Posts Tagged ‘rule of law’
“The clearest way to show what the rule of law means to us in everyday life is to recall what has happened when there is no rule of law”*…
There’s rule-by-law, and then there’s rule-by-law (AKA, authoritarianism).
Long-time readers will know of your correspondent’s affection and respect for the artist Banksy. He’s “struck” again– and again, he’s hit a nerve…
From the AP…
… Unlike the elusive artist’s other provocative works that are sometimes stolen or carefully removed and displayed in galleries or sold at auction for millions, his latest mural was being erased Wednesday from the record.
The stenciled spray-painting of a protester lying on the ground holding a blood-splattered placard while a judge in a traditional wig and black gown beats him with a gavel was scrubbed from wall of the iconic Royal Courts of Justice…
More of the story: “Banksy mural of a judge beating a protester is scrubbed from London court,” from @apnews.com.
* Dwight D. Eisenhower
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As we protect what’s precious, we might recall that it was on this date in 1935 that Adolf Hitler addressed the eighth Nuremberg Rally, the “Rally of Freedom.” Following Goebbels (who had declared that history would some day pass the verdict on Hitler that by overthrowing Bolshevism he saved Germany from an immediate catastrophe and thereby brought Western civilization back from the brink of complete destruction)…
In a speech to 120,000 political functionaries on the Zeppelinwiese [here] this afternoon, Herr Hitler expressed his appreciation of their loyalty, which had been inspired by faith in him and his ideals, and which had enabled him to achieve for Germany what he had.
In an address to several thousand “Hitler” girls and women Herr Hitler said that the National-Socialist movement was providing “braver and better husbands.”
He added:- We are training real men for the women, decent, brave, and honourable. When the women see the fine Labour Service boys, dressed only in trousers and with breasts all bare, they must say, “It is nice for the women and what fine fellows are here, and conscription, what marvellous training!”, There is no equality in giving women tasks where they were men’s inferiors. Whenever I picture a woman in Parliament, I feel that she is being degraded. She does not raise the general level. She is drawn down to it herself.
– source
“The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history”*…
… and of their present. Anne Applebaum explores the ways in which autocrats in China, Russia, and elsewhere are now making common cause with MAGA Republicans to discredit liberalism and freedom around the world…
… Even in a state where surveillance is almost total, the experience of tyranny and injustice can radicalize people. Anger at arbitrary power will always lead someone to start thinking about another system, a better way to run society. The strength of these demonstrations, and the broader anger they reflected, was enough to spook the Chinese Communist Party into lifting the quarantine and allowing the virus to spread. The deaths that resulted were preferable to public anger and protest.
Like the demonstrations against President Vladimir Putin in Russia that began in 2011, the 2014 street protests in Venezuela, and the 2019 Hong Kong protests, the 2022 protests in China help explain something else: why autocratic regimes have slowly turned their repressive mechanisms outward, into the democratic world. If people are naturally drawn to the image of human rights, to the language of democracy, to the dream of freedom, then those concepts have to be poisoned. That requires more than surveillance, more than close observation of the population, more than a political system that defends against liberal ideas. It also requires an offensive plan: a narrative that damages both the idea of democracy everywhere in the world and the tools to deliver it…
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… the story of how Africans—as well as Latin Americans, Asians, and indeed many Europeans and Americans—have come to spout Russian propaganda about Ukraine is not primarily a story of European colonial history, Western policy, or the Cold War. Rather, it involves China’s systematic efforts to buy or influence both popular and elite audiences around the world; carefully curated Russian propaganda campaigns, some open, some clandestine, some amplified by the American and European far right; and other autocracies using their own networks to promote the same language…
…the convergence of what had been disparate authoritarian influence projects is still new. Russian information-laundering and Chinese propaganda have long had different goals. Chinese propagandists mostly stayed out of the democratic world’s politics, except to promote Chinese achievements, Chinese economic success, and Chinese narratives about Tibet or Hong Kong. Their efforts in Africa and Latin America tended to feature dull, unwatchable announcements of investments and state visits. Russian efforts were more aggressive—sometimes in conjunction with the far right or the far left in the democratic world—and aimed to distort debates and elections in the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, France, and elsewhere. Still, they often seemed unfocused, as if computer hackers were throwing spaghetti at the wall, just to see which crazy story might stick. Venezuela and Iran were fringe players, not real sources of influence.
Slowly, though, these autocracies have come together, not around particular stories, but around a set of ideas, or rather in opposition to a set of ideas. Transparency, for example. And rule of law. And democracy. They have heard language about those ideas—which originate in the democratic world—coming from their own dissidents, and have concluded that they are dangerous to their regimes…
The origins and the operations of today’s all-too-successful authoritarian disinformation efforts: “The New Propaganda War” (gift article) from @anneapplebaum in @TheAtlantic. Eminently worth reading in full.
Apposite: “‘Everyone is absolutely terrified’: Inside a US ally’s secret war on its American critics,” @zackbeauchamp on India’s campaign to threaten and discredit critics of the Modi regime, in @voxdotcom. Plus: “India’s YouTubers take on Narendra Modi” (gift link to @TheEconomist).
* George Orwell
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As we analyze agitprop, we might recall that it was on this date in 1998 that Michael Fortier was sentenced to 12 years in prison and fined $200,000 for failing to warn authorities about the plot to bomb the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City.
Carried out by right-wing (white supremacist- and militia-sympathizing) anti-government extremists Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols, the bombing (on April 19, 1995, at 9:02 AM) killed 168 people, injured 680, and destroyed more than one-third of the building, which had to be demolished. The blast destroyed or damaged 324 other buildings and caused an estimated $652 million worth of damage. It was the deadliest act of terrorism in U.S. history before the September 11 attacks in 2001, and still the deadliest act of domestic terrorism in U.S. history.
McVeigh had shared his plans with Fortier (his Army roommate); Fortier had accompanied McVeigh on a scouting trip to the building in advance of the blast; and Fortier had failed to warn officials of the attack.
“Our new Constitution is now established, everything seems to promise it will be durable; but, in this world, nothing is certain except death and taxes.”*…
Franklin’s caution was, of course, premonitory. David W. Blight explains why in his review of James Oakes‘ new book, The Crooked Path to Abolition: Abraham Lincoln and the Antislavery Constitution…
Historians can and do change their minds about interpretations of events and the uses of evidence. We may be dead certain, or even mildly sure, about facts and the stories we tell about them, but our craft requires us to remain open to new persuasions, new truths. James Oakes used to believe that the United States Constitution was essentially proslavery in its foundations, and that any attempt to breathe antislavery meaning into it was strained or rhetorical and not textually supported. But no more. In his remarkable and challenging book The Crooked Path to Abolition, he makes the case that there were effectively two constitutions written in Philadelphia that summer of 1787, one proslavery and one antislavery, which would be in conflict with each other for more than the next fourscore years.
Oakes, a distinguished professor of history at the CUNY Graduate Center, is not the only historian to have changed his view on this matter. In my first book, in 1989, I treated Frederick Douglass’s development of an antislavery interpretation of the Constitution as a slowly evolving perspective on his road to becoming a pragmatic political abolitionist and as a form of wish fulfillment in the absence of alternatives. I called his antislavery constitutionalism “dubious”—a search for political and moral ground on which he could stand to avoid embracing violent revolution by the 1850s. But I have come to see him as a deeply committed political thinker who argued his way, through what he called “careful study,” using legal and moral logic, to a vision of an antislavery Constitution. Guided by the natural rights tradition, Douglass found the core meaning of the American crisis. “Liberty and Slavery—opposite as Heaven and Hell,” he wrote in 1850, “are both in the Constitution.” What divided the nation was a Constitution “at war with itself.”
It has long been understood that without the compromises that were struck to bolster the interests of the slave states, there might have been no constitution achieved in 1787, and the thirteen original states might have careened off into regional coalitions at best…
he original Constitution reeked of complicity with the peculiar institution. It contained prominent proslavery features: a fugitive slave clause requiring retrieval of escaped bondspeople (although ambiguous about adjudication), the provision that the end of the foreign slave trade would be postponed until at least 1808 (both sides claimed victory in this matter), and the numerous elements that embedded federalism deeply into the document, enabling the doctrine of states’ rights to flourish. Above all, the three-fifths clause counting enslaved people in such a robust fraction for the purpose of representation in Congress and the Electoral College, which enhanced significantly the slave states’ power in the legislative branch and presidential elections, explicitly gave the United States, it seemed, a permanent proslavery future.
Proslavery advocates made the Fifth Amendment’s guaranteed protection of property ownership their “linchpin,” Oakes shows, in one crisis after another in the antebellum era, including the dangerous controversy around the admission of Missouri as a state in 1820. The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 drew its power, at least slaveholding southerners believed, from original, if vague, constitutional guarantees of the return of escapees. But so did the passionate resistance to that hated provision in the North because of the Constitution’s equally explicit guarantee in the Fifth Amendment of due process to “all persons.”
Southerners would, of course, claim that the Constitution permitted their secession in 1861, following the argument of John C. Calhoun of South Carolina, who maintained that the United States had been from its inception a contractual arrangement balanced between slave- and free-state interests. And they confidently held that, according to the Tenth Amendment, all powers not delegated to the federal government were reserved to the states. The proslavery Constitution had previously sustained slaveholders’ faith in their power within the Union, and in “King Cotton” as economic leverage, down to the late 1850s, despite their increasing minority status.
On the other hand, Oakes identifies several parts of the Constitution as inherently antislavery. The preamble’s call for a “more perfect union” inspired abolitionists, who also pointed to section 4 of article 4 and its “guarantee to every state in this Union a republican form of government.” Section 2 of article 4 buttressed a growing antebellum claim of Black citizenship, rooted in the privileges and immunities clause. Antislavery constitutionalists also found support for their principles in the Fourth Amendment: the rights of Americans to be “secure in their persons…against unreasonable searches and seizures” offered language to protect fugitive slaves and promote human rights.
The Fifth Amendment served both sides, but abolitionists drew increasingly on its stricture that no “person” shall be “deprived of life, liberty…without due process of law.” They avoided the word “property,” which followed “liberty” in the text, not just out of convenience but because of their long-standing legal and moral rejection of the idea of “property in man.”…
The combination of all these clauses and principles allowed some abolitionists to declare the Constitution a bulwark for human equality and not merely, as Oakes says, a “hypocritical fantasy” crushed by white supremacy and a larger history. Some modern readers who are now conditioned to see the United States only as a progenitor of racial inequality may, misguidedly, find this claim on behalf of abolitionists a bridge too far...
[There follows an illuminating recounting of the arguments between the two sides over the nexts several decades, then of Lincoln’s reading and the Civil War…]
We still have two Constitutions on many issues: the nature of federalism, voting rights, election laws, the right to bear arms, and much more. We have a majority on the Supreme Court determined to return every power possible to the states, reverting the “Union” to many decades ago when it was a collection of battling legal sovereigns with common borders. The historical template for these and other future debates may always be the profound failures and triumphs of antislavery constitutionalism’s struggle against proslavery constitutionalism in the 1850s and 1860s. The heat in our public history wars today needs the light of this kind of scholarship, however difficult it is to sustain faith in truth, persuasion, and historical consciousness itself…
Too timely: “The Two Constitutions,” @davidwblight1 in @nybooks.
An apposite piece on the several ways that American’s “read” the founder of modern economics: “America’s Adam Smith” from Branko Milanovic (@BrankoMilan).
* Benjamin Franklin, in a November, 1789 letter to French scientist Jean-Baptiste Le Roy
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As we choose a side, we might recall that it was on this date in 1967 that President Lyndon B. Johnson nominated Solicitor-General Thurgood Marshall to become the first black justice on the U.S. Supreme Court. A storied civil rights attorney and jurist (Federal Court of Appeals), Marshall served on the highest bench from 1967 until his retirement in 1991.
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