By Russell A. Berman · Monday, March 2, 2009 It’s one thing for the Secretary of State to backpedal on human rights and refrain from making them central to U.S.–China relations. This probably accurately reflects a moderate position on rights in the Obama administration, which may be disappointing some of its supporters, especially since it’s a rollback from the rights advocacy of the Bush administration.
It’s quite another, however, to find that the newly appointed Chair of the National Intelligence Council, Chas Freeman, apparently holds that the Chinese government was too lenient in its treatment of the demonstrators at Tiananmen Square in 1989.
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By Russell A. Berman · Thursday, February 19, 2009 As Wajda’s film on the Katyn massacre opens, we’re reminded of how often human rights have been betrayed explicitly by their defenders.
Victor Zaslavsky’s Class Cleansing: The Massacre at Katyn documents how the U.S. government knew of Soviet culpability but participated in concealing it in order to mollify its wartime ally. George Earle, previously special envoy to the Balkans, prepared a report for Roosevelt, demonstrating that the Russians had carried out the killings: Roosevelt prohibited the publication and, to get Earle out of circulation, reassigned him to American Samoa (see Zaslavsky’s account, p. 61).
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By Jake Davis · Wednesday, February 18, 2009 Andrzej Wajda’s film Katyn, which is now playing at the Film Forum in Manhattan, examines the issues that are the central concern of Victor Zaslavsky’s Class Cleansing: The Massacre at Katyn, published by Telos Press. In stark, and sometimes brutal, manner, Wajda depicts the situation in Poland that led up to the massacre of Polish army officers in the Katyn Forest, as well as the subsequent deception employed by the Stalinist police state, which attempted to paint the event as an act of the Nazis. Reviewing Wajda’s film, A.O. Scott writes:
With elegant concision, the film explores both the events leading up to the massacre and its aftermath, following a group of officers and their families through the agonies of war and the miseries of peacetime under Communism, circling back to end with an unsparing reconstruction of some of the killings.
The movie should be of interest to anyone who has read Zaslavsky’s book, and will increase public awareness of the violence done to Poles and the history at Katyn. And, of course, the book, available here, is crucial background for an informed understanding of both the movie and the history of Communist violence.
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By David Pan · Friday, February 13, 2009 This talk was presented at the 2009 Telos Conference.
As we consider U.S. foreign policy for the next several years, there seems to be a growing consensus that the United States will have to adjust to a less unilateral role in maintaining world order and that we will be living in a more multipolar world. This is the conclusion of Global Trends 2025: A Transformed World, recently published by the National Intelligence Council. But this report’s view that such a multipolar world will lead to both an end of ideology and a return to the kind of balance of power politics of the nineteenth century overlooks major ideological differences between different cultures that will likely become more prominent in global politics. To understand why, we should consider both the motivations of recent U.S. engagements with the rest of the world and the ideological implications of shifting power constellations in the future.
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By Abraham Lincoln · Thursday, February 12, 2009 On Sept. 24, 1862, President Lincoln issued the following proclamation suspending the right to writs of habeas corpus nationwide.
By The President of the United States of America:
A Proclamation
Whereas, it has become necessary to call into service not only volunteers but also portions of the militia of the States by draft in order to suppress the insurrection existing in the United States, and disloyal persons are not adequately restrained by the ordinary processes of law from hindering this measure and from giving aid and comfort in various ways to the insurrection…
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By Michael Marder · Wednesday, February 4, 2009 This talk was presented at the 2009 Telos Conference.
A conflation of legality and legitimacy, brilliantly explored by Carl Schmitt, is the first of three essential confusions I term “the metonymic abuses of modernity.” In a nutshell, I argue that, when it comes to the modern political order, one of its privileged parts always stands for the whole: bourgeois legality metonymically signifies legitimacy in general, constitutional law and the Rechtsstaat constitution denote the constitutional regime as such, and the state appears as the incarnation of the political. The rampant abuses of metonymy and synechdoche in modern political thought polemically raise a particular kind of legitimacy, a specific type of the constitution, and one of the loci of the political to the status and the dignity of the genus, in a way that de-legitimizes their rivals. Furthermore, in aligning the three metonymic abuses of modernity, I reconstruct the multi-layered edifice of contemporary politics and, at the same time, show how Schmitt chisels away its fixed and ossified building blocks. If legality, which usurps the place of legitimacy, is the most superficial, depersonalized, “dead” stratum, then the political (metonymized by a centralized state) is the most profound and animating source, defaced by everything that is predicated upon it. Finally, the metonymy of the constitution and constitutional law is the intermediate step between the state that does not merely have but is its constitution and the legitimacy assumed in keeping with the existing constitutional order.
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