Dear Squeers,

Corpses are not rhetoric. They are produced by human evil. Maybe they are rhetoric to you, but they were produced by an evil system.

The corpses that the Marxist evil produced stink as much as the corpses the fascist evil produced.

There is no justification or excuse for it. The end does not justify the means.

Dear David F.,
I've been thumbing through one of my books by Noam Chomsky titled "Hegemony or Survival", and I came to these lines:
(referring to America's military and economic dominance) "The imperial grand strategy asserts the right of the United States to undertake "preventive war" at will "preventive" - not preemptive.... but the use of military force to eliminate an imagined or invented threat...Some defenders of the strategy recognise that it runs roughshod over international law, but see no problem in that..."
Legal scholar, Michael Glennon wrote: "The grand attempt to subject "the rule of force to the rule of law" should be deposited in the trashcan of history".
Chomsky adds that: "Washington made it clear that it intends to do all it can to maintain preeminence...declaring that it would no longer be bound by the U.N charter's rules governing the use of force."
On the subject of "corpses", it would seem the strategy undertaken by the U.S. in Iraq (to select just one post-war intervention and atrocity) has provided its own example of the depraved negation of the value of human life and dignity - all wrapped up in a neat little bundle of altruism. I don't buy it at all.

Dear Poirot,

I don't buy it either. I agree with you and with Chomsky in what you have quoted. The US has disregarded international law and has made many corpses in so doing. In doing that it has shown the impotence of international law.

My point was not to excuse the US. In my introduction to this discussion I wrote, "Can we limit national sovereignty?" The Marxist tyrannies oppressed their own people. The United States has the power to roam all over the globe picking out its targets. In 1987 a meeting of ex-CIA men in Switzerland estimated that US supported death squads had murdered about 6,000,000 people. How many more have been murdered since then?

Is it possible to curb the power of the nation state to oppress internally and externally? Popular democratic governments are a danger to the world (http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=9631) is an essay I wrote for OLO which deals with the aggressive acts of the United States. I contrasted it with Myanmar which oppresses its people but is not a danger to world peace.

Can we limit the power of the nation-state to oppress internally and externally?

An independent judiciary and other guarantors of human rights can act to minimise internal oppression, but we have no workable mechanisms to prevent nation-states from external depredations. The Marxist states and other tyrannies got rid of or didn't have the mechanisms that would protect human rights internally. I would like to see all countries have such mechanisms. I would also like to see mechanisms developed to protect people and countries from operations of powerful national entities such as the United States.

Dear Poirot,
I also agree with Chomsky, and thank you for emphasising a point I was making with the Zizek quote. I see institutions like the UN as nothing more than international PC, put in place to appease activists and docile electorates alike in order to keep international capital flowing. So-called human rights are of exactly the same idealistic stamp, and observed in the breach. Wealthy countries have the money ten times over to fix the bulk of human rights issues, at least at the level of demand. Of course in reality it would never be permitted in terms of capital because it would not be conducive to profit (indeed we are already living beyond our welfare means in terms of profit margins and economic crises are likely to be ongoing until real oppression {austerity measures lol} is inevitably revived). But even were that hurdle surmountable, the problem of national sovereignty (a key ideological pillar but actually another abstraction) is a convenient prevarication that maintains human rights as inspirational but empty rhetoric. Indeed, human rights are a joke within national borders like Australia's or the US's, let alone outside them! All the national and international conventions are nothing more than patronage, greese for the wheels of capitalism.

Dear Davidf,
brother Squeers was clearly referring to 'your' rhetorical use of 'corpses' and not implying that corpses were less than hardcore reality. Indeed I would deign to say that Squeers agrees with your concerns, and acknowledges the 'evils' perpetrated in Marx's name. The only point of tension is your insistence that Marx was the architect. There are any number of books, old and knew, which compellingly reveal that every form of Marxism that has ever been realised was a gross distortion of his philosophy. Even Engels poorly understood Marx and was largely responsible for the distortions.
If you are going to maintain your stand, then we await propper evidence.

Dear Mitchell,

Squeers wrote: "What you appear to fail to realise is that the concept of human rights is a false pillar of the capitalist system that would be redundant in the kind of utopia Marx postulated."

I don't think any state can be trusted even a Marxist utopia. If it can oppress it will oppress.

Marx stressed his opposition to human rights in the Manifesto:

"By this, the long-wished for opportunity was offered to "True" Socialism of confronting the political movement with the socialistic demands, of hurling the traditional anathemas against liberalism, against representative government, against bourgeois competition, bourgeois freedom of the press, bourgeois legislation, bourgeois liberty and equality, and of preaching to the masses that they had nothing to gain, and everything to lose, by this bourgeois movement. German socialism forgot, in the nick of time, that the French criticism, whose silly echo it was, presupposed the existence of modern bourgeois society, with its corresponding economic conditions of existence, and the political constitution adapted thereto, the very things whose attainment was the object of the pending struggle in Germany."

He advocated getting rid of human rights as they would not be needed. The USSR and the other Marxist tyrannies did not have freedom of the press, liberty and equality. Marx called these human rights bourgeois,. They were eliminated, and there was nothing to protect people against arbitrary state power. He was the architect of tyranny.

In the Manifesto he also recommended:

6. Centralization of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the state.

That made even printing presses in private hands illegal.

He advocated tyranny and got tyranny.

I am writing an essay on the subject expanding the idea further..

Dear davidf,
You are completely wrong.
I suggest in your research for said article you analyse the Manifesto in context (the very passage you quote is precisely the criticism of form, the "Problem of the problem", that Zizek mentions above), as well as go beyond it; all the Marx texts are available on line. You might also look at the difference between Aristotelian metaphysics (which Marx, following Hegel, subscribed to) and the Humean metaphysics that underwrite our current rationalist paradigm, rendering Marx virtually inaccessible. This is the root problem.
If you persist in the current vein, including in your upcoming essay, patently uncomprehending and without substantive evidence, I (Squeers) will finally conclude that you are an obstinate fool and take no further part in trying to disabuse you.
You may then confabulate at your leisure