So, the last segment of my thoughts on Carl Schmitt has been delayed because I have decided to use the project as a jumping off point for a much longer piece, which I intend to submit to TELOS. Here’s the abstract - I would much appreciate any feedback:

Theologies of the Conjuncture

The Event in the Radical and Liberal Conceptions of History

Ideologies at both extremes of the traditional political spectrum posit structurally analogous narratives of the political Event. For both the Marxist left and the radical right, the Event represents the culmination of the political enmities and internal contradictions embedded within particular historical conjunctures. In the radical imagination, the Event is thus a vehicle for historical transformation by serving as a conduit for, alternatively, the birth of qualitatively new social orders (left) or the restoration of repressed loci of “true” legitimacy (right). This paper interrogates the assumptions behind and implications of this conception of the Event in light of the liberal counter-narratives advanced by the founding texts of American democracy.

Hmm… I wonder why Maliki dispensed with his usual silk tie when meeting with the Supreme Leader? 

I’m vexed.

I tend to resist the McLuhan’s deterministic conception of the role of media to shape their messages. As the example below makes it plainly evident, media producers in fact have a great deal of agency in the ways they go about seeking and presenting reality. The choices that media producers make as they go about their task reveal a great deal about not only their underlying biases, but also their willingness to use media to advance those biases.

Case in point: the ongoing anti-Israeli prejudice in the BBC’s coverage of the Jewish state. A recent item covering recent comments made by Deputy Prime Minister Shaul Mofaz contains two subtle but nonetheless significant examples of such bias in the BBC’s choice of headline and photo caption. Allow me to set the context: speaking to Yediot Ahronot newspaper, Mofaz had said that “if Iran continues with its programme for developing nuclear weapons, we will attack it. The sanctions are ineffective.”

I think it’s perfectly reasonable for the BBC to highlight these particular comments from Mr. Mofaz’s interview. I’ll even grant the BBC’s concern that Mr. Mofaz’s tone and approach reflects a highly aggressive approach to Israel’s security vis-a-vis Iran’s nuclear program. Nonetheless, given the fact that Mr. Mofaz had strongly qualified his statement by asserting that an Israeli attack on Iran would be unavoidable if Iran continues its nuclear program, the BBC’s choice of headline - “ISRAELI MINISTER THREATENS IRAN” - is highly irresponsible.

Worse still is the BBC’s choice of caption for a photo of Mr. Mofaz, which reads “Mofaz, a former army chief, may be lining up a challenge to Olmert.” Now again, it’s perfectly okay for the BBC to bring attention to the fact that Mr. Mofaz may potentially have political ambitions of his own given Olmert’s recent troubles. However, to use this clearly speculative statement as the stand-alone caption for Mr. Mofaz’s image seems to me to smack of a dubious desire to potentially deligitimize Mr. Mofaz’s intentions (as concerned for Israel’s existential security or even as a hawk) by pointing to his ambitions on the Israeli domestic scene. Furthermore, the BBC’s lack of transparency - in juxtaposing Mr. Mofaz’s statements against the backdrop of speculations about his own political ambitions - suggests that the operating principle here is insinuation and not analysis. Had the BBC been explicit in suggesting this potential “conflict of interest” (for lack of a better term) and the fact that it’s largely based on speculation, then the article’s objectivity would have remained intact. As it stands however, it seems to want to say, “Mr. Mofaz has x views and oh *cough-cough* he wants to replace Olmert! [therefore x views are really just meant to pander to his constituency.]“

And this, by the way, is just one example among hundreds of biased articles on this subject from a source that takes its bona fides in the realm of objectivity very seriously.

One more diversion before returning to my series on Carl Schmitt. With all due respect to her courageous, decades-long efforts as an attorney and public intellectual to improve the human rights situation in Iran - Shirin Ebadi’s recommendations for the path to democratization in Iran betray her naive attachment to the failed reformist framework. In a recent interview with The Nation’s Robert Dreyfuss, Ebadi urges the U.S. and its partners to:

• discontinue funding for pro-democracy activists inside the country,
• directly engage Iran’s leadership at the highest level via open and public diplomacy, 
• offer the IRI tons of carrots and no sticks in the security arena,
• and drop economic sanctions against the regime.

I will return to the Schmitt series shortly, but for now here’s a visual testament to the I.A.F.’s operational effectiveness. One minute you are developing weapons-grade plutonium with North Korean help - the next, you aren’t:

Carl Schmitt’s critique of liberalism originates in his “anthropological” assumptions about human nature and human societies. As I described in Part I, Schmitt is indebted to not only the realist strand in political philosophy (he names Machiavelli, Hobbes, and, interestingly, Hegel and Marx as major proponents of realism), but also to the reactionary Catholic theorists like Donoso Cortes, for whom humanity is inherently evil, ignorant, destructive, and - above all - sinful in nature. Both the realists and the Catholic reactionaries describe the human world as a site of conflict between classes and peoples and as divided against itself and hence contradictory.

For Schmitt, the law is consequently always-already political - that is, it must contend with the possibility that these “internal contradictions” (to use a Marxian term) may become so heightened as to reach the point whereby “sociology” overpowers jurisprudence (PT) and thus threatens the state itself. Nations (and their sovereigns) must operate on a political basis as well - that is, they must remain aware of the presence of the enemy: “Political thought and political instinct prove themselves theoretically and practically in the ability to distinguish friend and enemy,” he writes. “The high points of politics are simultaneously the moments in which the enemy is, in concrete clarity, recognized as the enemy” (CP).

Schmitt characterizes liberalism as a political doctrine and movement based on a fundamental denial of these realities. Liberalism seeks to either depoliticize essentially political oppositions between classes and peoples, or else to neutralize political oppositions by referring to apolitical categories such as economics, morality, culture, and especially the law in order to make political gains on its own behalf:

The worst confusion arises when concepts such as justice and freedom are used to legitimize one’s own political ambitious and to disqualify or demoralize the enemy. In the shadow of an embracing political decision and in the security of a stable political state organization, law, whether private or public, has its own relatively independent domain. As with every other domain of human endeavor and thought, it can be utilize to support or refute other domains. But it is necessary to pay attention to the political meaning of such utilizations of law and morality, and above all the word rule or sovereignty of law… There always are concrete human groupings which fight other concrete human groupings in the name justice, humanity, order, or peace. When being reproached for cynicism, the spectator of political phenomena can always recognize in such reproaches a political weapon used in actual combat (CP).

As a political discourse liberalism negates politics, and fails to advance a systematic vision of state or governance: according to Schmitt, liberalism (like other individualistic ideologies), is singularly devoted to mediating the relationship between the individual and the state (or other institutions that can potentially restrict civil liberties). The sole role of the liberal state is to ensure the individual freedoms and social wellbeing of its citizenry.

Schmitt’s affinity for revolutionaries like Marx and Lenin - in spite of his political opposition to the Marxist project - is to be understood in light of their shared distrust of liberalism’s distortion and negation of politics, as well as its inability to propose “a political principle or an intellectually consistent idea.”

(To be continued…)

Engaging Carl Schmitt’s oeuvre is an extremely challenging process. A legal theorist and constitutional lawyer, Schmitt was considered the “crown jurist” of Nazi Germany. After the fall of the Third Reich, Schmitt was held for some time by the Allies, but no charges were ultimately brought against him for his major role in Hitler’s twisted judicial system. During the post-war period, the man was alternatively unapologetic or in denial about his involvement with the 20th century’s most despicable and dangerous ideology.

In Political Theology (henceforth PT), Schmitt provocatively and famously argues that “sovereign is he who decides on the exception [Soverän ist, wer über den Ausnahmezustand entscheidet].” In other words, it is a true emergency or exception to the status quo of a state which really designates the sovereign, and it is the sovereign who decides whether the emergency is a true exception - and, if so, what steps need to be taken to restore order. Moreover, Schmitt asserts that the sovereign—despite having the power to transcend the constitution’s abstract “limits”—is nevertheless an integral part of the legal order precisely because s/he has the power to suspend the law to secure the state.

Based on these premises, Schmitt goes on to put forth a powerful critique of constitutional liberalism. The liberal constitution’s fundamental drive, Schmitt argues, is to unveil a law so complete that it may provide norms for responding to every possible situation. Schmitt believes that despite this effort, contingencies and contradictions always arise that ultimately undermine this drive and that the exception shows that the state precedes the law because it allows the sovereign to roll back constitutional rights to protect the state against existential threats.

In contradistinction, liberal theory asserts that all is law or, alternatively, that the state and its sovereign merely exist to serve as guardians of the legal process, not to decide on legal questions. (Thomas Paine: “In America, the LAW is king!”) Schmitt refutes this position by referring to the concept of legal form. He argues that the legal form is incapable of translating itself into social reality or consensus without the state and its sovereign: “A point of ascription is not achieved with the aid of the norm; it happens the other way around. A point of ascription first determines what a norm is and what normative rightness is.” It is the very person of the sovereign that transforms an abstract law into a norm by making a decision in the true sense of the term. Schmitt’s vision of “decisionism” and his intellectual affinity with Hobbes is based on this fundamental process.

In The Concept of the Political (henceforth CP), Schmitt offers another one of his (in)famous definitions: all politics is based on a simple distinction between friend and enemy, on a peoples affinity for or enmity against another people. Furthermore, Schmitt characterizes the friend-enemy division to be driven by existential threats to a people’s security, that is, by matters that involve the “life or death” of a nation. For Schmitt, every other category or association (religion, economics, culture, etc.) is social in nature. In order for the category of the political to operate, affinity for the friend and hatred for the enemy must be in play.

Underlying Schmitt’s discourse are the influence of two major sources of inspiration: (1) the realist tradition in political philosophy that reaches all the way back to Machiavelli, includes Hegel-Marx-Lenin, but finds its most systematic expression in the work of Hobbes and (2) conservative Catholic philosophers like Donoso Cortes and de Maistre who viewed dictatorship as the only form of government capable of protecting society against the “sinfulness” of human nature. Schmitt’s intellectual influences may initially seem politically contradictory, but they share a common vision of society as a site of permanent conflict between competing human classes and forces. What Schmitt admires in both sources is their willingness to come terms with the problematic cores of human societies.

In fact, Schmitt, whose own personal politics were deeply reactionary, had a profound respect for the revolutionary left. After all, Marxists and other revolutionaries fully acknowledge their enmity towards the ruling class (”the class enemy”). There is clarity in the opposition between revolution and reaction. There is something compelling about Schmitt’s analysis here that has attracted many thinkers from the new left willing to separate the reactionary content of Schmitt’s thought from its formal structure, which they turn to renew their own lost project.

Liberal thinkers, on the other hand, detest Schmitt - and, as you can imagine, Schmitt is far less generous when approaching liberal politics.

(To be continued…)

The first statement of human rights is attributed to Persia’s Achaemenid Emperor Cyrus the Great (Kurosh-e-Bozorg) . Most Iranians take deep pride in the values of tolerance and solidarity encapsulated in Cyrus’s declaration upon his conquest of Babylon:

“When I entered Babylon as a friend and established the seat of government in the place of the ruler under jubilation and rejoicing, Marduk, the great lord (induced) the magnanimous inhabitants of Babylon (Din Tir) (to love me) and I daily endeavored to praise him. My numerous troops walked around in Babylon in peace, I did not allow anybody to terrorize (any of the people) of the country of Sumer and Akkad. I strove for peace in Babylon (Ka Dingir ra) and in all his (other) sacred cities. As to the inhabitants of Babylon (who) against the will of the gods (had/were … I abolished) the corvee (yoke) which was against their (social standing). I brought relief to their dilapidated housing, putting an end to their main complaints. Marduk, the great lord, was well pleased with my deeds and sent friendly blessing to myself, Cyrus, the King, who reveres him, to Cambyses, my son, as well as to all my troops, and we all (praised) his great (name) joyously, standing before him in peace … I returned to (these) sacred cities on the other side of the Tigris, the sanctuaries of which have been ruins for a long time, the images which (used) to live therein and established for them permanent sanctuaries. I (also) gathered all their (former) inhabitants and returned (to them) their habitations. Furthermore, I resettled upon the command of Marduk, the great lord, all the gods of Sumer and Akkad who Nabonidus has brought to Babylon (su sa na) to the anger of the lord of the gods unharmed in their chapels, the places which make them happy.

Iranian dissidents are correct then when they point out that the disrespect towards and discriminatory policies enacted against Iran’s ethno-religious minorities by today’s Islamic Republic undermines Persia’s heritage of cross-cultural tolerance. Here’s a recent example of one such act of desecration:

The Iranian cultural heritage website chn.ir reported that in the framework of Tehran urban development, the Tehran municipality razed seven ancient synagogues in the Jewish neighborhood of Oudlajan in the south of the city – even though the sites had been nominated as national Iranian historic sites.

Actions like the one undertaken by the municipal government in Tehran highlight the critical importance of vigilantly renewing - in the collective conscience of the Iranian nation, at home and across the diaspora - the moral imagination of our Persian ancestors. At the same time, it may be time for those opposed to this barbaric regime to propose a new, values-driven framework to combat the IRI’s immoral misrule.

What values should stand as non-negotiable cornerstones of this new ethico-political framework?

Amnesty International recently released its 2007 death penalty report. Iran earned the silver medal for the highest rate of executions per capita, with Saudi Arabia claiming the gold. The report highlights one particular execution from Iran as symptomatic of a disturbing trend of death sentences being imposed for non-capital crimes: “Ja’Far Kiani, father of two, was stoned to death for adultery in Iran in July.”

Of course, it makes me cringe to find the United States listed in the same company as Saudi Arabia, Iran, North Korea, China, and Libya. I believe that racial disparities in the US justice system, recent cases of death sentences overturned on the basis of new DNA evidence, as well as executions of mentally ill criminals should compel us to at least consider a national moratorium.

I’ve been home sick all day long, and I had a chance to watch the Medal of Honor ceremony celebrating the heroism of Navy SEAL Michael Monsoor. Learning about the act of “conspicuous gallantry” for which Monsoor was awarded the Medal of Honor left me in tears:

That September morning, Monsoor and a group of SEAL snipers took up position on a residential rooftop as part of an operation to push into a dangerous section of southern Ramadi. Four insurgents armed with AK-47 rifles came into view, and the SEAL snipers opened fire, killing one and wounding another. Loudspeakers from a mosque broadcast calls for insurgents to rally, and residents blocked off nearby roads with rocks.

Insurgents shot back at the SEAL position with automatic weapons from a moving vehicle and fired a rocket-propelled grenade at the building. The SEALs knew that more attacks were inevitable but continued their mission of protecting the troops clearing the area below, according to an official account.

Monsoor’s commander repositioned him in a small hidden location between two SEAL snipers on an outcropping of the roof, facing the most likely route of another insurgent attack. As Monsoor manned his gun, an insurgent lobbed up a hand grenade, which hit Monsoor in the chest and bounced onto the roof.

“Grenade!” Monsoor shouted. But the two snipers and another SEAL on the roof had no time to escape, as Monsoor was closest to the only exit. Monsoor dropped onto the grenade, smothering it with his body. It detonated, and Monsoor died about 30 minutes later from his wounds.

“He made an instantaneous decision to save our teammates. I immediately understood what happened, and tragically it made sense to me in keeping with the man I know, Mike Monsoor,” said Lt. Cmdr. Seth Stone, Monsoor’s platoon leader in Ramadi.

How do men like this come about? What values, aspirations, or experiences forge their courage? How many of us would take the easy exit rather than jump on the grenade, as Monsoor did, to mitigate the impact on our comrades?