AUM NAMAH SHIVAYA
There are no non-state actors. No NGOs. Dutch-Israeli Martin Van Creveld sows confusion. His analysis is superficial, tendentious in the direction of Talmudic legalism. Legalisms of any kind are closed systems and Talmudism, along with its counterpart Sharia, is a persisting representative of the breed.
If you have a lobbyist you are a governmental organization. If you aim to influence policy-makers, you are a governmental organization. The phrase, US foreign policy establishment, which is intended to include all the so-called think-tanks, gives the game away. They are governmental organizations. There are no NGOs. If you are a citizen of a country, your every action, undertaken as an individual or in a group, is a governmental action, because citizens are their government, even when a despot crawls their backs.
Leader Development Discussion One
Statecraft is about power, which means national sovereignty and a people’s ability to maintain it for themselves. A people’s sovereignty as a nation/country is the measure of their freedom. Measures of good and evil take place in the hereafter, not in the concourse of states. Who among men knows what is good and what is evil? Find one such, report it in public, and observe/accept the consequences. Then answer for the ticks on your measuring stick.
Measures of morality and analyses of ethics are something else altogether. Measures of morality and analyses of ethics do obtain in the conduct of statecraft:
Morality is a very simple thing. Morality is having the thought, the word and the deed inline on the same line going the same direction. Morality is the unity of thought, word and deed, or, power and meaning. It has nothing to do with estimates or measurements or opinions of goodness or badness.
Man has no capacity to know what is good or what is not. Moreover and more importantly, man cannot separate good from not-good in his experience. In matters of valuation, man can know only what is moral and what is not. That is moral which has thought, word and deed united to one direction, one purpose, one telos or goal. That is immoral which has thought, word and deed proceeding separately in different directions.
Ethics is the analysis and evaluation of a situation with regard to its unity or disunity of thought, word and deed. That is ethical which embodies complete and accurate analysis and evaluation. That is unethical which embodies incomplete and inaccurate analysis and evaluation.
The premise of the Talmud is decrepit, sick: that man can adjudicate between what is Godly and what is not, that he knows what He knows. Job himself declares otherwise, as does Jeremiah. And then there is Jesus.
That, of course, was in the days of McCarthyism and the rampages of the House Un-American Activities Committee. And that reminds me of an unlikely, but I think true, story of Tillich and Bertolt Brecht, which I learned from Eric Bentley, one of Brecht’s interpreters and translators.
Brecht, the communist playwright, was to run afoul of the House Un-American Activities Committee and find it prudent to return to Germany, where he settled and worked in East Berlin. But before that, he went to see Tillich in Cambridge, where Tillich was by then teaching. The two had apparently never met before and would not again. Brecht spent the evening trying to persuade Tillich to join the communists but could not do so. As Bentley told it to me, Brecht would hold forth on some theoretical point and then Tillich would say, “Ja. Bestimmt!” or something like that. And Brecht would say, “So, you see, you are already one of us.” And Tillich would say, “Nein.” So Brecht would take another tack and talk a while about labor, or about international relations, or perhaps class struggle, or something. And Tillich would say, “Ja,” and agree with him. And Brecht would say, “So you really belong with us.” And Tillich would again say, “Nein.” And so it went for several hours, and finally Brecht, defeated, had to get up and leave.
I don’t know whether either Brecht or Bentley had read The Socialist Decision. Probably not. But if they had, I think they would have understood Tillich’s “Nein.” He was in strong agreement with the communist critique of capitalism and bourgeois society, but he recognized the heteronomous character of the Communist party, and he saw that the communist movement was falling back into the bourgeois mentality that he called “self-sufficient finitude.”
The irrational perversity of Self-Sufficient Finitude may be denominated also as the malicious irresponsibility of The Manichaean Madness. Spiritual Patriotism improves upon Tillich’s Religious Socialism for these times.
Βασιλεία του Θεού