War and Peace

Seth Barrett Tillman: “Weighing” Good & Evil, and What We “Forgive” in History

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Seth follows up his post on Ireland and World War II.

Seth’s central point:

I do not suggest that Sakharov, Longstreet, or Rommel were evil men, but they did serve bad causes. I do not say that the good they did (or attempted to do) during their lives is made void by the bad. But I do say it is wrong to suggest that the bad is outweighed by the good. Cf. Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) (“I do not say [God forbid], I do not say that the virtues of such men were to be taken as a balance to their crimes; but they were some corrective to their effects.” (language in square brackets is Burke’s)). Such a moral quantification of right and wrong is not possible by mere mortals, and those who attempt such a calculus only callous our consciences.

The notion of weighing, as Seth cites it, is a metaphor that deserves more scrutiny than it gets from many of the people who casually use it. It begs the question of who has standing to do the weighing. I don’t think it’s human beings, certainly not the humans alive today who didn’t themselves pay much of the price of, in this case, Ireland’s WW2 neutrality. The people who paid aren’t around to speak for themselves. It’s hubris for us to make moral calculations, to weigh, to forgive, in their names. Better to say, so-and-so did these good things and these bad things, and leave it at that.

(See the previous Chicago Boyz post here.)

Seth Barrett Tillman: Ireland and World War II

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I am an American. I currently live and work in Ireland. But, I carry no special brief for Ireland and its people. When you wrote: “Ireland, like Sweden, has gotten a pass for behavior during World War II that doesn’t deserve a pass.” That’s true. But it is not the whole story either.

Read the rest.

Seth Barrett Tillman: The European Parliament’s 2016 Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought

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Excerpt:

I suspect there is no General James Longstreet Prize, and if someone asked me if such a prize should be created, I would say “no”.
 
There is no Rommel Prize, and if someone asked if such a prize should be created, I would say “no”. (And—just to be clear—I am not comparing Longstreet and the Confederacy to Rommel and Nazi Germany.)
 
There is a Sakharov Prize, and if someone had asked me prior to its creation whether it should be created, I hope I would have had the moral clarity to say “no”. There were and there are other people in Europe and elsewhere who this prize could have been named for: persons who were not quite so morally ambiguous. E.g., Average people—people who were not heroic or even particularly bright. Perhaps it could have been called the Ivan Denisovich Prize. It speaks volumes about the modern European zeitgeist that a major prize is named for Sakharov, but the founders of NATO—which protected Europe from Sakharov’s warheads—remain largely unknown. It goes without saying that the American taxpayer who paid for Europe’s defence (and who continues to do so) is entirely lost from sight. Europe’s cosmopolitan transnational elites much prefer believing that the years of peace and plenty were their creation, as opposed to their being the beneficiary of American good will beyond their control.

Seth’s argument is well worth reading in full.

Seth Barrett Tillman: Letter to the Editor: Responding to Robert Fisk’s “To understand the Islamist beheading of a French priest ….”

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It is not “inevitable” in any civil war—no matter how brutal—that one side murder foreigners. Certainly, the GIA’s murdering foreigners—even during the brutal Algerian civil war—was not “inevitable”. It was a choice; it was the wrong choice…

Read the whole thing.

Hillary & FBI Director Comey’s Cyber-Security “Broken Window”

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When FBI Director Comey publicly took a dive and sold out the rule of law in refusing to prosecute Hillary Clinton’s Cyber-security crimes.   He began a new chapter in providing evidence of the validity of “Broken Window Policing”   in the field of cyber-security. For which, see the following definition:

The broken windows model of policing…focuses on the importance of disorder (e.g., broken windows) in generating and sustaining more serious crime. Disorder is not directly linked to serious crime; instead, disorder leads to increased fear and withdrawal from residents, which then allows more serious crime to move in because of decreased levels of informal social control.

Hillary and the FBI Director Comey have advertised  both outrageous cyber-security weakness and more importantly the breakdown of social mores of “the rule of law” in Federal Government  cyber-security.   If you advertise you are weak,  stupid and capricious in enforcing  cyber-security, it is blood in the water for cyber-criminals of all sorts.

Consider this not exhaustive list busted e-mail security associated with Hillary Clinton and her Democratic Party surrogates.

1) Hillary’s email system on Bill Clinton’s server.
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2) The Hillary Controlled Democrat National Committee email server.
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3) The Democrat Congressional Candidates Committee server.
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4) Hillary’s election campaign server.
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5) Hillary’s several different illicit off-site email servers when she was Secretary of State.

This is a very small fraction of the “Broken Window theory” as applied to cyber-crime.   What we see related to Hillary.   The problem here is that this sort of political corruption cannot be centralized.   If Hillary can do it and get away with it.   Exactly how many other illicit off-site e-mail accounts filled with Federal secrets are there now?   And how many more will there be between now and Jan 2017?

Lois Lerner at IRS and the EPA director are both known to be using non-Federal government secured public e-mail systems as early as 2010.

Exactly how many other officials at the State Department, Defense Department, Interior Department (Can you say Secret Service?), other non-departmental American intelligence bureaucracies, and the Federal Reserves are there?

That is the real cyber-security “broken window” Hillary and FBI Director Comey have opened.  And this is the cyber-security nightmare that will be with America for decades, barring a massive and systematic purge of everyone high and low associated with such behavior by a new President or after another — likely nuclear — Pearl Harbor.

I’ll close with the following Sept 12, 2008 Obama campaign statement that applies in 2016:

“Our economy wouldn’t survive without the Internet, and cyber-security continues to represent one our most serious national security threats,”   “It’s extraordinary that someone who wants to be our president and our commander in chief doesn’t know how to send an e-mail.”

— Obama for President 2008 campaign spokesman Dan Pfeiffer.