Charlie Rose

StevenBlue  05/28/2011 07:02 AM Report

@ JohnGelles 05/28/2011 05:26 AM

I agree that the arrest and trial of Mladic probably won't be such an deterrent to other warlords and despots as some make it out to be IMO. Nonetheless his victims and their families deserve justice and it is an important stepping stone for the region to try to move on.

I don't see how you could prosecute the North Koreans at this point more than you could prosecute German or Japanese war criminals before WW2 had ended.

With regards to our "priorities", this had little to do with the US. Mladic was arrested by Serbian police and will face trial in the Netherlands.

JohnGelles  05/28/2011 05:26 AM Report

Long live everyone, doodah ~

I really wanted to discuss the Michael Spence interview on our economic future -- that is until I listened to what he had to say.

He and our host, Charlie Rose, tried to get past the choice between Keynesian spending and Gordon Brown's austerity. Between fear of unemployment and fear of debt.

Unemployment is a disaster. Debt is something to swap for equity or otherwise make reasonable.

The conversation did not work: Spence did not echo Jon Huntsman's call for a new industrial revolution NOW when we need it most.

He saw one coming -- which is good -- but increasing the pace of change from markets to planned prosperity was not something he was promoting with his book.

Meanwhile, the trial of General Mdlac will not IMO deter genocide. And it will not be remembered as a lesson to anyone. Among the worst perpetrators of misery for innocent people is the government of North Korea. That government works in the Stalinist and similar tradition of killing its internal potential dissenters. But, compared to its crimes, the General did nothing. Yet Holbrook, Albright and the rest of us do not yearn to bring its top row of leaders to justice. Our priorities in such matters are not right.

doodah  05/28/2011 04:32 AM Report

@ JohnGelles 05/27/2011 11:54 PM

Long Live the Jews, John. Long Live the Jews (except for the bad apples). ;)

Hows that, fella?

NeilMacCallister  05/28/2011 03:35 AM Report

Wow, John! ..Foucault, Chomsky, and Sartre??? ..really????

Doesn't this month taste more like Julia Child, Bobby Flay, or Guy Fiere??

I mean, this is the start of another election cycle, isn't it!!

***

President Obama had just completed his deal with Donald Trump to help get that "birther" tack-strip out of the road.

The next step was to appeal to those people "who still cling to their guns and Bibles", ..so he sends a crew over to Pakistan to snatch up Osama and toss him into the election soup.

But that Osama ingredient needs a balancing flavor to reduce the bitterness of that killing to the Middle-eastern palates, so the President quickly makes a call to the Balkans to secure a fresh bulb of blood-red Mladic!

***

Let's see, ..what flavor might still be missing? ..What else might his hoped-for customers demand in this stew?

..a little QE-3 garnish maybe??

..or some thinly sliced Israel, on a toasted roll???

JohnGelles  05/28/2011 12:50 AM Report

The real issues surrounding a trial of General Ratko Mladic for genocide have to do with the history of Christian versus Muslim fighters and peoples in Serbia. There have been atrocities reported in that history from centuries past and from WW II, when Germany and its Muslim friends killed Slavs the way they killed Jews.

Today we want no more revenge killing of innocent descendants of past killers. However, this feeling of "enough revenge, today's innocents deserve to be left alone" is not shared by all people everywhere.

A trial of the General in the Hague may convict him and send him to jail. But the desire for revenge without mercy will remain and will result in death in the future as it has in the past.

I do not think Foucault or Chomsky or even Sartre has to be quoted to take sides on the issue. The General's lawyers will make a case for genocide or some other view of what he did and the court will decide genocide is wrong and the General is guilty. He will be sentenced to 30 years in jail -- which is longer than he will live.

The opposite outcome is very hard to imagine. It would be based on the idea that revenge is OK -- even if it is unfair to kill a Muslim whose parent did not want Muslims's to kill Christians as a stooge for Adolph Hitler.

Well, no one is going to make the case for a theory in favor of revenge that might have been OK a few centuries ago.

The CR Show explained that much of our present case to oppose genocide was supported by Europeans and Americans who offered practical money reward for surrendering the General.

If the case were very strong, that reward would not have been necessary.

Holbrook and Albright see genocide against Muslims as beyond the Pale. I guess it is now. Yet it may take genocide to end genocide. That is a disgusting thought. And I voiced it. For shame John Gelles. You are not a Serb or Slav and have no excuse for saying such words. After all, you never wished the bomb that fell on Japan had fallen first on Germany -- did you?

JohnGelles  05/27/2011 11:54 PM Report

REMant says:

..... "Yet if the murder of Bin Laden had happened in some locality in this country it would have resulted in the officer being brought up on charges, particularly if the victim were a minority. So far then am I from thinking as does Ms Albright, that this is benevolence, I am inclined to think with Foucault that hers is the modern face of evil."

REMant finds bin Laden's death, at the hands of the military with whom bin Laden went to war, suspect. He imagines that if bin Laden had been Jewish, say, his death would have been murder. Well maybe bin Laden was Jewish. I still think he attacked America and deserved to be captured or killed in the attempt to capture him.

Of course, bin Laden was probably no more part Jewish than REMant is. And Madeleine Albright who was a Jew raised as a Catholic was never killed by Navy Seals and is the face of Mary mother of Jesus more than the face of evil.

If you don't follow me -- then follow REMant. He is the voice of Foucault about whom you can read on Wikipedia -- for free.

REMant stubbornly tries to be first on the CR boards every night. He is the voice of evil -- perhaps. Why not. He is as far from the spirit of the CR show as anyone is likely to get. If I were CR I would direct that his postings never come sooner that 24 hours after the first poster. They would carry the reason: this poster tries to ruin the spirit of our conversations -- so we hold back his comments that tend to do that. By doing this, we expect him to gain some respect for our intention to inform America and not disgrace her.

doodah  05/27/2011 06:49 PM Report

@ charlizecourriers 05/27/2011 04:20 PM

Are you recommending that President Obama should punish the Navy Seals for killing, or as you describe it, 'murdering' Osama Bin Laden instead of capturing him alive?.!

Wow! You are the Ultimate arm-chair, Monday-morning Quarterback; aren't you?. .. Most people IGNORE you, don't they ;)

charlizecourriers  05/27/2011 04:20 PM Report

Ironically, it would appear that U.S. government officials, including presidents, now think that political murder, i.e., assassination, is a just means to political ends. The murder of Bin Laden, rather than his capture, is lauded as a just act. Obama made a profound mistake in not ordering his capture. And this mistake may redound disastrously! Mladic will receive justice, no doubt. But Albright should not forget that political murder is murder, no matter who pratices it. Albright, as the commentator below notes, has removed evil from the realm of her own possibilities, a fantasy of western liberals, noted most percipiently by Jean Baudrillard. And thus she is doubly banal.

REMant  05/27/2011 12:03 PM Report

That this would be the subject of tonite's show was a foregone conclusion when I saw it on the evening news and I jotted down my thoughts: "Turning over Mladic, which is what must have happened, comes at an interesting juncture and I suppose is meant as a lesson of some kind. It certainly seems illustrative of the point in time when police action supplanted war in the liberal mind, tho it had been part of the anti-Communist crusade and found in many regimes now seen as brutal as any ancient one. It reminds me that those who have argued that liberalism is more opposed to violence than to repression are probably right. Indiscriminate as it has become in the wake of the decline of reason and the aristocracy, war at least had the virtue of not having to either determine who was a bystander and who not, or to make anyone behave. There is undoubtedly a connection between the current idea of counterinsurgency and this sort of police. It should not be supposed that anyone is "protecting the population" in this sort of action anymore than when the Germans and Soviets shot resistance fighters. American counterinsurgency types in both Vietnam and in Iraq and Afghanistan have run large-scale assassination programs killing both guerrillas and those who've hidden and supported them. If liberals hate war, or even violence, they are not above resorting to it themselves. Yet if the murder of Bin Laden had happened in some locality in this country it would have resulted in the officer being brought up on charges, particularly if the victim were a minority." So far then am I from thinking as does Ms Albright, that this is benevolence, I am inclined to think with Foucault that hers is the modern face of evil.

Kosovo was the Clinton's crusade, but the idea of war crimes came up in the midst of WWII and issued in Nuremberg, but it was largely vengeance, and as hypocritical as any puppet trial. It was Churchill's, proposed ahead of the 1943 Teheran meeting of the Allies, the text of which I'll spare you, but it is to found in Vol 5 of his WWII memoir, "Closing the Ring," pp296-7. Suffice to say it reads like a WWI poster. Indeed, the same charges had been made during that war, there and here. For his part Stalin jokingly suggested they only exterminate the German General Staff and 50,000 officers. Tho Churchill was not shy about saying he would make a pact with devil to defeat the Nazis, it transpired when we discovered what Stalin had done to his own army, it was no joke and he surely had. It is interesting to note in passing that Serbian thugs have ever since loomed large in British TV productions.

There is of course something to be said for the laws of war that obtained in the 18th century, however they were fought by men of honor, many of whom were in fact mercenaries, and if the reasons for them no less touched on religion, culture and race, they were mostly fought between governments which had control of their citizens. What people like Albright would like to do is remove that control in the mistaken belief that it is merely repression. That's akin, as I've said so many times, to the idea that all our economic problems are due to scrooges, that all our education problems are due to classroom autocrats, or that all our psychological problems are due to the repression of emotions. They can only efface them, however, without also effacing, as Tocqueville and Foucault concluded, humanity itself.

Ironically, perhaps, it was one of Churchill's forebears who remarked that the wars of democracy would be worse than those of aristocracy, a fact he, himself, acknowledged repeatedly (eg, in his discussion of Versailles: "Gone were the days of the Treaties of Utrecht and Vienna, when aristocratic statesmen and diplomats, victor and vanquished alike, met in courtly disputation, and, free from the clatter and babel of democracy, could reshape systems upon the fundamentals of which they were all agreed.") He thought they should have restored the German monarchy after WWI, and after WWII he opposed both FDR and Stalin in dismantling the Germany.

Remind me tho to never watch Amanpour again.