to the Enlightenment ideals of individual freedom, equality and government by the people. John Locke, one of Jefferson’s mentors, wrote extensively on liberty and the social contract theory. (5) Immanuel Kant thought that a democratic government would make war less likely:

…if the consent of the citizens is required in order to decide that war should be declared (and in this constitution it cannot but be the case), nothing is more natural than that they would be very cautious in commencing such a poor game, decreeing for themselves all the calamities of war. Among the latter would be: having to fight, having to pay the costs of war from their own resources, having painfully to repair the devastation war leaves behind, and, to fill up the measure of evils, load themselves with a heavy national debt that would embitter peace itself and that can never be liquidated on account of constant wars in the future.

Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch (6)
http://www.constitution.org/kant/perpeace.txt

Jefferson thought that the US Constitution would be a model for the rest of the world. He hoped it would change the world for the better. However, he also feared that the Federalist tendency could erode the rule of the people which is why he advocated a revolution every 19 years. The fear of Jefferson was the fear of the state of exception. The state of exception includes but is not limited to Habeas Corpus. It really asks a larger question, “Can any constitution be constructed such that liberty and justice are essentially protected?” For Jefferson and Agamben the answer is, no. Jefferson, like Walter Benjamin, thought the only answer was a perpetual revolution of the people.

The whole constitutional question and in a larger sense, how any kind of constitution could democratically protect a nation from going to war, that would be “of the people”, seems to be an impossible task. This is a very good article concerning the US constitutional question on the initiation of war:

The war on terrorism and the modern relevance of the Congressional power to “declare war” (7)
http://www.allbusiness.com/legal/3585740-1.html

In the conclusion the author notes:

Where does all of this leave us? What, if anything, is left of the power of Congress to “declare War?” I submit that it is largely an anachronism, because the kind of aggressive uses of force historically associated with formal declarations of war, which the Framers seemed most concerned about checking with a congressional veto, have now been outlawed.

The defensive need for swift action in the case of aggression is a clear case in which the will “of the people” cannot be conclusively established before the commitment of troops and possibly years of war have been initiated by the Executive branch. The article cited above also establishes other nuances of this situation that appears to have also mystified the framers of our Constitution. The general thought based on the framers and their mentors was that defensive military action must reside with the Executive branch but offensive action should include the Congress. However, as the above article cites, this can get murky too. This seems to me to be a clear case where there is no democratic resolution possible and opens up the rift that is aimed at the notion of the state of exception.

The use of the state of exception has been used liberally by Democrats and Republicans but in recent times more liberally by Republicans. Here are some examples:

1. The Patriot Act of George Bush (8)
2. The suspension of a right to trial (Habeas corpus) at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba (9)
3. Dick Cheney’s defense of torture based on “national security” and Abu Ghraib (10)
4. Justification for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan (10)

Wendell Kisner in his article, “Agamben, Hegel, and the State of Exception” discusses two thinker’s resolution to the problem:

Carl Schmitt’s approach is to try to annex the state of exception within the juridical order itself. The difficulty here is that one then has a juridical order that includes a provision regarding its own suspension (insofar as the state of exception suspends the rule of law), making it difficult to make sense of how a legal order can govern, ‘legally’, the state of exception in which that very order is deactivated, as well as how any legal limitation can be applied to it.

Agamben, Hegel, and the State of Exception (11)
http://www.cosmosandhistory.org/index.php/journal/article/view/77/154

Walter Benjamin’s approach is to always separate the state of exception from the juridical order, thereby ‘unmasking’ (as Agamben puts it) the ‘mythico-juridical violence’ that attempts to unify them in the service of the authoritarian state (SE 63). Benjamin wrote shortly before his death that ‘the tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the ‘state of exception’ is the rule’ (cited in SE 57). Agamben follows Benjamin here and suggests that, because the state of exception is the ‘anomic’ space from which any legal order emerges at all, it is no longer even possible to return to liberal democracy: ‘From the real state of exception in which we live, it is not possible to return to the state of law, for at issue now are the very concepts of “state” and “law”’ (SE 87). Regarding the two possibilities exemplified by Schmitt and Benjamin, he then concludes,

To live in the state of exception means to experience both of these possibilities and yet, by always separating the two forces, ceaselessly to try to interrupt the working of the machine that is leading the West toward global civil war (SE 87).

And thus:

The only truly political action, however, is that which severs the nexus between violence and law. And only beginning from the space thus opened will it be possible to pose the question of a possible use of law after the deactivation of a device that, in the state of exception, tied it to life (SE 88).

As mentioned above, beginning from the state of exception, it is not predetermined which way it will go and so the risk is great. Will revolution bring a more just political order or a more oppressive totalitarianism?

Agamben, Hegel, and the State of Exception (11)
http://www.cosmosandhistory.org/index.php/journal/article/view/77/154

The debate of the state of exception seriously puts our constitutional government into question. Can the Constitution be suspended in times of “emergency”? What constitutes an emergency? Couldn’t this be a slippery slope that could be used for looser and looser situations and ultimately make a mockery of “due process”? Would the Constitution then be simply smoking mirrors for totalitarianism? Could Plato have this in mind when he wrote in “The Republic”

This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when he first appears above ground he is a protector.

http://www.constitution.org/pla/republic.txt

Dr. Kisner suggests that Hegel poses a possible way out of the dilemma. He first seems to make the suggestion that the distinction between constitutional order and the state of exception is a necessary kind of symbiotic relationship that is brought about by limitation and the refusal of limitation which he and Hegel call “negative freedom”. Writing of freedom he states:

Insofar as that demand requires abstraction from all particular determinacy in order to first become self-determining and thereby free, however, it requires abstracting from the very historically determinate conditions of its own appearance at a particular time and place in history.

Agamben, Hegel, and the State of Exception (11)
http://www.cosmosandhistory.org/index.php/journal/article/view/77/154

He quotes Hegel:

The will on one side is the possibility of abstraction from every aspect in which the I finds itself or has set itself up. It reckons any content as a limit, and flees from it. This is one of the forms of the self-direction of the will, and is by imaginative thinking insisted upon as of itself freedom. It is the negative side of the will, or freedom as apprehended by the understanding. This freedom is that of the void, which … becoming actual it assumes both in politics and religion the form of a fanaticism, which would destroy the established social order, remove all individuals suspected of desiring any kind of order, and demolish any organization which then sought to rise out of the ruins. Only in devastation does the negative will feel that it has reality

Agamben, Hegel, and the State of Exception (11)
http://www.cosmosandhistory.org/index.php/journal/article/view/77/154

It is almost as if we must create order to destroy it, to free ourselves from it as freedom dictates. Thus, the state of exception is a necessity of freedom. The will is on an essential mission to destroy itself to concretize its freedom. Order or the Forms (peros) must undo itself in chaos (aperion). The notion of the individual necessitates its destruction:

In archaic Roman law, the “state of exception” describes the juridical situation of homo sacer (sacred man), a human being who — for one reason or another — “may be killed but not sacrificed,” that is, someone who is no longer included in human society nor even covered by its most basic protections. Condemned to exist in a state of exception, the homo sacer can be killed by anyone, without a murder being committed. To Agamben, the striking thing is that this situation (which concerns the extra-juridical order) was inscribed within Rome’s juridical order. The rule and the exception to it became confused, indistinct: the exception now becomes the rule. The homo sacer is not simply excluded from society; he or she is also included into its “constitution,” its legal code. But he or she is included only as “bare life,” only as a body, a mere creature without political or “human” rights of any kind. This was a major historical development, which constituted “the first paradigm of the political realm of the West.” Prior to that, bare life (zoe in Greek) had not been “included in/excluded from” the politico-juridical realm, which merely concerned itself with bios (living in the polis as a citizen).

The Secret of George W. Bush’s Power: the State of Exception
http://www.notbored.org/state-of-exception.html

Thus “bare life reaches its maximum indeterminacy”:

The immediately biopolitical significance of the state of exception as the originary structure in which law encompasses living beings by means of its own suspension emerges clearly in the ‘military order’ issued by the President of the United States on November 13, 2001, which authorized the ‘indefinite detention’ and trial by ‘military commissions’ (not to be confused with the military tribunals provided for by the law of war) of noncitizens suspected of involvement in terrorist activities […] What is new about President Bush’s order is that it radically erases any legal status of the individual, thus producing a legally unnamable and unclassifiable being. Not only do the Taliban captured in Afghanistan not enjoy the status of POWs as defined by the Geneva Convention, they do not even have the status of persons charged with a crime according to Americans laws. Neither prisoners not persons accused, but simply ‘detainees,’ they are the object of a pure de facto rule, of a detention that is indefinite not only in the temporal sense but in its very nature as well, since it is entirely removed from the law and from judicial oversight. The only thing to which it could possibly be compared is the legal situation of the Jews in the Nazi Lager (camps), who, along with their citizenship, had lost every legal identity, but at least retained their identity as Jews. As Judith Bulter has effectively shown, in the detainee at Guantanamo, bare life reaches its maximum indeterminacy.

State of Exception (12)
http://www.notbored.org/state-of-exception.html (quoted here)

In “negative freedom”, freedom is an anarchism that separates form and content. It has no content, no order to replace the limitations of constitution and exception with; it can only tear away at the ground, the foundation of law within the form of law. This sounds like a Derridian deconstruction but Dr. Kisner relegates post-modernism to a maze of relativism that apparently must feast on the absolute as exception feeds on the Constitution.

In true Hegelian fashion Dr. Kisner retrieves a positive from a negative:

Therefore negative freedom is a standing contradiction: its very character as negation of limit is itself its limit. Alternatively stated, its very flight from all content is its content. The abstractive move of the state of exception itself is its own positive character. But this in turn means that negative freedom negates itself as absence of limits. It is defined as absence of limits. But insofar as this is its limit, this negates its character as absence of limits. We do not need to merely oppose a better concept of freedom to it, as do Rousseau and Kant. Negative freedom is not negated by some other concept of freedom but by itself. To put it another way, the state of exception is not overcome by some other juridical order that is imposed upon it or which has to annex it in advance. Rather, its own negativity as the suspension of all normativity/juridicality is itself negated by the positive character that this very negation is.
…
Insofar as it negates all limit, negative freedom is negative. But insofar as this flight from limit is its own limit, it has a positive character. Thus insofar as the will is nothing other than the willing of freedom, the will now wills this positive character. The step is certainly minimal, but a subtle shift has occurred from willing the absence of limit to willing a limit, even if that limit be nothing other than the very willing of the absence of limit. We’ve moved from a will that wills nothingness to one that wills its own positive character, and hence from willing nothing to willing something.

But this is self-determination in its most germinal form. The abstraction from all limit abstracts from every externally imposed or pregiven determinacy. But that very movement reveals its own determinacy as such abstraction, and hence it is only now in a position to will itself as freedom. The limit it now wills is its own limit rather than a pregiven one, and hence it has ‘given itself’ that limit or, to look at it another way, is submitting to the limit that it is. Insofar as it submits to its own limit, it gives its limit to itself or is self-determining. Thus from out of the suspension of law a self-imposed law emerges. This is not yet the fully explicit legal system of a juridical order, of course, but is the minimal limit out of which any such legal order must emerge if it is to be self-determining and thereby free. It is from here that we can get from Rousseau’s natural freedom to a freedom defined as ‘obedience to the law one has prescribed for oneself’.

Agamben, Hegel, and the State of Exception (11)
http://www.cosmosandhistory.org/index.php/journal/article/view/77/154

So the state of exception is the movement of spirit that creates content, it historicizes a Constitution to overturn it. When we understand this conundrum we no longer are externally compelled to keep the law, we can become the law; have the law written in our hearts as Paul might suggest.

Freedom has here gained a greater degree of concreteness over the merely abstract universality characterizing a will that, in rejecting all limitation, winds up being an empty formality devoid of content. An abstract universal is one that is other than its particular content—the separation of form from content is what makes it abstract. Once we take the step to a will that wills itself, to a freedom that has itself for its content, then we have a concrete universal—the concrete universality in which the form of freedom is the same thing as its content. What the will henceforth must do in order to be free is not to withdraw from all determination but to determine itself. A freedom that wills itself universally is what Hegel calls a ‘right’.

Agamben, Hegel, and the State of Exception (11)
http://www.cosmosandhistory.org/index.php/journal/article/view/77/154

It seems to me that the notion of “externally imposed” gets added into the argument at a critical point such that now the argument is shifted from a sort of viscous circle between Constitution and state of exception to a conflict between will and “negative freedom” or by extension between me and the other. The “external” would then be “negative freedom”, the other. Reminiscing of Emanuel Levinas, the other undoes the totalizing of will, has meaning beyond “me”, beyond being (ontology) – meontology (me-on). If the other turns out to be me then the conflict is resolved and we can all walk away happy – Tat tvam Asi. However, can we think of a resolution in terms of the self-determination? How does this change the four examples I cited above of the state of exception? Doesn’t this internalization of the conflict at the least enable a sort of bourgeois perpetuation of the status quo? Perhaps a Hegelian, guru-like state of enlightenment ushers in a hard earned ‘right’ but have all the issues been resolved? Even if Hegel is absolutely right and has concretized the universal, is everything done? We still have Dick Cheney and Abu Ghraib. Have we silenced the cry of those victims or at least made them “understandable”? Do we have to misunderstand Hegel to care about the conflict in the Constitution and the state of exception? Do we have to lapse into an external (negative freedom) versus internal (will) dialectic?

What impact does this, “What the will henceforth must do in order to be free is not to withdraw from all determination but to determine itself” have on the original problem of Constitution and state of exception? Should we take this as an admonition not to withdraw from the dilemma but to approach it with a deeper understanding of how we “willed it thus” as Nietzsche might suggest? Is the suggestion that a shift from what “they” are doing (and the moral high ground it affords) to what I am doing as self-determined somehow erases the dilemma? Does a “concrete universal” change or alter the dilemma in some discernable way? What results from understanding the cause?

While Dr. Kisner asks us to consider the real nature of the dilemma and thus find some sort of resolve we could also ask, “What does it matter?” What effect is produced by asserting the cause? It certainly does not make Guantánamo go away. Perhaps it does help erode our concern over doing something about Guantánamo. It seems to me that a dialectic is called for on the external and internal. However, that could easily land us into Cartesian Dualism, the old mind/body, subject/object dilemma. Can we use a dualism (external/internal) to resolve a dualism (Constitution/State of Exception) or have we simply obscured and shifted the argument cleverly? Are we essentially obligated by the suffering of the other or are we only called to internalize it? What kind of world-philosophy would internalize the dilemma or as Levinas might suggest totalize it? Haven’t we lapsed into a sort of self-determining totalization albeit of our own essential making? It almost looks like an anti-materialization, a resolution of Spirit, self-determination gone absolute. Spirit has gathered itself as itself and as Paul suggests “For from him and through him and to him are all things” with “Him” being us – an Occidental, Vedantic koan. It just seems to me that out in the hinter land howling wolves still mark the lost graves of the damned.

It also appears that a resolution to the state of exception as “self-determining” misunderstands the violence that Agamben and Benjamin are aiming at in the tension of law and lawlessness (anomie). Law and violence are not subsumed or synthesized (aufhebung, lifted up, sublated) such that they are both preserved in their transformation. The brute facts of violence, its horrific immediacy, its irrecoverable loss, its senselessness nevertheless retain their significance in relation to law. Without law, violence would merely be a random act of nature without consequences, without significance. Both law and violence are essential to each other. The power of the Executive inchoately, essentially carries with it, the intent of the despot for war and violence. It cannot be regulated by law or constitution but must exist alongside it as a necessary component of a democracy. Its violence and potential for abuse cannot be dulled or transformed unless invasion, torture, collateral damage and war can be thought in different terms that violate their meaning. They can be totalized. By totalized, I mean put into a higher context that essentially loses its immediate impact, its brute force (allusion to Derrida – force of law). Totalizing causes these horrific acts to lose something about them that we should not and cannot lose (without violating it beyond recognition). I find Levinas’ discussion of the saying and the said to have an odd kind of ambience here.

The violence of the said, the totalizing of the said, that narcissistically substitutes itself for saying. It violently abolishes the anachrony of the other. In so doing it does not transform the saying but re-presents it as determined. As such, it inscribes the other into its own orb, the orb of sameness. In this moment the other is negated, lost, obviated and violence asserts itself once again. However, the face of violence is now bourgeois; the slave is property, the Jews as “bare life reaches its maximum indeterminacy”. The result of this is that ethics (as Levinas thinks it) cannot be transcended, synthesized or lifted up beyond itself. If it is “self-determined” it is really only lost and relegated to the hinter land. It is interesting to note that if we were drawing parallels the said would be related to law and the saying would be related to violence. Could it be that the interruption of the face of the other violently displaces me, breaks the plastic molds I make of the face of the other (in Levinas’ words)? Horrific violence is a result of the loss of Ethics (as Levinas envisions it). Could it be that death is the final violence that disrupts the said, the nomus (law) of being? Would this mean that violence as the disruption of totality turns in on itself and lashes out at the absolute alterity (otherness) of the other in rage and lawlessness?

With archaic passion for survival the will, the Executive, is pitched in a desperate effort to re-establish itself, its dominance, it takes on a psychopathic revenge for life. The force of non-being (me-on) is re-presented as the abyss, the void. The disruption of the other that puts me and mine into question rolls in as a fog over the void. A pathological need washes over beings, the totality of ‘Being’, to uphold order over chaos, to reestablish law over lawlessness, totality over alterity, and restore ‘Being’ from its corrosive demise. The heroic as the Executive must gather itself. In the face of absolute threat, the Executive is roused with infinite passion to reclaim its origin (arche), its right to be as self-determined. Agamben makes the state of exception sound like a vortex, a black hole, a center that defies all the known laws of physics, is void of any real determination including “self-determination”:

This debate takes place in the same zone of anomie, of lawlessness that on one side that must be kept at any price in relation to the juridical order and on the other hand must be freed on the contrary from this relationship. What is at stake in this zone of anomie is the relationship between violence and the law. That is to say that the state of violence is a cipher of human action. To Schmitt’s gesture that tries each time to re-scribe the violence in the juridical context Benjamin responds by showing to violence for pure revolutionary violence in existence outside any juridical order. Interesting for some reason you have to understand the fight for anomie, for lawlessness, seems to be, for Western politics and juridical tradition as decisive for Western metaphysics (the child’s struggle about being ….[indistinct]) To pure existence as a physical wager corresponds here pure violence as the ultimate political object. To the ontological strategy that tries to capture being in lawleess language corresponds to a strategy of exception which must establish and conserve the relationship between violence and law. It is as if both law and lawless language are in need of an anomic order (a logic zone of suspension) in order to ground their reference to world and life. Law seems to be able to exist only by grasping anomic lawlessness in the same way that language can only exist by grasping a [known quest?]. In both cases, the conflict concerns (a very peculiar) empty space. On one hand anomie, the juridical void, and on the other pure being being void of any real determination. For the juridical order the empty space is precisely the state of exception as its constitutive action.
Giorgio Agamben. The State of Exception – Der Ausnahmezustand. Lecture at European Graduate School. (1)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dW5hl0-w7P8
http://www.egs.edu/faculty/giorgio-agamben/articles/the-state-of-exception/ (This is a transcript of the lecture but the link does not always work.)

Ethics as the absolute alterity of the face of the other must always return as tides on the sands to the desperate battle for self-determination, for any kind of determination. The Hegelian lifting up (13) of terms is the transformation of alterity to sameness. It is the re-establishment of self, the self AS self and other, law and lawlessness, judicial and Executive. Otherness must essentially drop out and thus, violence is destined to be the future of ‘Being’. The tides of once again, samsara are fates from the future that can only mercifully be absolved in the finality of death. Tragically, in the land of the living, the progeny of the past is the desperate violence for the eradication of the other.

——————————————————————————————————————————-

Notes

(1) August 2003. Transcription by: Anton Pulvirenti
(2) “no society can make a perpetual constitution or even a perpetual law. The earth belongs always to the living generation.”…”Every constitution then, and every law, naturally expires at the end of 19 years. If it is to be enforced longer, it is an act of force, and not of right.” Thomas Jefferson To James Madison Paris, Sep. 6, 1789
http://odur.let.rug.nl/~usa/P/tj3/writings/brf/jefl81.htm
(3) Even if congress does need to approve exceptional cases and keep the executive branch on a “short leash” look at what happened when the congress approved the intervention in Iraq (here are the votes http://mixermuse.com/blog/2010/01/02/nearly-every-member-of-congress-voted-for-intervention-in-iraq/). As the votes indicate Democrats had more problems with it than Republican’s but many Democrats voted for it for purely political reasons. So even though theoretically the legislative branch (and the judicial branch by extension) has reasonable checks and balances to executive abuse the reality is a very different story. I remember the intervention in Iraq and Afghanistan as a congressional “rubber stamp” to Bush. In times where the president commits us to war with troops already engaged in conflict (without official decree of war) most politicians do not display a concern for the Constitution but a concern for their political survival (I note Obama’s recent statement on the mosque in New York as a notable exception). History is replete with examples of how both parties were more concerned with their jobs than balancing abuses of the executive branch. It seems to me that this is a giant loop hole that effectively dismantles Constitutional mechanisms and indicts our whole democratic, Constitutional form of government.
(4) Excerpt from pages 11-22 of State of Exception by Giorgio Agamben, translated by Kevin Attell, published by the University of Chicago Press. ©2004 by the University of Chicago. All rights reserved. This text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of U.S. copyright law, and it may be archived and redistributed in electronic form, provided that this entire notice, including copyright information, is carried and provided that the University of Chicago Press is notified and no fee is charged for access. Archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the consent of the University of Chicago Press.
(5) Locke, John. Second Treatise on Government (1689)
(6) Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch by Immanuel Kant
(7) By Turner, Robert F
Publication: Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy
Date: Monday, April 1 2002
(8) “Another thing to do with the relationship between the ‘state of exception’ and law and life is the immediately biopolitical meaning of the ‘state of exception.’ It is an original structure by means of which law includes in itself living through this sort of suspension. I think it appears clearly in the military order declared by the President of the United States on November 24, 2001 which auhtorised the indefinite detention and trial by military commissions (not to be confused with the military courts)of citizens suspected of being involved in terrorist activities. The US Patriot Act was voted in by Congress in May, 2002, it allowed the Attorney General to detain anyone suspected of an activity which would threaten the national security of the United States. But in this case the alien had to be, after 7 days, either expulsed or accused of any violation of the law. So it was new in the military order of President Bush to completely cancel any juridical status of an individual. It thus produced a human being juridically unable (to defend him/ herself). Taliban capture in Afghanistan cannot be protected by the status of a prisoner of war according to the Geneva Convention. They cannot be accused even according to American law. Neither prisoner nor accused but only detainees are the object of a purely factual sovereignty completely outside the law. The only possible comparison is the juridical situation of the Jew in the Nazi Lager. They had lost not only citizenship but any juridical identity.”
Giorgio Agamben. The State of Exception – Der Ausnahmezustand. Lecture at European Graduate School. August 2003. Transcription by: Anton Pulvirenti
http://www.egs.edu/faculty/giorgio-agamben/articles/the-state-of-exception/
(9) “Why suspend the habeas corpus in insurrections and rebellions? The parties who may be arrested may be charged instantly with a well defined crime; of course, the judge will remand them. If the public safety requires that the government should have a man imprisoned on less probable testimony in those than in other emergencies, let him be taken and tried, retaken and retried, while the necessity continues, only giving him redress against the government for damages. Examine the history of England. See how few of the cases of the suspension of the habeas corpus law have been worthy of that suspension. They have been either real treasons, wherein the parties might as well have been charged at once, or sham plots, where it was shameful they should ever have been suspected. Yet for the few cases wherein the suspension of the habeas corpus has done real good, that operation is now become habitual and the minds of the nation almost prepared to live under its constant suspension.” –Thomas Jefferson to James Madison, 1788. ME 7:97

“The following [addition to the Bill of Rights] would have pleased me:…No person shall be held in confinement more than days after he shall have demanded and been refused a writ of habeas corpus by the judge appointed by law, nor more than days after such a writ shall have been served on the person holding him in confinement, and no order given on due examination for his remandment or discharge, nor more than hours in any place of a greater distance than miles from the usual residence of some judge authorized to issue the writ of habeas corpus; nor shall that writ be suspended for any term exceeding one year, nor in any place more than miles distant from the station or encampment of enemies or of insurgents.” –Thomas Jefferson to James Madison, 1789.
(10) See http://www.markdanner.com/orations/show/213?class=related_content_link
The Politics of the Forever War: Terror, Rights, and George Bush’s State of Exception (transcript)
The 2006 Remarque Lecture, New York University
by Mark Danner
(11) Cosmos and History: The Journal of Natural and Social Philosophy, Vol 3, No 2-3 (2007)
(12) Stato di eccezione (2003, translated into English as State of Exception by Kevin Attell and published by Stanford University Press in 2005)
Giorgio Agamben
State of Exception
Translated by Kevin Attell
©2005, 106 pages
Cloth $30.00 ISBN: 978-0-226-00924-7
Paper $13.00 ISBN: 978-0-226-00925-4
(13) Even Hegel died and was not lifted up as some of his disciples would like ;-).

Please note that this article will be updated and changed as I do more research and hopefully, get feedback from others – everything on this site is a work in progress.
 

Why We Still Sacrifice Our Young

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Barbaric ancient cultures ritually sacrificed their young to appease the gods. In the remoteness of those behaviors we cloak our own ritual instincts to sacrifice our youth. First, let me say that my own personal perspective on this has been shaped by first-hand experience of the Vietnam War that effectively destroyed both of my older brother’s lives. I am fascinated with how we sabotage ourselves in our truths and guarantee that our nemesis will once again rule the day. How do we sacrifice our young?

Watching Vice-president Biden yesterday talk about love of country in the heroic sacrifice of our warriors enraged me. The mistakes of President Obama’s predecessors have been blessed and sanctified in his administration’s current support of the Afghanistan war. These mistakes are no longer thought in terms of Bush administration tragedies but the old mantle of “defending freedom” has once again been cast over the irrevocable tragedy of state sanctioned killing of our youth. In Vietnam, the thought of a tragic mistake was the elephant in the room that our rhetoric always had to maneuver itself against. Just as the Catholic Church has never officially acknowledged that the earth is round but killed it with centuries of rhetorical hubris, the tragic sacrifice of our young in Iraq and now Afghanistan, started by Bush’s admitted mistake in Iraq, has been rhetorically redeemed into a “defense of freedom”, a “heroic sacrifice for the survival of our country”. The very same politicians that propagate these tragedies are the ones that gush their priestly, sanctimonious justifications for why these sacrifices had to be.

The truth, the elephant would speak if we let it, is that we blundered into nation building and forcing our values on cultures that at best have ambivalent judgments about our occupation and at worst fuel the fires of the holy war against the great satin (us). Our politicians tell us all the theological edicts that sanction our violence by a loving god and a country that stands for unquestionable truth. We lure our young into the military with commercials that play on their heroic fantasies and need for a job. They naively enter a machine that dashes their youthful ideals and deposits them in an alien culture with weapons and a mantra of kill or be killed. Families are torn apart and destroyed for generations. “Collateral damage” is the name for the rhetorical elephant that kills hundreds of thousands of women, children and “non combatants”. Many veterans that return find they must justify themselves and get locked into war hawkish justifications for future conflicts. They find conservative, Republican ideology as their life-long companion. The church ensures its future and brainwashing propagates into its young. The business of war is sealed in a tomb of sanctimonious rhetoric.

We could never admit that we have wasted our children’s youth and futures on a lie. That would rob our false god of its fire and fury. We would have to live in the shadows of Mordor, the dole drums of the under-world, the loss of meaning, the emptiness of nihilism. Nihilism is the result of the bankruptcy of our truths, our metaphysics, and our reasons for being. The chasm of our underside is opened by the radical belief in our holiness. The negative fascination of our truths stares into the void and the void stares back into our truths. We must continually feed the dragon or it will eat us. The gods must be appeased and our youth are our sacrificial lambs.

I have written elsewhere (http://mixermuse.com/blog/2010/01/08/war-on-terrorism/) on this blog how I think criminal situations could be dealt with that are propagated and fueled where no law exists, both best case and worst case, without playing these psychological-sociological games on ourselves so I will not re-state how we could deal with Iraq and Afghanistan in a saner, rational and targeted approach. In this essay, I simply want to expose how we symbolically and symbiotically feed on ourselves by a lack of philosophical, critical reflection. Folks, if our gods could save us from ourselves they would have centuries ago. The truth is, as Nietzsche prophesized, is that our good and evil is hopelessly enmeshed in a historically destructive dance that can only be compared to an act of god, an non-human tornado, a thirst that can never be quenched but will drink itself into oblivion on the sands of the desert. Will the United States be remembered thousands of years from now as a step away from humankind’s barbaric past or just another historical example of an Egypt or Rome that lost itself in its own dizzy heights and crashed into yet another heap of historical ash? All the while there are those of us that live in the shadows of death of our loved ones while the politicians blather on about our virtues and continue to tragically and mistakenly feed the beast.

My Email to the Attorney General of Colorado

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If you would like to send an email, here is the address:

attorney.general@state.co.us

Dear Mr. Sutthers,

I know you really believe in what you are doing with this law suit against the Federal Government. I know you also know that your opposition believes that this is merely a political vendetta. Obviously, nothing I can say will change your mind but I would like you to keep one thing in your mind while you are pursuing this case:

– Colorado is looking at laying off a lot of teachers in the next few years

– State budgets having been teetering on failure for quite some time

-Every fifty thousand dollars you spend on this case is a teacher that will get laid off and innumerable children that will suffer long term consequences

I hope you have resolved this issue in your mind because this is the brute fact that will proceed from your action. I, for one, will be looking intensely into what is being spent on this venture and I know many others will as well. Please act wisely as this involves more than your anger or merely your interpretation of the law – look realistically at the chance of winning the case or just making headlines at the cost of teacher’s jobs…

“I paid for my Social Security and Medicare. I don’t take government handouts.”

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Yea, you paid some money into these programs and you keep telling yourself you are not part of the BIG government program and not being totally selfish but think about this:

1. Social Security and Medicare ARE big Federal Government programs largely done by Democrats with Republicans calling it Socialism and BIG government totalitarianism. They said it was not American for the government to force them to pay for these programs. Republicans have been trying to get rid of these programs ever since. Both Medicare Advantage and Medicare Part D (prescription drug plan) were Republican plans that were gifts to insurance companies and contributed as much or more to the deficit than the new Health Care Reform package will.

Medicare Advantage does not offer any new benefits over basic Medicare without increased premiums and costs the government 14% more than the same benefits offered in basic Medicare. For the same benefits, Medicare Advantage hands out wads of case to private insurance companies to offer the same benefits as basic Medicare.

The prescription drug plan prohibits cost negations based on huge quantities that the government purchases. Bulk negotiations are regularly done in private business but the Republicans in the Bush administration wanted to make sure the drug companies got a sweetheart deal that cost you as much money over the next ten years as the cost of the Health Reform Bill.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/12/opinion/12krugman.html
http://www.americansforcoordinatedhealthcare.org/the_next_healthcare_battle_cutting_medicare_advantage/pid:5

2. As an older person you are part of a high risk insurance pool. Before these programs you could not get insurance. Many older people died on the street. Private insurance companies could not make a profit on you. The cost to insure you was more than they made on premiums. The situation is even more severe now that the cost of medical care has been increasing much faster than inflation. The money you paid into these programs would not come close to covering the costs that you have accumulated for the following reasons:

a) One of the causes for the projected deficits is that the number of workers paying taxes compared to the number of people receiving benefits has fallen and is projected to fall further.

b) Increase in life expectancy without a comparable increase in the retirement age:

– Since Social Security began paying benefits in 1940, the life expectancy of the average 65-year old male and female has gone up 40% and 45% respectively.

– Benefits and taxes are automatically indexed on an annual basis to compensate for inflation and wage growth. The retirement age is not indexed to compensate for increased life expectancy.

c) The higher birth rate of the baby boom generation compared to the birth rates of succeeding generations:

– In 1960 (during the baby boom), the average birth rate per woman was 3.6. By 1975, the average birth rate had fallen to 1.77. As of 2004, it is at 2.05.

d) The increasing number of people receiving disability benefits:

– Between 1960 and 2005, the U.S. population grew by 59%. During the same period, the number of people receiving disability benefits increased by 1,109%.

e) Health care cost have increased dramatically more than what the projected cost increases

http://www.justfacts.com/socialsecurity.basics.asp
http://www.cbo.gov/ftpdocs/102xx/doc10297/06-25-LTBO.pdf

The bottom line is that you are drawing out more than you paid in. You can complain about the Federal Government all you want but you would not have any health care without the government. The numbers do not work.

3. A lot of you are in programs you never paid into like Part D (prescription drugs). My dad does not need part D because he is on a prescription drug program for veterans of WW2. He never paid into this but he is a big Republican and thinks he is not on a government program – he says he has never taken anything from the government.

4. If the commerce clause the Republicans are touting is correct then get ready to get rid of Social Security and Medicare because the big, bad government forces you to pay into it.

5. If we do nothing the deficit will rise 143 billion dollars more over the next 10 years than if we have the Health Care Reform Act according to the CBO. Health Care Reform costs less than we will pay if we do nothing. The total cost of the Health Reform Act is the same as the cost of Part D over the next 10 years and closes the doughnut hole.

http://www.cbo.gov/ftpdocs/113xx/doc11379/Manager’sAmendmenttoReconciliationProposal.pdf

I don’t know how to get through these rationalizations and justifications based on pure fantasy but I will tell you that your blindness conveniently keeps you from seeing your selfishness, greediness and the violence you are doing to others that do not have your government benefits. How does it feel to be a hypocrite?

The “Tea Party”?

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The Tea Party got its name from the Boston Tea Party.  Initially, their point was that there should be no taxation without representation.   They identified with the patriots.  Now, they like to equivocate the monarchy of England during the Revolutionary War with today’s Federal Government.   Do you see a difference?  A monarchy is NOT elected but our government (which includes the Federal Government) is elected by a majority of the people in our country.  Hey, Tea Partiers, we got the government we elected – you lost. 

Real patriots advocated democracy in the face of totalitarianism.  Terrorists advocate senseless violence in the face of democracy.  What side are you gun toting, reloading, cleaning fools on?  The rest of us pay taxes for a military and police to deal with your type.  Go ahead – go down in a blaze of ignorance – the gene pool will be better off.

And, guess what…we think the tax burden will get shifted from the middle income groups the Republicans administrations gave us to big corporations and rich folks.  Oh, I know they like to threaten that they will leave the country or pass the cost on to everyone else but I call that intimidation and black mail.  I have faith that capitalism and competition will leave those that act on these threats in the ranks of the has-beens and entrepreneurs will rise to take the spoils.  Don’t continue to be pawns of big money marketing.  They would have you act against your own interests so they come out ahead. 

Oh, and if you are on Social Security and Medicare and are against Health Care Reform you are selfish and nasty.  You are part of the problem and I think you are responsible for the death of thousands of men, women and children that have died in this country from no and/or inadequate health care.  I see faces of children when it comes to health care reform.  You and your politicians fought CHIPS and health care for decades and I see children dying from it.  If you have the gall to call yourself “pro-life” on top of this you are hopelessly lost.  Why don’t you give age the face of grace, wisdom and virtue not pettiness and hypocrisy?

The Democrats Filibustered the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Performed Southern Lynching

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Next time you hear this please do NOT let them get away from the “rest of the story”.  Both statements above are true.  After the Civil War, Southerners hated Republicans (remember Lincoln).  They also fought against blacks in the Civil War.  The Union used Northern blacks and Southern blacks that escaped slavery.  This is why Southerners were Democrats after the Civil War in large numbers.  In 1964, the Dixiecrats (Southern Democrats) hated integration (remember busing).  They opposed Civil Rights in large numbers.  The real issue with Civil Rights was NOT Democrat versus Republican – it was North versus South.   See the numbers folks: http://mixermuse.com/blog/2009/12/15/of-all-the-varieties-of-virtues-liberalism-is-the-most-beloved-aristotle/ .

After the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Dixiecrats joined the Republican Party in mass.  Why do you think they did this?  They found their true ideological home with the Republicans.  The big, bad, evil Federal Government was forcing their kids to go to school with blacks.  Many states in the South are still very Republican.  If Civil Rights happened today without everything that has happened since 1964, the Republicans in the South would oppose it.  They might know how to keep their mouth shut now but speaking as one from Louisiana, the Dixiecrats are Republican now and have learned to keep their bigotry to themselves.

The Absolute Necessity of Rhetoric

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In President Obama’s recent trip to Afghanistan he told the troops that he would not send troops anywhere that was not “absolutely necessary” (http://frontpagemag.com/2009/10/27/mission-abandoned-%e2%80%93-by-alan-w-dowd/).  When President Bush started the war in Afghanistan he justified it as a crusade, vengeance for 911, a Texas style hanging for Al-Qaida and killing the ones responsible for 911.  I never heard him state that he was going to bring the terrorists responsible for 911 to justice.  He may have made that statement but most of the statements were along the line previously described.  Using these rhetorical ploys Bush was able to get the support he needed to start the war in Afghanistan.  Hatred is always a strong emotion while justice is emotionally a bit puny.  Bush started the war against Afghanistan based on rhetoric about getting Al-Qaida.  To date Al-Qaida is still around and our rhetoric about our enemy Al-Qaida is also used freely about the Taliban.  While no one would suggest that the Taliban is a great group of guys, they were not the stated reason why we went to war in Afghanistan.  Fanning the flames of 911, Bush was able to start a war.  His rhetoric became President Obama’s “absolute necessity”. 

I have previously stated that as leader of the United States, President Bush should have stated that we would bring Al-Qaida to justice.  Preferably, this would be done through the United Nations, the World Court and pressure from the World Monetary Fund (in Afghanistan and Pakistan).  President Bush’s rhetoric should have made justice the guiding principle.  We would have kept the sympathies of the world and made justice the value that everyone, no matter what their political persuasion, sympathetic to the universality of justice.  Vengeance and hatred on the other hand are regionally specific.  Those that hate and want vengeance are driven by their own internal necessity not by any universal appeal, by an ideal that everyone could think is worthwhile.  As I have also mentioned in another paper, barring the earnest attempt to get justice in a region of the world where justice is highly lacking, the alternative would be US Special Forces, the CIA, mercenaries, and covert bribes and pressure.  Don’t think it can’t be done; we had a whole cold war based in Afghanistan against the Russians using these techniques many years ago.  However, the political rhetoric should always be concentrated on universal values not regional and circumstantial emotions.

When our hatred drives our rhetoric the rhetoric can take on a life of its own in popular culture.  The switch from admirable, universal ideals to self-aggrandizing, raw and base instincts that become yet another mindless iteration of the past; it becomes its own necessity.  The necessity driven by hatred always ends badly.  The necessity driven by high ideals, historically always ends well.  Examples of the latter include the founding fathers, Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., Jesus, etc.  Unfortunately, the earlier is typically the blunder of humankind.

Since rhetoric based in base instinct got us into Afghanistan, I think President Obama had no other choice but to use rhetoric to get us out of Afghanistan.  It has been done before (Vietnam comes to mind) – we declare victory for x, y, z reasons and get the hell out.  We pursue the cause of bringing Al-Qaida to justice using the previously discussed strategies.  As it is, now we are looking at an endless war that has the tendency to expand as these situations typically do.

Another example of rhetoric gone badly is the recent militant rhetoric used by the Republican Party against the Democrats.  The Republican leaders play on the strong emotions of hatred and violence with inflammatory rhetoric and “wash their hands” of it when their words start taking a life of its own in popular behavior.  If you want to understand how Hitler was able to do what he did you can see the beginnings of it in these kinds of rhetorical ploys. 

While personally, I have never opposed capital punishment in cases where there is “no shadow of doubt” about the defendant’s guilt, I have opposed it based on the rhetorical dynamic described above.  When the necessity of rhetoric is allowed to run rampant Texas style executions become more and more “normal” and statistics about wrongful deaths and ethnic inequalities of the death penalty become more and more prevalent.

President Obama should have held to his higher ideals and not adopted the rhetorical necessity handed to him by the Bush administration. 

On a more philosophical level, the dynamic of rhetorical necessity tells us something about human’s unique way of being-in-the-world.  Our narratives of history become our cannon.  The ill-conceived actions that typically follow continue to create generations of veterans and Republican voters that sanctify our motivations and our histories.  The perceived alternative would be to exist in meaninglessness.  God, the self-evident and the a priori surround us as witnesses to our ultimate worthiness and meaning.  In the margins of our hubris plays the alter-ego, the lie of truth and the future seeds of our own undoing.

Response to a Pro-Death Comment

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This is my response to a Pro-Death comment submitted for this article:

House of Representatives Passes Sweeping Health Reform Bill

http://www.nea.org/home/38621.htm#btnSubmitComment

Original Comment:

“I just wanted to let the NEA president know that because of his arrogant opinion I am no longer a member of the NEA. I went to my local NEA office today and told them I no longer want to be a member of an organization who endorse people support socialist policies/agendas. My political and moral values are more important to me than anything in the world. I am so sorry that I was a member of an association that suppossedly pushes an agenda for kids but supports many political candidates who endorse killing babies in the womb (hypocracy) and makes a mockery of ideals of our founding fathers. By the way NEA make sure you push for print in all the future history books in schools throughout the USA, Im sorry…..the U.S.S.R (United States Socialist Republic), March 21, 2010, the day Constitution was ripped into shreads by the Democratic Party of America.”

My Response:

James 2:15-17 states:

“If a brother or sister be naked and in lack of daily food, and one of you say unto them, Go in peace, be ye warmed and filled; and yet ye give them not the things needful to the body; what doth it profit? Even so faith, if it have not works, is dead in itself.”

If Jesus were here today he would add health care to food and clothing as it is certainly “things needful to the body”.

The commenter above needs to know that abortion is legal in this country and has been for quite a few decades.  Neither President Obama nor the rest of us are baby killers because mere cells are not human.  On the other hand, you kill young people because they certainly are human and since I am sure you voted for Bush and his 2 ridiculous wars you had a direct hand in killing innocent young people – you are a murderer IMO.  By the way, I did not get any choice about paying taxes for your stupid wars that killed our young people. 

 I also did not get a choice about Social Security, Medicare, drivers license, motorcycle helmets, increased taxes for booze and cigarettes but I understand that we all pay for these issues and I am willing to pay without calling my country socialist, fascist, totalitarian, etc.  You are not a patriot – you are only for this country when you get your way. 

You need to know that President Obama was elected by a majority of us to do the job he did on health care.  I will not even begin to tell you how enraged I was during both Bush and Reagan presidencies.  We the American people DO want national health care in this country and you were told when President Obama was elected and you have been told again with this bill so deal with it!  If you are so “pro-life” how can you fight against the millions without health care in this country and the hundreds of thousands of deaths that result for no care or inadequate care?  Before CHIPS and this bill you people would not even let us insure kids in this country!  You are already involuntarily paying for emergency room health care and will be paying much, much more in the near future unless something is done NOW. 

Don’t say you are “pro-life” when you fully exhibit hatred and violence for those that have already certainly been born.  You are pro-death and full of darkness and an evil god!  Go back to your cave and pray or slice up small animals or whatever you do!

The Greater Good and Scott Roeder

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It seems to me that anti-abortion folks have an untenable position if they hold to the idea that some killing is ok.  I have debated abortion with many anti-choice folks.  I have never found one yet that took the position that killing any human for any reason was wrong.  Scott Roeder took the position that killing was ok in the case of self-defense or to protect “unborn children”.  Most anti-abortion folks will not go along with killing someone to protect “unborn children”.   However, most anti-abortion folks do believe in the concept of a “just war” and capital punishment.  In both of these cases they believe that it is ok for humans to kill others. 

In their view, God is good.  God is served in the case of a “just war” or capital punishment.  Therefore, killing in the case of a “just war” or capital punishment is the greater good – the greater good not by man’s standards but by God’s standards.  Many anti-abortion folks that have been around the block tend to resist arguing their point on purely religious grounds since they have been burned too many times with that argument.  They tend to take the emotional bashing, shame and pity method to make their point.   Nevertheless, when push comes to shove, their beliefs are really grounded in their religion.  In any case, the “greater good” argument works whether they are atheists are theists.  Since they believe that a greater good is served by a “just war” or capital punishment, the question is, “Why isn’t the greater good served by murdering an abortion doctor – if you believe that a fetus is a baby?”  How would you draw the line at saying killing an abortion doctor is wrong yet killing is ok in the case of a “just war” or capital punishment? 

I suppose if you are a theist you could maintain that the former is not God’s will while the latter is.  This argument will show itself to have more “subtleties” as in the case of Judas Iscariot cited further down.  So God appears to be more interested in killing “unjust” folks whether in war or in crime.  However, if you think that killing “babies” is murder, wouldn’t you also believe that it is “unjust”?  I suppose that if you question why one “unjust” act justifies humans killing humans but another “unjust” act does not, the theist would proclaim that we cannot know the mind of God.  But if we cannot know the mind of God how can they know the mind of God?  Well, they would say “faith”.  At this point nothing is left to be said since to question this “faith” means that you have no faith or at least not the “correct” faith.  In any case, it appears that there are various shades of faith. 

Scott Roeder’s faith told him it was ok to murder Dr. George Tiller.  The anti-abortion mainstream would disavow this type of faith and wash their hands of it (remind you of Pontius Pilate).  However, by intentionally slicing the kinds of faith so thin, don’t they share some complicity in this?  I have heard many of them (including Rod Dreher) write that they are not heartbroken by the death of Dr. George Tiller but condemn the action of Scott Roeder.  They have a very tight line to walk.  Ultimately, it can only be defended by appealing to their correct “faith”.  My question is. “How is this different from radical, violent Islam?”  They believe that they have the correct “faith” as well.  If everything boils down to the right “faith” then on the surface of it there is absolutely no difference. 

Here is another point – if you believe that Iraq or Afghanistan was wrong then you are in effect saying that those wars were not “just wars” and that your vote for the Republicans and President Bush was complicit in killing unjustly – or, murder (see http://mixermuse.com/blog/2010/01/02/nearly-every-member-of-congress-voted-for-intervention-in-iraq/ ).  As anti-choice, the only way to justify your vote for President Bush is to insist that both wars were just.  This would also include all the post-born women and children that were killed in these wars which no one would contest are not human and that the vast majority was innocent and killed unjustly.  I suppose this also would boil down to not having the correct knowledge of God.  The point is, once one starts down this road the fine distinctions get finer and finer.  When a person like Scott Roeder can’t get too fine with his logical prowess he just believes that he is exercising his faith by killing Dr. Tiller.  He thinks he is simply braver with his faith than most Christians.  He has all kinds of rationalizations about his virtuous motives.  Most Christians that disavow his action would also suggest that God can use evil for his glory as in the case of Judas Iscariot.   

Judas Iscariot betrayed Christ.  Here is what the Bible says concerning Judas:

I am not referring to all of you; I know those I have chosen. But this is to fulfill the scripture: ‘He who shares my bread has lifted up his heel against me’.  John 13:18

While I was with them, I protected them and kept them safe by that name you gave me. None has been lost except the one doomed to destruction so that Scripture would be fulfilled.  John 17:12

 Jesus replied, “The one who has dipped his hand into the bowl with me will betray me.  The Son of Man will go just as it is written about him. But woe to that man who betrays the Son of Man! It would be better for him if he had not been born.”  Then Judas, the one who would betray him, said, “Surely not I, Rabbi?”  Jesus answered, “Yes, it is you.”  Mathew 26:23-25

But the hand of him who is going to betray me is with mine on the table.  The Son of Man will go as it has been decreed, but woe to that man who betrays him.  Luke 22: 21-22

Then what was spoken by Jeremiah the prophet was fulfilled: “They took the thirty silver coins, the price set on him by the people of Israel, 10and they used them to buy the potter’s field, as the Lord commanded me.  Mathew 27:9-10

and said, “Brothers, the Scripture had to be fulfilled which the Holy Spirit spoke long ago through the mouth of David concerning Judas, who served as guide for those who arrested Jesus  Acts 1:16

“For,” said Peter, “it is written in the book of Psalms, ” ‘May his place be deserted; let there be no one to dwell in it,’ and, ” ‘May another take his place of leadership.  Acts 1:20

Judas was condemned for betraying Jesus and yet he was fulfilling the will of God.  This is how many anti-choice folks view the act of Scott Roeder. 

It seems to me that at some point we have to just state that “faith” and rationality contradict each other and “faith” wins at the cost of logic.  Even Kierkegaard who thought that faith was the absolute passion of pinning your eternal happiness on the contradiction of the God-Man would not pitch faith against logic.  He would simply suggest that logic is irrelevant for faith.  The square is not a circle in faith; it is just not relevant to that distinction.  However, in the case I am making, faith must conquer rationality and deem logic illogical by the “logic” of faith so the square is a circle.  Faith is another kind of logic that can contradict logic.  It is sort of like saying A is not A because of B.  If you have faith in B then your argument is proved correct.  However, many folks do not hear the voice of God in this proposition – only the confusion of man.

Christians still kill the innocent unjustly and still condemn those that they think do the same.  I believe this is the definition of a hypocrite.  It also shares a nasty complicity in the evil it condemns as the prophecy of God also shares an insidious role in the betrayal of Christ.  Thus, it seems to me that the violent history that marks the history of Christianity, the hatred of the inquisition, the genocide of the crusades still yells much louder in the anti-abortionists than the words of their Christ, “The eye is the lamp of your body; when your eye is clear, your whole body also is full of light; but when it is bad, your body also is full of darkness.  Then watch out that the light in you is not darkness.”  Luke 11:34-35