I recently participated in an online Zoom forum presented by the history department of the University of Massachusetts Amherst through its Feinberg Family Distinguished Lecture Series, a series that purports to focuses on “big issues of clear and compelling concern, grounded in historical inquiry, context, analysis and experience”.  The event in which I participated (as part of the virtual audience) purported to deal with the dangers being faced in academia as a result of what smells like a dawning dark age where the right to think is shrinking daily and it was supposed to compare the current challenges faced by academia with those faced in the second half of the 1940’s during the tenures of Harry Truman as president and senator Joe McCarthy as hatchet man.  Unfortunately, notwithstanding the importance of the topic to me and its timeliness, I was disappointed and confess that I could not get past the introduction and first few minutes of the initial presenter’s discourse.  Instead of an objective academic discourse, it seemed a partisan charade reflective only of the nature of so many who today perceive of themselves as historians, people who have spent their lives reading and researching and writing and teaching, but for whom the quest for truth seems an irrelevancy, especially when the quest is undertaken under the shadow of long held political loyalties[1].

The presenters as well as their online audience seemed completely and blindly devoted to the Democratic Party, the party ironically responsible for both the dark days of the McCarthy era (although the senator himself was a Republican) and for today’s expansive wave of censorship and curtailment of liberty, especially liberties pertaining to the right to opine.  Their criticism, snide, direct and full of virtue signaling, was reserved for Republicans and the “far right”, there apparently not being a mere right wing, and thus, to anyone not part of the choir to whom they were preaching.  Thus, the postures they sought to represent, postures in which for the most part I personally believe, lost rather than garnered credibility.  It’s as though they’d never heard of political options like Doctors Jill Stein and Cornell West, or if they had, considered them beneath contempt, just as they consider former presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., for placing the coronation of Kamala Harris at risk.

Even if their goal was merely political that strategy was not very productive.  Unless fund raising is the goal, “preaching to the choir” is almost always counterproductive, especially in an electoral context where attaining the vote of a majority is important.  Rather than more fully convincing the already convinced, one needs to reach out to those who have not yet made up their minds.  Better yet, one needs to strive to convince those who support one’s opponents that our views have merit.  That is very difficult when one has “shot one’s credibility in the foot” by refusing to accept that one’s side is fallible and that sometimes our opponents may be right.  Credibility is essential and it is best attained when one at least appears objective, when rather than spewing conclusions one has yet to support with facts, one at least pretends to consider opposing perspectives and examines the reasons why others hold them.  And that is best accomplished when one, in fact, has an open mind rather than its mere verisimilitude.

After I logged out of the event I became introspective, examining both my own beliefs and how I expressed them.  And that led me to the issues that most perplex me, and to the people I’ve chosen to admire, despite their foibles.  The latter are a very mixed group, both historically and during my own lifetime.  I am a great admirer of the reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. but accept that sexual fidelity was not his strong point, and if that was true for him, it was also true for John Fitzgerald Kennedy and Bill Clinton and Donald Trump and Joe Biden.  A bitter pill but one essential if one hopes to be objective.  I love Nelson Mandela and admire him not because of his courage in adversity but because, after he attained the South African presidency, he managed, at least for a brief while, to bring his traumatized racially, economically and culturally divided nation together.  And I love Mohandas Gandhi for his absolute dedication to peaceful revolution despite his failure, in the end, to attain it.  I love Uruguay’s Pepe Mujica and Brazil’s Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, Chile’s Salvador Allende and Pablo Neruda, Cuba’s Jose Marti, Colombia’s Gustavo Rojas Pinilla and now Gustavo Francisco Petro Urrego.  None are perfect by any means, but they have all been transformational.  Ironically, I am also drawn to ethically complex people like Alexander III of Macedon, Gaivs Ivlivs Caesar and Napoleon Bonaparte, leaders who somehow combined good and evil successfully in order to attain transformational change, although I’ve always been curious as to why their military prowess so thoroughly overwhelms their more peaceful accomplishments in areas such as science, philosophy, education, architecture, etc., in their perception by the public.

As a political scientist, historian and researcher, albeit admittedly not a very important one, I’m deeply suspicious of those things on which we are not allowed, either legally or socially, to reflect, and I believed that that would have been one of the topics to be dealt with in the Feinberg lecture I’d been invited to attend, but I was very wrong.  Today’s tacit support by so many of genocide on the one hand and the pillorying of Donald Trump on the other, both massively driven by peer pressure, and attitudes towards the current conflicts in the Ukraine and in the Middle East, made me again wonder concerning the “verboten” subject of what World War II, the second war to end all wars, was really about, and just how evil the villains and of just how virtuous the victors really were; the victors responsible for the firebombing of Dresden and Tokyo and the nuclear destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the colonization of Africa and the Middle and Far East.  There was recent outrage among netizens of the corporate media concerning an admission purportedly made by Donald Trump that Adolf Hitler might have done some good things in Germany, something quickly (and distortedly) interpreted by Trump opponents as praise.  More than anything, that reaction to Mr. Trump’s honest observation made me acknowledge (after reflection) that like most others, I lacked the courage to agree with him despite the rarely admitted reality that, excluding his international bellicosity, racism and lack of respect for the sanctity of life (obviously huge faults), domestically, during the period from 1933 through 1939, Hitler in fact accomplished very positive things domestically in Germany, and that in turn made me wonder if we will ever be capable of an objective analysis with respect to that very complex man, a man who in his worst aspects, seems ironically similar to Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu, a popular hero today not only in Israel, but in the United States, the United Kingdom and Germany.

All of the foregoing seem dangerous themes on which to focus, or even to consider, but is it ethically and morally correct to ignore them and to permit what passes for imposed truth to just “lie” (a double entendre) comfortably abed?  That observation then led me to reflect on the morally ambiguous issue of issues.  There are issues where, to me, every position seems wrong and worse, where most of those who hold a strong position do so incoherently when contrasted with their positions on related issues.  For me, one of those involves the profoundly polarizing conjoined issues of abortion and the death penalty. 

It seems incoherent to me that the postures of most people with reference to the foregoing seem to involve, on the one hand, a belief in the “right” to an abortion while simultaneously opposing the death penalty, and on the other, the position of their opponents who reject the right to abort unwanted fetuses while concurrently supporting the death penalty.  To my mind, one either respects the “right” to life or one doesn’t, both of those postures leading to logical conclusions:  If one respects the “right” to life, then both abortion and the death penalty should be anathema.  If one does not respect that “right”, then both abortion and the death penalty are acceptable options.  However, the topic involved is deemed so “existential”, that most of us have a very strong opinion in one direction or the other while strenuously opposing the “right” of others to have an opposing position, something that to me seems to require amazing moral ambivalence and hubris.  The issue is fraught with irreconcilable moral quandaries and yet, most people have no problem in taking one side or the other, and make it the principal basis on which they select whom they will support politically.  To top it off, most of the people who presents themselves as electoral options, loudly championing one side or the other, tend to be pure pragmatists for whom the only importance of the issue involves how it will mobilize their political bases.

The right to bear arms is another issue that strikes me as ludicrous, if not as existentially and morally problematic as the right to life.  I understand the second amendment to the United States constitution and the context under which it seemed essential.  It reads: “A well-regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”  It is absolute in its prohibition, unless one examines its premise, “a well-regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State”.  However, the philosophical context in which that statement was drafted was centered, not on defense from foreign aggression but on the importance of avoiding domestic tyranny and that in turn was premised on three important assumptions: first, that instead of standing armed forces, the “free State” anticipated would have a citizen army comprised of state militias in which most adult males would serve; second, that the armed citizenry would hold a preponderance of the power necessary to avoid tyranny and sustain its “free” status; and, third, that “freedom”, rather than mere security, would remain the priority.  None of those premises hold true today.  The state controls the overwhelming balance of power, both internally through its police forces and externally though its professional armed forces (and the military industrial complex against which Ike warned during November of 1960).  If the right to bear arms were to be effective today, citizens would have to enjoy the right to own and operate nuclear weapons, aircraft carriers, air forces, etc., and, as importantly, the ability to financially afford to obtain and maintain them.  We don’t and we shouldn’t and we couldn’t.  As to the importance of “freedom”, today it’s mainly an illusion bound in red tape with the state in control of most of our actions, a state not controlled by the citizenry but through bureaucrats imbedded throughout our bloated governmental systems by a tightly knit group of selfish billionaires, with the assistance of their tools in the megalithic media-sports-and-entertainment industries, industries whose job it is to keep us polarized and distracted while our pockets are picked.  So at best, “freedom is an illusion, an opiate in the same sense that Karl Marx described religion.

Of course, we’ve deluded ourselves with the concept of “rights”.  A concept ideal for “virtue-signaling” if little else.  Purportedly, “rights are inherent, universal and eternal, not granted, rather, at best discovered.  As purportedly eternal, they have supposedly always existed and will always continue to exist.  They are supposedly the emanations of the individual sovereignty and autonomy to which every human being is entitled.  Given the foregoing definition, rights may not be conditioned by others, even where those conditions are eminently sensible and indeed, essential for life in the collectives in which we live, collectives which range from the family, with or without children, through our diverse polities and eventually, encompassing the human species and perhaps, even every species and the planet as a whole.  If “rights” are inherent and unconditional, they must be impossible to violate.  However, no human interaction encompasses those requirements and further, as more and more rights are discovered on a purportedly generational basis, they become diluted in the sense that they are more and more impossible to attain.  Instead, today’s purported rights are, at best, aspirations as to how we should prioritize our resources and organize the diverse aspects of governance by others in our lives, but with no ability to enforce any such aspirations, however laudable they may seem.  They are promises impossible to keep and those who make them and most vigorously proclaim them are at best self-deluded, albeit in most instances they are merely frauds.  And yet, we willingly sacrifice our lives and the lives of those whom we most cherish, we sacrifice our honor, our morality and our ethics in their purported defense.  Thus abortion and the bearing of arms are but irrelevancies useful in keeping us divided and thus, easy to manipulate and control.

Not that “rights” would not be awesome if they could be attained, maintained and enforced, but they can’t, at least not while we remain a deluded species, one which on the one hand abhors the purported Nazi holocaust while on the other, applauds, supports and makes possible the holocaust perpetrated by the descendants of the Nazis’ victims against Palestinians and other Muslims (the only people who ever actually treated them with real compassion and respect).  Not while we accept the accumulation of massive wealth by actors and singers and sports stars as well as by corporate executives, directors, and, most of all, by the heirs of those who illicitly accumulated huge fortunes, while children, indeed while anyone starves to death, bereft of shelter and health care.  But we do.  And it seems that, at least for the foreseeable future, we’ll continue to do so.

Our moral ambiguities make that not only possible, but probable.
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© Guillermo Calvo Mahé; Manizales, 2024; all rights reserved.  Please feel free to share with appropriate attribution.

Guillermo (“Bill”) Calvo Mahé (a sometime poet) is a writer, political commentator and academic currently residing in the Republic of Colombia (although he has primarily lived in the United States of America of which he is also a citizen). Until 2017 he chaired the political science, government and international relations programs at the Universidad Autónoma de Manizales. Previously, he chaired the social studies and foreign language departments at the Eastern Military Academy in Huntington, New York. He is currently the publisher of the Inannite Review available at Substack.com; an intermittent commentator on radio and television; and, an occasional contributor to diverse periodicals and publications. He has academic degrees in political science (BA, The Citadel, The Military College of South Carolina), law (JD, St. John’s University, School of Law), international legal studies (LL.M, the Graduate Division of the New York University School of Law) and translation and linguistic studies (GCTS, the University of Florida’s Center for Latin American Studies). However, he is also fascinated by mythology, religion, physics, astronomy and mathematics, especially with matters related to quanta, cosmology and cosmogony. He can be contacted at guillermo.calvo.mahe@gmail.com and much of his writing is available through his blog at https://guillermocalvo.com/.

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[1] Contextualizing the foregoing, I am a political independent although during my lifetime I have been a Republican, a Democrat, a Liberal, a Conservative, a Libertarian, a Democratic Socialist and a Green Party supporter.  However, I was always uncomfortable pledging my allegiance and my sacred honor to any political party, especially with respect to supporting policies with which I was either not familiar or with which I was not in total accord.  During the past decades I’ve taken to criticizing the United States duopolous political system and both principal political parties and my electoral activities have revolved around doing what I could to let voters know that there were more than two choices, more than two political parties, and that a lesser evil is always evil.  I am also an academic and the former chair of a university political and juridical science department as well as of political science, government and international relations programs in the Republic of Colombia.  In my youth, I taught history and chaired the social studies and, for a brief time, the foreign language departments at a military high school in the state of New York.