Blood Libel: Donald Trump, Mika Brezinski, Genesis 9.5 (and Leviticus et al. passim)

I'm not going to write a formal post on the subject — with a draft on MS-Word and revision and proofreading and all that — but this much I'll add to the commentary on Donald Trump's tweet of 29 June 2017 on Joe Scarborough and Mika Brezinski, as reported on Business Insider: "I heard poorly rated @Morning_Joe speaks badly of me (don't watch anymore). Then how come low I.Q. Crazy Mika, along with Psycho Joe, came to Mar-a-Lago 3 nights in a row around New Year's Eve, and insisted on joining me. She was bleeding badly from a face-lift. I said no!"

To tweak for the tweet an old snarky comment: we knew Trump was a bully and sexist when the Electoral College hired him, so we have only a limited right to complain. Even allowing that limitation, however — and as an American I claim complaining as a God-given right, Constitutionally protected — even allowing that limitation, there are three serious problems with the tweet, in addition to its being a tweet (and sorry folks, but the President of the United States shouldn't be tweeting, period, except maybe an occasional "Happy Thanksgiving" or such).

First, blood comes with taboos in our culture and others: Biblically, it's the life of an organism and forbidden as human food in God's covenant with Noah. (So religious folk all upset over homosexuality shouldn't speak on the subject while eating blood sausage.) On the positive side, as the life of the organism it's a crucial point of Christian communion: "Take; drink." / "for this is My blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many for forgiveness of sins." And there are concerns with menstrual blood in the cultures of the Israelites and Jews and others.

Trump's mentions of blood, though, are unusual nowadays, and creepy.

They move from creepy into dangerous with at least two other considerations.

That Mika Brezinski and Joe Scarborough would track down Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago three nights running would indicate a great need to get to Mr. Trump; that they'd do it while Brezinski was undergoing complications from surgery would make them nearly desperate to contact him.

Whatever else was going on, such insistent attempts would indicate either pathetic stalking or a pathetic attempt to get to the Mr. Trump for one reason or another. As an absolute certainty, it would indicate a power relationship in which Mr. Trump is the superior.

Trump is the President of the United States; it's weird he'd brag about power in such a relatively trivial relationship.

It's weirder that he'd brag in such a way that he can be easily and quickly be shown to be lying.

Mike Brezinski is a TV personality only, so she's without significant power; she does have significant exposure and people could see whether or not "She was bleeding badly from a face-lift" on or about New Year's 2016/17. News outlets simply need to publish a photo, such as this one.

People lie for many reasons. For a person in power to tell a blatant lie is a power move. As George Orwell and Eric Hoffer pointed out primarily about "the old monster," Stalin — descriptive phrase from a Marxist opponent of Stalinism — Stalin's twists and turns functioned among other things to make intellectuals go into contortions to follow the Party Line. And more normal folk would have to show their faith in the great leader by showing it as unquestioning faith, ignoring logic and reason and sometimes their senses.

If "Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four," then Power is the power to get people to say, and ultimately believe, otherwise. If Trump says Brezinski "was bleeding badly from a face-lift," that is that, whatever photos and other witnesses might say. For authoritarians and totalitarians and bullies and power-freaks from Shakespeare's farcical sexist Petruchio in The Taming of the Shrew (4.5) to tragedy-producing tyrants: for their inferiors "To rely on the evidence of the senses and of reason is heresy and treason" (The True Believer, §56).

And that means heresy against the word of the leader and treason as disloyalty, e.g.,  to assert that Mika Brezinski wasn't bleeding.

Remembering Stalin in Ukraine, and Other Atrocities to Keep in Mind while Doing Very Careful Business with the Latest Russian Empire (and the Iranians)

"Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?"

                  — Attributed plausibly to Adolph Hitler,

                      preparing to annihilate, most immediately, Poles         

  

I'm listening again to Timothy Snyder's Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler And Stalin (1st published 2012), and I've gotten to Stalin's program of collectivization and against the peasants and nationalisms (sic: plural) inside that "prison-house of nations" the Russian Empire was under the czars and remained under Stalin.

            The United States will have to cooperate with the Russians (and the Iranians) for immediate needs like a reduction of slaughter in Syria and vicinity, and for continuing necessities like nuclear-arms reduction so the number of warheads gets to and stays below any number likely to destroy human civilization. The history of Russian rule in Ukraine and in the Balkans, the history of Russia in the various attempts to destroy Poland — another big topic for Snyder — is crucial to know and keep in mind during any rapprochement with the Russian Federation: It must be done in ways that won't really upset people with grievances against the Russian Empire in its Stalinist forms and decent memories. In American time, the 1930s were a long time ago; not so for people with better memories, especially when the memories include Ukrainians in huge numbers intentionally starved to death by Stalin and his willing executioners.

            I just finished listening again to Destiny Disrupted: A History Of The World Through Islamic Eyes by Tamim Ansary (2010), which makes the point that Islam, like aspects of Judaism and in the history of Christendom, is in part a political project. (Year 1 in the Muslim calendar is not the birth of Mohammed nor the year of the first revelation, but the year of the move to Medina and the birth of the Muslim community.) This is a point insisted on by Donald Trump’s national security adviser, retired Army Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn. It is also a point that must be kept in mind *and* handled with great delicacy.

            Here are two areas where the Trump people have legitimate points to make and could suggest some useful policies, but may end up with greater or lesser disasters because they don't "do nuance" and seem to consider delicacy (and what George Orwell called decency) unmanly.

            We need to cooperate with the Russians without undermining NATO and putting large parts of Europe in doubt of our willingness to prevent Russia from again doing horrible things on their territory. We need to cooperate with Russia and Iran against very much political aspects of "Jihad" in senses that definitely included military struggle. And we need to do all this very carefully.

            Another US administration that's into swagger over substance and some subtlety could make the US Iraq misadventures look relatively minor.

Euphemism: When You Want Truly Obscene Language (9 June 2014)

            It was some time during the 1980s: after 4 July 1982, when I earned my certification as an open-water scuba diver, and before November 1986, when the Iran-Contra affair became national news and few would joke about US actions against Nicaragua. Anyway, sometime in the mid-1980s I went to Roatan Island off the coast of Honduras for some of the best scuba diving in the Caribbean, and I ran into a young officer (captain if I remember right) in the Army of the United States.

            Now at least at that time, and in a cheap resort, there wasn't much to do on Roatan except dive, eat, play cards, play darts, eat more, drink, and, with all of these options, bullshit with other divers. I don't play cards and had had my fill of darts, so I was engaged in some serious drinking and shooting the shit with, among others, the Army officer.

            He wasn't with our diving group, and when we asked what he was doing on Roatan, he said something like, "What else?! I'm a spy." He was also, he said, a "red diaper baby": the offspring of Leftists, one who'd rebelled from his parents a bit — he went no further Right than Liberal — and joined the Army.
            It's possible that he was a spy of sorts, checking out US expatriates on Roatan for news from Nicaragua, though mostly getting in some diving; and there was no reason to doubt his family story. But I don't need any special reason to talk politics, and we proceeded to get moderately drunk, a little loud, and maybe just a tad too emphatic.

            Anyway, apropos of God-knows-what, I took an idea from George Orwell's great essay from 1946, "Politics and the English Language" and pushed the idea farther than I would have sober, saying something like, "You know, the great problem of the 20^th century is euphemism!" The Army officer gleefully jumped on the line, pointing out war and famine and genocide and torture and additional abominations, and suggested, strongly, I withdraw my assertion on grounds of its denseness and my inebriated stupidity. I said something with my usual sophistication, like, "Well, maybe not" and backed down a step or two, or possibly excused myself to empty my bladder or go to bed — or passed out, since that's all I remember of the conversation.

            I should have stood my ground more firmly.

            Indeed, euphemism is not the great problem of the 20^th century or any other century, but as the sainted Georges insist — Carlin as well as Orwell — language is important, and we should recognize in Orwell's words, "that the present political chaos," and that's any "present" I've experienced, "is connected with the decay of language, and that one can probably bring about some improvement by starting at the verbal end. If you simplify your English, you are freed from the worst follies of orthodoxy. You cannot speak any of the necessary dialects, and when you make a stupid remark its stupidity will be obvious, even to yourself. Political language — and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists — is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind."

            And the most serious of "the decay of language" and the perversion of language is political euphemism, reinforced by "question begging" — in the old senses, including evading the real issues — "and sheer cloudy vagueness." Orwell's examples: "Defenceless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers. People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps: this is called elimination of unreliable elements." That was in the mid-20^th century; in our time we have "nuclear exchange," "collateral damage," "friendly fire," "projection of force," and "area denial munitions" (= landmines) for some military euphemisms, and less spectacular business and political euphemisms for firing people, putting them on the government dole, and then cutting off their money: they're downsized, assisted with welfare, and then encouraged to take responsibility.

            Orwell asks his readers to picture "some comfortable English professor" — an example I resent but won't deny — "defending Russian totalitarianism" under Stalin: i.e., Stalin of the purges, massive "transfer[s] of population," and murderous famines. This hypothetical academic "cannot say outright, ‘I believe in killing off your opponents when you can get good results by doing so,'" but would more likely say or write something along the lines of, "‘While freely conceding that the Soviet regime exhibits certain features which the humanitarian may be inclined to deplore, we must, I think, agree that a certain curtailment of the right to political opposition is an unavoidable concomitant of transitional periods, and that the rigors which the Russian people have been called upon to undergo have been amply justified in the sphere of concrete achievement.’"

            This is parody, but, as the Brits might say, spot on parody, including the point that "The inflated style itself is a kind of euphemism," and, given Stalin's enthusiasm in killing off his own people, a euphemism that is obscene.

            Overstating his case, Orwell says that most political writing of his time was "largely the defense of the indefensible" and notes, correctly and with no exaggeration, that "Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of the political parties."

            So let's follow Orwell and imagine cases nowadays where politicians, pundits, and policy wonks are pressed to say directly what they mean.

            For example, when the President says, "No options are off the table," let's have a reporter ask, "Do you mean, then, that you'd be willing to destroy the major cities of _________ with thermonuclear weapons?" When a senator calls for a "surgical strike" with a drone-launched Hellfire Missile, s/he can be praised for not suggesting the older method of dropping high explosives or incendiaries on a whole village or town but only taking out a house or two — but asked if s/he is suggesting killing or wounding or maiming some relatively innocent people in that house or two in order to kill or wound or maim (given good intelligence and luck) some bad people.

            "The phrase surgical strike," as George Carlin has said, "might be more acceptable if it were common practice to perform surgery with high explosives."

            When fiscal conservatives talk about the need for "belt tightening," they can be asked how many people should lose their jobs for an appropriately tight belt. When defenders of the Bill of Rights talk vaguely about rights of privacy or bearing arms, they should be pressed to give approximate body counts to be risked to protect their e-mails or their right to bring a large-magazine weapon into a bar.

            So, again, euphemism was not the great problem of the 20^th century, but it would be nice in the 21^st if people talking politics were pressured to spell out what they mean with concrete words that call up images.

            If you believe that there are too many deer in an area, say if you like that "We should cull the herd," but add by that you mean shoot some, especially female deer of reproductive years. If you believe we should send troops into combat in support of some policy — and there are times when the United States should do so — say that you wish to send out heavily armed young people to enforce a policy decision by threatening to kill, wound, and maim other young people (and some miscellaneous old people and children) or threaten to do so until we have imposed the will of our leaders upon their leaders. And we'll destroy a fair amount of property, or at least threaten to.

            Basic rule: If you're willing to do something nasty, be willing to say what it is you're proposing to do.

            So, as indicated, I am willing to say that I believe there are situations where I will acquiesce in the killing, wounding, and/or maiming of children in order for my government to get its way. I must say that since I'm not an absolute pacifist. Therefore I believe there can be instances were one should engage in warfare — and kids are always killed in wars of any size. If you drop high explosive or incendiary ordnance into a village or town or city, you will kill people and destroy the products of their labor, and it is somewhere between ridiculous and abhorrent to say, "Well, I didn't intend to do that harm." Some nut throws a heavy-duty fragmentation grenade into a crowd and that's murder, even if he only intended to kill a bad person. Period — and ditto if you drop from the air or send in on a missile a whole lot more high explosive than in a grenade.

            What makes me a "Peacenik" is that I believe you should kill people to get your way only when you really, really have to. I'm one of those bleeding-hearts because I want people to think carefully about even necessary killing and acknowledge that even justifiable and justified homicide is still homicide and that large-scale killing in warfare is evil, even if there's an ethical imperative to do the do the killing.

            It is our duty to choose the lesser of two or least of several evils if those are our only choices. To choose evil, however, is to choose evil — and there is always the possibility that we missed a way out of the dilemma, and the strong likelihood that we put off action until we were trapped in that dilemma.

            Okay, people: do what you're going to do; propose the policies you think we must follow, but call deeds by the right names and bloody well take responsibility for what you do and what you recommend to do.
            Then, and only then, can we have moral discussions. And without moral discussions, we can't have moral action.

            Insofar as euphemism keeps us from honest thought and discussion, it may not be the major problem of politics, but it is a big one.