Category Archives: Political

Rethinking Delusional Popular Governance

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The concept of democracy in conjunction with governance seems a sacred cow, unfortunately, a dysfunctional sacred cow given that the concept of democracy is neither understood nor respected and that what is required for the constitutionally guaranteed “public welfare” is efficient, transparent and honest governance with the capacity for long range planning and for providing its constituents with the opportunity to fully realize their capabilities and to lead peaceful, comfortable, happy and fulfilled lives.  That is certainly not what exists anywhere today.  Rather, we have self-perpetuating systems built on pillars of omnipresent corruption implemented through corrupt mass media and administered by corrupt entrenched bureaucracies.  Human rights, as the long-term Israeli genocide in Palestine supported by the United States and NATO makes clear, are mere delusions.

There are two principal poles for what is considered democratic governance, presidential systems with legislatures elected for fixed terms, and parliamentary systems which meld legislative and executive functions for variable terms, the exact length depending on how well the executive, which stems from the legislature, and the legislature are able to function collaboratively.  The latter is both more democratic and more coherent, but has its own internecine flaws.  In addition, there are forms of governments that require voters to participate (or else), generally in uniparty Communist systems, the most successful being those in the Peoples Republics of China and Vietnam, but according to the western press at least, they apply serious restrictions on personal liberty.

Looking at the most efficient governments, those most able to function strategically as well as tactically, it appears that long term executive leadership is essential, leadership such as that demonstrated in Germany during the long chancellorship of Angela Merkel and in the Russian Federation during the Putin era and the aforementioned Chinese and Vietnamese systems.  Of course, corrupt and inept long term leadership, such as that in Egypt, is awful.  Trusting that a majority of the people make the best electoral decisions has proven a fallacy, largely because the “people” are not free to select candidates, that function in reality being effected through a partisan filtering system controlled by purported elites and now, imposed in countries like the United States through blatant judicial manipulation as well.  In addition, the resulting disinterest results in lack of participation so no candidate is likely to ever receive more than 50% of the eligible vote, the quintessential aspect of democracy.

If the foregoing is accurate, then perhaps we need to consider how to implement a meritocratic rather than democratic method of selecting our leadership on a long term basis, but a method subject to earlier democratic revocation for misfeasance or malfeasance and with significant personal penalties in the case of any such revocation.  It could, for example, involve, in the first instance, a selection process embodying the philosophy of the original Electoral College in the United States, with a democratic revocatory process exercised both periodically, say every five years, or on the spot if invoked by a significant portion of the electorate dissatisfied with the results of the incumbent leader.  Electoral participation by the citizenry would, as it was in ancient Athens, be a duty and not a right, with serious consequences for shirking it or exercising it in a corrupt manner (e.g., selling or renting it).  It smells a bit too much like the fascist ideal of an overall, all-powerful leader, except for the revocatory mechanisms but those make all the difference.  Admittedly, the concept needs to be polished a bit with a check and balance mechanism such as a negative legislature, an elected body charged with political control functions and the ability to veto executive decrees (which would replace traditional legislative functions), but not responsible for enacting legislation.  A multi cameral negative legislature would be best, one chamber being selected democratically, one based on pluralistic concepts and one selected meritocratically based on expertise in diverse areas but all three chambers voting as one.  Of course, an independent judiciary would be essential, but not one charged with constitutional control or review, as would an independent body controlling the electoral system, perhaps a body selected by the legislature.  The most serious penalties under the penal system would be reserved for violation of political and judicial duties, pretty much the way it is today in the People’s Republic of China.

If it ain’t broke don’t fix it is a saying reflective of a great deal of common sense but one that does not apply to our current models of governance.

Something to at least consider, although implementation in the face of the entrenched and ruthless deep state makes any kind of real reform improbable.
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© Guillermo Calvo Mahé; Manizales, 2023; 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.  He is currently the publisher of the Inannite Review, available at Substack.com, a commentator on Radio Guasca FM, and an occasional contributor to the regional magazine, el Observador.  He has academic degrees in political science (the Citadel), law (St. John’s University), international legal studies (New York University) and translation and linguistic studies (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 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/.

A Beautiful Day in the Central Range of the Colombian Andes, As the World Burns

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It’s a beautiful, sunny Saturday in the city in the sky.  The one set among snow clad peaks and thermal springs near an adjacent volcano or two and the remnants of several glaciers.  The one set atop the central range of the Colombian Andes in the midst of a sea of mountains dressed in diverse verdant shades.  It seems summery although in the Northern Hemisphere, the part of our planet in which this part of Colombia is set, it is late autumn, just short of winter.  But then, this close to the equator, seasons tend to meld and shift and be measured in hours rather than months.

The world seems as bad as it’s been since the second war to end all wars a bit over three quarters of a century ago, all the lessons it purportedly taught at best unlearned but more they were probably just fictitious attempts at justifying unjustifiable terminal follies.  Again.  After all, the second war to end all wars took place less than two decades after the first war to end all wars ended.  And wars?  Well, they’re just fine, in fact, perhaps healthier than ever.

Still, … as individuals here and there, life plows on, life: full of interpersonal challenges and triumphs, its own interpersonal beauty and mystique artfully masking our own errors and mistakes.

The Global South (which ironically includes Russia and China and Iran but definitely not the Ukraine) seems to be making headway in its quest for liberation from the constant abuse, humiliation and looting that flows from the North.  But not without severe challenges as the Global North has no intention of brooking what it considers insolence by lesser species.  By people almost but not quite human. 

Notwithstanding the hypocritical “woke”, condescension still rules. 

Still, … there is a scent of a different sort of future and lingering echoes seem to wonder whether such future will be better or just filled with shadows from the past, and whether the images we’ll see in our future mirrors will reflect who we’ve been, or we claim to have been, or who we wish we had been, or who we’d like to be, or who we’ve been forced to become.  Hopefully the images that stare back at us will not be too much like those of those who for so long have oppressed so many.  Wishful thinking, I know, but “if our reach does not exceed our grasp, then what’s a heaven for”, as Robert Browning wrote.  But then, he was a poet, not a politician, a journalist or a historian (the illusory professions).

Omnipresent, dystopia seems to rule.  We seem to be a people in transition, greedily tearing down the past without any agreement on what will replace the corrupt social institutions that have been decaying, putrefied for millennia.  Decaying but refusing to die.  That confuses and polarizes us as we’re manipulated by the worst among us, the Northern hegemonic wannabe leaders who refuse to let go and definitely decline to share, but who still exercise almost total control.  Yet, “almost” is an optimistic harbinger, a qualifier that hints at possible changes, perhaps even beneficent changes.

Who can tell? 

But we can hope. 

Especially on a beautiful sunny Saturday in early December, one in which at least some of us are safely ensconced among some of those we most love, … at least for the day. 

The carnage, genocide and ethnic cleansing underway in Palestine by the worst cultural descendants of the tribe which, after looting Egypt, went on to plunder and murder every man woman and child in ancient Jericho, continues unabated despite popular condemnation in the Global South and even, among an enlightened minority in Europe, the United States and even Israel, although, from here in the heights of the Andes, as in the United States and Europe, to some, that all seems very far away.  Far enough away so that the screams of pain and dying gasps and mourning and lamentations are barely audible and thus, perhaps, at least for them, can be sanitized and washed away.

Or at least shouted down and obfuscated through carefully crafted rhetoric, with reckoning postponed, if not for ever, at least for another day.   

After all, who mourns for ancient Jericho today?
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© Guillermo Calvo Mahé; Manizales, 2023; 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.  He is currently the publisher of the Inannite Review, available at Substack.com, a commentator on Radio Guasca FM, and an occasional contributor to the regional magazine, el Observador.  He has academic degrees in political science (the Citadel), law (St. John’s University), international legal studies (New York University) and translation and linguistic studies (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 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/.

Reflections on Thanksgiving Day, 1621 – 2023

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Another strange Thanksgiving Day is on the horizon.  They’ve all been strange though.

It’s always been a day in which descendants of European colonists enjoy gorging themselves in banquets and eventually, watching football games, but one in which indigenous people in North America reflect on how their generosity was repaid with ethnic cleansing and genocide.

North American indigenous people can probably empathize with Muslims who sheltered and protected Jewish people for over a millennium but were then rewarded with the theft of Palestine and, of course, with ethnic cleansing and genocide as well.

Thanksgiving Day will probably be remembered this year by indigenous people everywhere, remembered but not celebrated.  Indigenous people whose lands were stolen and who were subjected to ethnic cleaning and genocide, a day like Columbus Day.  One in which to reflect on the hypocrisy inherent in colonialism, whether in the Americas, in Africa or in the Middle East.

Today, this year, 2023, it’s a day on which to reflect on the hypocrisy associated with the phrase “never again” and with other days remembering holocausts.  Holocausts as ancient as Jericho and as new as the one during World War II.  Or the one that has been occurring in Palestine since 1948.
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© Guillermo Calvo Mahé; Manizales, 2023; 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.  He is currently the publisher of the Inannite Review, available at Substack.com, a commentator on Radio Guasca FM, and an occasional contributor to the regional magazine, el Observador.  He has academic degrees in political science (the Citadel), law (St. John’s University), international legal studies (New York University) and translation and linguistic studies (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 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/.

Not in our Name

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Israel, the land of nine million Eichmanns who can’t grasp that Palestinians rightly feel for them the emotions that survivors of the Holocaust felt for the worst of the Nazis, and that those feelings are spreading to people all over the world, but especially in the Global South.  And that those feelings are not expressions of antisemitism but of disgust with Israeli genocide, mass murder and ruthless ethnic cleansing.

Too many people of Jewish descent respond to criticism of the new holocaust, the one perpetrated by Israel on Palestinians, by asserting that only Jews can understand the justification for what are to others obviously crimes of lesse humanidad, but how would they answer a Nazi sympathizer who made a similar claim to a Jew, that not being a German Nazi, a Jew could never understand the justifications for what the Nazis did. 

Too many people of Jewish descent may feel that way but far from all as a resounding echo answers loudly from far and near: “not in our name!”
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© Guillermo Calvo Mahé; Manizales, 2023; 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.  He is currently the publisher of the Inannite Review, available at Substack.com, a commentator on Radio Guasca FM, and an occasional contributor to the regional magazine, el Observador.  He has academic degrees in political science (the Citadel), law (St. John’s University), international legal studies (New York University) and translation and linguistic studies (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 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/.

A Cease Fire is Not Enough

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The ubiquitous calls for a ceasefire in Palestine miss the mark.  What is required is the fulfillment of the promises hastily made at Nuremberg following the second war to end all wars as victors vengeance disguised as justice took its toll and a promise was made: “Never Again!”  A promise which immediately proved impossible to keep as the most prominent of the Nazi’s victims, those whose vengeance was extracted at Nuremberg, almost immediately became the victimizers, exalting in the memories of the fate of ancient Jericho and seeking to duplicate it in Palestine. 

What is needed is accountability and implementation of the rules of law established as res gestae at Nuremberg.  Mass murder seeking genocide and ethnic cleansing, crimes of lesse humanidad, must be punished and the appropriate punishment was established at Nuremberg.  Mass murderers, whether few or many, must be held to account, whether directly involved, as in the case of Israel (and other countries), or indirectly as in the NATO countries that supply and resupply Israel with the means to engage in the mass slaughter of innocents in clear violation of International Law, of Humanitarian Law, of the laws regulating what is prohibited in armed conflicts or during occupations, even if the occupation is three quarters of a century old. 

A cease fire is not enough.

The Palestinian State already recognized by civilized countries, one within the borders established by the United Nations in 1948, or at least those existing before the “Six Day War”, must be universally recognized and protected, and such Palestinian State must be sovereign and independent, free to ally itself with whomever it will, but subject to the res gestae that purportedly governs us all.   

And the Palestinian dead and maimed during the past quarter century deserve the same memorialization as do the victims of Nazi concentration camps, gas chambers and crematoriums, as do the victims of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  And the Palestinian State and the descendants of the Palestinian dead and maimed deserve reparations in the hundreds of billions of dollars from Israel and those NATO countries that enable Israeli crimes of lesse humanidad. 

It is time to take the promises made following the second war to end all wars seriously, and to shun all those that refuse to do so in every way possible.  The BDS movement is not enough.  Remember, as the justices at Nuremberg proclaimed (albeit hypocritically, no allied personnel engaged in comparable crimes were judged): “following orders is no defense”, and as they should have added, “voting to elect those who facilitate crimes of lesse humanidad, anywhere, is no better”.
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© Guillermo Calvo Mahé; Manizales, 2023; 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.  He is currently the publisher of the Inannite Review, available at Substack.com, a commentator on Radio Guasca FM, and an occasional contributor to the regional magazine, el Observador.  He has academic degrees in political science (the Citadel), law (St. John’s University), international legal studies (New York University) and translation and linguistic studies (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 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/.

Of Genocide, Ethnic Cleansing, Hubris and Impunity

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As of October 29, 2023, nearly 3,500 Palestinian children had been murdered by Israeli military personnel and an additional 1,000 are missing, presumably buried in the rubble of Gaza during the preceding three weeks.  An additional 6,000 Palestinian adults were also liquidated and an unknown number are missing, while almost a million have been uprooted from their destroyed homes.  Of course, that is sort of traditional, immediately after its founding Israel expelled more than 800,000 Palestinians from their homes almost overnight during 1948 and “appropriated” (stole) their land and possessions, an event known as the Nakba.  One might call the past three weeks Nakba II, or more accurately, the Nakbanth.  There have been too many Nakbas to accurately keep track.

While the past three weeks have involved a significant increase in indiscriminate extra judicial killing of Palestinians by Israelis, it was merely a continuation of official Israeli policy since 1948, with peaks and valleys to be sure, but such attempted annihilation of Palestinians, glossed over as merely “ethnic cleansing”, has been unabated.  The hunting of Palestinians by Israeli military personnel and settlers is a sick reality akin to the worst historical violations of human decency, let alone rights, actions akin not only to those of the Nazis but of the Huns and then the Mongols, and to United States’ soldiers and settlers with respect to the indigenous population of North America were bounties were paid for indigenous scalps without differentiation between age or gender. 

In the case of Israel, the justification for such inhumanity goes back millennia to old Hebrew genocidal traditions, traditions which are biblically recorded as far back as the genocide committed against the inhabitants of ancient Jericho, and involves a Hebraic version of the Nazi policy known as Lebensraum, one not only sanctioned, but commanded by the Hebrew deity, Yahweh, a deity who, ironically, is the same deity worshipped by Israel’s current Palestinian victims.  Perhaps the saddest irony is that Palestinians are much closer genetically to ancient Hebrews than are the Israelis.  They are the descendants of the Jewish people who stayed in the “Holy Land” instead of migrating away after the Roman destruction of the second Hebrew Temple, and who were, in large part, first forced by the Romans of the later Christianized Empire to convert to Christianity, and then, forced to convert to Islam by conquering Arab Muslims, a faith much closer to their original Judaism than was Christianity.  Current Israelis on the other hand are an amalgam, with Hebrew roots, to be sure, but primarily comprised of converts to Judaism from diverse European ethnic groups, primarily descendants of the ancient Eurasian Khazars but including many others. 

Still, murder is murder, genocide is genocide and impunity is impunity.  Hypocrisy reigns, seasoned with hubris, especially with reference to the phrase “Never Again” and to memorials remembering and honoring one segment of those who perished in the series of events during the first half of the twentieth century collectively referred to as the Holocaust, memorials that do not include remembrance of the Soviet citizens slaughtered, or the residents of Nagasaki and Hiroshima, or of Dresden or Tokyo.  The height of such hypocrisy, of course, in addition to the creation of the embryonic State of Israel by the United Nations in 1948, in Palestine rather than say, in Bavaria, involves the decisions of the tribunals established by the victors in the second war to end all wars in the cities of Nuremburg and Tokyo which authorized selective additional murder and torture, in the name of justice and humanity and, of course, as deemed necessary to assure that what is happening in Palestine today, would never occur.  Not all that successful I’d say.

Odd how the term anti-Semitism has morphed from an attitude of unjustifiable actions and attitudes against members of the Jewish faith based on their religious beliefs into defense of genocide and ethnic cleansing, and opposition to truths concerning related realities.  Fortunately, a great many Jews refuse to accept the commission of genocide and ethnic cleansing in their names and are prominent among those protesting against Israel.  The same is true of the populations of many of the countries supporting and defending the Israeli annihilation of Palestine and the Palestinian people.  Perhaps they’ll remember the forgoing when next they vote in purportedly democratic elections.

Something to think about as the descendants of the victors in the second war to end all wars employ the same tactics and excuses as did the losers, and as a third “war to end all wars” becomes more and more likely.

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© Guillermo Calvo Mahé; Manizales, 2023; 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.  He is currently the publisher of the Inannite Review, available at Substack.com, a commentator on Radio Guasca FM, and an occasional contributor to the regional magazine, el Observador.  He has academic degrees in political science (the Citadel), law (St. John’s University), international legal studies (New York University) and translation and linguistic studies (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 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/.

The Irrelevance of International Humanitarian Law

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Perhaps it’s time to reevaluate the premises on which World War II has been judged.  After all, apparently the problems with genocide and ethnic cleansing which purportedly differentiated the two warring camps may have had more to do with the methods with which those two purported crimes against humanity were implemented, or perhaps the numbers involved, rather than with they’re having been undertaken.  Gas bad!  Bombs good.  That was sort of clear when Hiroshima and Nagasaki were destroyed but seems absolutely clear now with the Israeli destruction of the Gaza Strip and elimination of its troublesome population. 

Interestingly though, United States courts at both the state and federal level have ruled that execution through use of gas chambers does not constitute cruel and unusual punishment; see, e.g., Hunt v. Nuth, 57 F.3d 1327 (4th Cir. 1995), Gray v. Lucas, 710 F.2d 1048 (5th Cir. 1983) and the Supreme Court decision in Gomez v. Fierro, 519 U.S. 918 (1996).  To violate the 8th Amendment to the United States Constitution’s prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment it would need to involve some sort of torture, such as dismemberment (as results, for example from non-nuclear forms of bombing). 

Hmmm, so just what is the difference?

Given the foregoing, perhaps the Nazis, while extremely unpleasant towards diverse ethnic and social groups executed in gas chambers (e.g., Jews, Gypsies, sexually deviant groups as measured by standards at the time, etc.), where less culpable of crimes against humanity, at least in the manner of execution if not in numbers, than today’s Israel.  Since today’s Israeli campaign of genocide and ethnic cleansing against non-Jews in the area of Greater Israel (the Nazi concept of lebensraum comes to mind) have been deemed appropriate responses to feelings of national insecurity and reprisals for rebellion such as those which occurred during the second war to end all wars in the Warsaw ghetto and elsewhere; perhaps Germans of all stripes are owed an apology, perhaps the decisions of the Nuremburg tribunals need to be vacated, and perhaps appropriate compensation should be paid to the descendants of those executed and otherwise punished erroneously in such trials as well as in the similar trials held in Tokyo.

As current Israeli leaders have specified, no rules involving human rights or proscriptions against lesa humanidad are applicable to military reprisals against groups deemed undesirable or inconvenient in light of national objectives.

Case closed, finally!!!  It’s only logical.  Everyone is innocent except, of course, for the victims.
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© Guillermo Calvo Mahé; Manizales, 2023; 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.  He is currently the publisher of the Inannite Review, available at Substack.com, a commentator on Radio Guasca FM, and an occasional contributor to the regional magazine, el Observador.  He has academic degrees in political science (the Citadel), law (St. John’s University), international legal studies (New York University) and translation and linguistic studies (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 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/.

In Defense of Sedition, Liberty and Democracy

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Sedition is defined as “overt conduct such as speech or organization which tends toward rebellion against the established order and includes subversion of a constitution and incitement of discontent toward, or insurrection against, established authority”.  It thus seems an essential tool for the implementation and operation of a real democracy, one free of the fetters of self-perpetuating oligarchies and thus, anathema to self-appointed elites while concurrently essential to populism in the sense that populism involves the real exercise of democracy notwithstanding institutional impediments.  Sedition would seem to have been the essence of Thomas Jefferson’s belief that the established order should be seriously challenged every generation.  However, Jefferson was great at intuitive libertarian truths albeit hypocritical as to their implementation.

Sedition was and is a sine qua non of the United States Declaration of Independence, of the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and indeed, of the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights.  The United States and most so-called modern democratic systems were founded on the basis of sedition.  However, sedition is considered inherently illegal in every legal and constitutional system.  It is akin to heresy in organized religions and thus, as in almost everything having to do with the exercise of power over others, its proscription is an exercise in abject hypocrisy.

Sedition, “apparently the most essential tool for a libertarian society”: something on which to reflect as the United States and other so-called Western governments drift further and further away from libertarian democracy and closer and closer towards elitist authoritarian dictatorship (assuming that they’re not already there).
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© Guillermo Calvo Mahé; Manizales, 2023; 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.  He is currently the publisher of the Inannite Review, available at Substack.com, a commentator on Radio Guasca FM, and an occasional contributor to the regional magazine, el Observador.  He has academic degrees in political science (the Citadel), law (St. John’s University), international legal studies (New York University) and translation and linguistic studies (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 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/.

A Brief Reflection on the Latest Rationalization for Genocide

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I wonder if the Israelis murder Palestinians with a joy similar to that ascribed to the Nazis as they murdered Jews (and many, many others).  Or whether instead, when the Nazis did what they are credited with having done, they did so with remorse, considering it a necessary evil, as apparently some Israelis do today.  Just how different, really, are Benjamin Netanyahu and Adolf Hitler and Harry Truman and Winston Churchill and Joseph Biden and Dick Cheney and George W. Bush, et. al.?  Interesting that they’re all political rather than military leaders.

It is horribly ironic that, as human beings, Nazis and Zionists share so many qualities and experiences, but terrible that they are not the only ones.  Terrible that their shared emotions, attitudes and actions flow throughout our history and prehistory as one group of humans finds it essential to destroy another.  As the Jews did millennia ago at Jericho and elsewhere.  As the United States did first with its indigenous population and then at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  As so many groups of humans coalesced into societies almost always seem to do. 

Obviously, despite the hypocritically noble proclamations by the victors of the second war to end all wars, like those by the noble victors of the first war to end all wars, and like those by the noble victors in so many armed conflicts before and since, the human capacity to rationalize evil has not changed at all.  It may be what defines us.  It’s who we’ve always been and seems as though it’s what we’ll always be.

We seemingly are what we are, and that has too little in it of the truly noble and perhaps none of the equitable or just.
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© Guillermo Calvo Mahé; Manizales, 2023; 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.  He is currently the publisher of the Inannite Review, available at Substack.com, a commentator on Radio Guasca FM, and an occasional contributor to the regional magazine, el Observador.  He has academic degrees in political science (the Citadel), law (St. John’s University), international legal studies (New York University) and translation and linguistic studies (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 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/.

Reevaluating Genocide during and after the Second World War: a Critique of History and Historians

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On Tuesday, October 17, 2023, Jonathan Cook published an article in Consortium News (Volume 28, Number 284), entitled “Israel’s Official Ethnic Cleansing Program”.  He’s absolutely correct, but reacting to the long term consequences of root problems is inadequate without addressing the root causes.  In this case, we historians and journalists are the great facilitators, and the hypocrisy following the second war to end all wars, popularly referred to as the Second World War or World War II, is the root cause.

The second war to end all wars was followed by a series of trials based on application of promising ex post facto ius cogens that proclaimed that genocide was impermissible under any circumstances and that violators could be subjected to the death penalty, notwithstanding provisions of domestic law under which their actions were obligatory.  The trials were held in the cities of Nuremberg in Germany and Tokyo in Japan and purportedly established the framework on which future interstate belligerency would be judged.  A number of former Axis political and military leaders were executed and, in the ensuing decades, numerous lower level personnel were convicted and punished for following orders deemed violative of the new norms for armed conflicts, even though such norms did not exist at the time the conduct in question took place.  The repugnance with which such conduct was to be judged henceforth justified the violation of the prohibition of ex post facto penal law.

Subsequent history has demonstrated that the foregoing scenario was a fraud and that the Nuremberg and Tokyo trials were mere expressions of the vengeance of conquerors on the conquered, albeit packaged in beautiful and inspirational camouflage.  That should have been obvious given the reality that both sides in the second war to end all wars engaged in blatant genocidal actions: consider Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but also the obliteration of German and Japanese cities from the sky and the utter absence of related accountability, so it ought to be no surprise that subsequent more neatly packaged and sold examples of genocidal conduct continue, not only unpunished, but as in the case of Israel and the Palestinians, even extolled.

The only real lasting consequence of the second war to end all wars seems to have been that the British quest for global political and economic hegemony was transferred to the United States and that hypocrisy continued its unabated bludgeoning of truth in what passed for journalism and history.  Genocide continues to be celebrated, most notably by adherents of the primordial Abrahamic faith during Hanukkah and Passover while the same cultural group constantly decries the genocide practiced on it (and others) by the Germans, incoherently using it as justification for its own long term campaign of genocide against Palestinians and other adherents of the junior branches of the Abrahamic faith.  One wonders if Abram realized the horrendous long term consequences of his sexual abuse of his wife, Sarai’s, handmaiden Hagar.

I have taught and researched international law at the university level and have sadly concluded that, as with so much that purports to involve moral, ethical and legal norms, it exists only as an aspiration, but an aspiration carefully kept at bay and pulled out only when it is convenient for those who wield sufficient control over the use of force to force their will on others, but who insist on being portrayed as morally and ethically justified.  We historians are largely at fault for being so inept and hypocritical in our chosen avocation, as are purported journalists for the same reason.  Indeed writers of acknowledged fiction, writers such as, for example, Gore Vidal, come much closer to the truth than we ever do, earning us a place in a Shakespearean hell alongside lawyers, clerics and politicians.  Rather than eulogized, we deserve disdain and worse because the genocidal murder of so many rests all too comfortably on what passes for our consciences.

Something to think about as we attend and participate in seminars and congresses and teach our classes and publish our articles and books and accept the compensation we are awarded for the foregoing, and perhaps, hope that there is neither a Heaven nor a Hell, other than the one we help create and perpetuate here on earth.
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© Guillermo Calvo Mahé; Manizales, 2023; 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.  He is currently the publisher of the Inannite Review, available at Substack.com, a commentator on Radio Guasca FM, and an occasional contributor to the regional magazine, el Observador.  He has academic degrees in political science (the Citadel), law (St. John’s University), international legal studies (New York University) and translation and linguistic studies (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 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/.