RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/01/five-years-later-we-still-havent-learned-from-the-charlie-hebdo-massacre/

Giving a bunch of religious extremists or government bureaucrats veto power over our speech doesn’t make us safer. It just makes us less free.

Five years ago today, two French Islamists forced their way into the Paris editorial offices of the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo and began shooting. The journal’s offices had been moved to an unmarked building after they were hit by a 2011 firebombing in response to the publication of a satirical cartoon of the Prophet Mohammed. The shooters managed to kill twelve people. A related attack soon followed in a kosher supermarket, where four Jews were murdered by a friend of the shooters.

Even today, the paper’s editor, who’s published offensive caricatures of popes and rabbis, lives under police protection for the crime of slandering Mohammed. Charlie Hebdo, whose circulation has dropped precipitously after an initial post-attack spike, is an ill-mannered slayer of sacred cows of a kind that, sadly, doesn’t exist in the United States. The only American enterprise I can think of that has a comparable openness to skewering all faiths is South Park, but even its excellent brand of satire is staid by comparison.

For a brief moment after attack, the free world rallied around Charlie Hebdo. “Je suis Charlie” became a global rallying cry. The massive march through the streets of Paris that followed included virtually every major world leader, including those hypocrites who are happy to clamp down on free expression in their own nations. One leader conspicuously, and embarrassingly, absent from the proceedings was the president of the United States, Barack Obama. He sent the U.S. ambassador to France instead.

https://jrnyquist.blog/2020/01/06/the-killing-of-general-soleimani-was-it-right/

There are many approaches to the subject of ethics. Aristotle said that we do not naturally possess goodness of character. Only by obedience to rules of valid conduct do we acquire such goodness. Does our national security establishment even know what goodness is? And was it right to assassinated General Soleimani?

Rightness of action, according to Aristotle, involves taking a middle path between a vice of deficiency and a vice of excess.

Now let us examine President Trump’s order to kill General Soleimani. As actions go, the killing partakes of the spheres of Fear and Confidence, Honor and dishonor (major), actuated through temper and truthfulness (or lies).

On the first of these dimensions, did President Trump act with rashness, courage or cowardice? We cannot say it was cowardly, because he publicly took responsibility for killing a high-ranking Iranian general. No coward would place himself in the crosshairs of a violent terrorist regime. The question is whether or not President Trump acted rashly (i.e., the vice of having too much confidence).

Is Trump over-confident? In terms of acceptable risk, a leader should not create a situation in which he is likely to be killed. Leaders are not invincible, immortal, supermen. Therefore it is not, in principle, wise to wage war with poison weapons, or to target enemy leaders, unless you are prepared to suffer the same fate as those you have targeted.

In principle, a policy of killing enemy leaders, which (I am sad to admit) the United States has followed intermittently since Pearl Harbor, exposes our own leaders to assassination. An example of how this works may be found in the case of President John Kennedy’s assassination. It is known that Kennedy ordered a hit on Cuban dictator Fidel Castro. It is also known that Castro learned of Kennedy’s order through a double agent (i.e., the prospective assassin), and said he knew about Kennedy’s hit when he visited the Brazilian Embassy in September 1963. These facts have been alluded to by famous persons, including President Lyndon Johnson and the chief of the CIA’s counterintelligence staff, James Angleton. It is believed by some intelligence experts that two communist bloc intelligence services (DGI and KGB) were complicit in Kennedy’s assassination; that the Soviets acted to defend Castro, preemptively, and to lay down the law to future American presidents. This action had the intended effect when President Gerald Ford instituted Executive Order 12333, prohibiting assassinations. Because President Ford understood why Kennedy was assassinated, he exercised prudence to safeguard the person of the president — reflecting the lesson of Dallas, learned on 22 November 1963. The lesson was simple: America should not attempt to assassinate foreign leaders or officials. President Carter and President Reagan affirmed Executive Order 12333 during their terms of office.