Agon: Moral Flux / Moral Absolute

"Take Lithuania, for example, where 240,000 Jews lived at the start of the war," says Levin, a survivor of - and expert on - the Holocaust. "Some 220,000 perished, most at the hands of the Lithuanians themselves who began murdering Jews in 40 communities even before the Germans invaded in June 1941. They were organized in the LAF (Lithuanian Activist Front) and anyone wanting to prove his loyalty had to murder at least one Jew.

http://skiptraceamerica.com/ARTICLES/art06.html

There is moral relativism and there is moral popularity and there is moral. Who knows where we end up? That's because there is no end to end at. History doesn't end at all. We do, and we are what we did, others deciding that moral to their own satisfaction later, that morality not being to them what we do/did but what they decide among themselves according to themselves. Forget the judgments of history: Immoral people will reign in immoral times and condemn the Just. Those who are moral live accordingly and live without concern for the judgments of those who come later, regardless.

Does it mean we are trapped in a personal vacuum of personal morality? Not if we act according to Reason, intuition, and tradition. If we think, then we are able to save ourselves perhaps from immorality. Mistakes? We'll make a few. And the authority we base our moral actions on? That decides it for us. That's personal. Sartre writes of it nicely, writing that we choose our own moral authorities to obey. He takes at least some of the foundation for such thought from, of all people, Heidegger. We live anyway, and we must do our best.

At the Combat Zone the point is to bring forth examples of moral questions in action. There's no theology here; not a philosophy to follow. No ideology informs these posts. A thesis, yes.

Below is some of a piece from Latvia, close to Lithuania geographically and culturally, historically and morally. In fact, it's hardly different from anyplace. The same moral questions are pervasive no matter where we are or the times. A Lett is tried for crimes against Humanity in the story below for siding with a group now out of favor, and he seems to have been a particularly brutal bastard on the face of it. You, in a position perhaps similar sometime, will have to make decisions that will define you as a moral person. Times will change around you and today's friends might become tomorrow's prosecutors. Today's right might seem to be tomorrow's crimes against Humanity. How will you know today that this is good and that isn't? What, if anything, will you do today?

Latvian seeks £4million compensation after being jailed for killing Nazi sympathisers in World War Two

Daily Mail Reporter; 26th June 2008

More than 60 years after the end of World War Two, a man is to be judged by Europe's highest court on whether he was right or wrong to kill Nazi sympathisers collaborating with Hitler.

Latvian Vasiliy Kononov, 85, is claiming compensation of £4 million for being convicted and sentenced to six years imprisonment by his own country in 2001 for the unlawful killing of civilians who had betrayed a partisan group to the Germans.

Kononov, a guerrilla attached to the Soviet Red Army, helped kill the civilian collaborators after tricking them into admitting they had handed the partisans over to the Nazis.

Years later courts in Latvia found him guilty of crimes against humanity.

But Kononov is claiming that he acted correctly in killing the nine civilians in a Latvian village in 1944, because at the time he was legitimately fighting with the Red Army, and on the side of the Allies including Britain, to repel the Nazis from the Baltic state.

He also claims that he is the victim of political correctness in modern day Latvia, a European Union country where the State now openly defends those who fought for the Nazis against the Soviet army in the Second World War.

The Latvians argue the Soviets were seen as the greater threat to the country's independence, and this justified siding with Hitler.

The verdict from the European Court of Human Rights, due next month, will effectively re-open the issue of war crimes during the Second World War as established under the Nuremberg trials, by deciding whether a man can be punished for fighting against the Nazis.

[....]

In March, 1944 he was assigned to discover the fate of a partisan group of 12 men led by a Major Chugunov who disappeared near the village of Maliye Baty after being betrayed by villagers in the pay of the Nazis.

Disguised in a Nazi greatcoat, Kononov talked to villagers who boasted how they had betrayed the partisans.

Then Kononov and his men held a war court that convicted the villagers. The villagers were given a written judgement sentencing them to death.

Most were shot, although a man, and two women were in a building that Kononov set on fire and died in the flames.

In all, nine people were killed, including a child, which Kononov admitted was a mistake.

[....]

The case brings into focus Latvia's contempt for the former Soviet Union after over four decades of occupation, with Kononov being cast as a Stalinist thug massacring civilians.

It hinges on whether the highly decorated former guerilla can be classified as a Soviet occupier of Latvia or as a Latvian citizen fighting the Nazi invaders.

'The Latvian courts agree that Kononov was a member of an anti-Hitler coalition, they do not dispute that,' said Joffe.

'They also agree that those villagers were in collaboration with Nazis.

'Yet they claim that Kononov was representing Soviet occupiers and killed the civilians who were acting according to the laws of that time.

'But this is nonsense. He is a native Latvian, he was fighting for his country.

'And according to the rules of war, people taking guns from invaders in exchange for food and protection were not civilians anymore, but collaborators.

'This process is purely political like other things Latvia has been doing recently - such as reburying Nazis as heroes, and organising monuments and eternal flames at Nazi cemeteries.'

Kononov, now 85, said : 'I have never doubted that I was fighting for the right thing.

'It was a shock for me to know that what I did to defend my country is now considered a crime.'

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/worldnews/article-1029692/Latvian-seeks-4m-compensation-jailed-killing-Nazi-sympathisers-World-War-Two.html

In the Modernity we share we have "rules of engagement" and legitimate control over who does what and where and when. We don't lawfully act as individuals in combat but act under direction of authority of our nations and governments. We have a duty, legal and moral, to refuse to act on orders immoral and illegal, known to most at least at an intuitive level: that we don't set fire to buildings with people inside, and that we don't shoot children. That part shouldn't be too hard to figure. But we kid ourselves in thinking it's all an easy story to discover the sense of. In the comfort of the moment the horror is difficult to grasp, and it's very easy to condemn. Cold sobriety demands that after the fact we do judge coldly and soberly and act accordingly. Individuals who commit crimes against civilians must be punished for those crimes, regardless of their motives and the urgencies of the times. It's a price actors pay for life. No one is perfect, and even the best commit wrongs that require punishment. It's a price one might willingly pay for the terrible mercy of "later still."

Combat Zone: War is Deceit

This is the first installment of Combat Zone. The theme is of civil war in the Western world. The intention is to provide information about the state of our struggle against jihad from outside our Modernity, and to look closely at those who use Islam and other socialist forces inside and outside Modernity to destroy Modernity itself.

For those curious, this is neither Left nor Right in orientation, such dichotomy arising originally during the French Revolution as a seatting arrangement of political factions, and today having no meaning politically. The days of Left and Right are gone. Today we face a division between those forces who struggle either for Modernity and political liberty for the individual; or they struggle for a return to the Middle Ages with its collectivist totalitarianism.

The struggle in the Western world today moves toward active combat, and this is the Combat Zone. To give an indication of how things seem to be today and how they might further play out as we progress, below is a short piece from Cornwall, England.

This piece comes originally from Islam Online, a jihadi pit. We pick it up from the entirely excellent Esther in Europe. Aside from the whingeing throughout the piece, the typical moaning of Muslim victimization, and the cries of "racism," one also sees too clearly, as usual, the demands for power for Islam in the West. As Mohammed records in the Qur'an, "War is deceit."

Wherever possible we will quote from authorative texts to make clear the points and to give the reader the chance to verify them. Immediately below, to set the stage, are quotations from the Qur'an and ahadith.

War is deceit:

Sahih Bukhari, Volume 4, Book 52, Number 269:

Narrated Jabir bin 'Abdullah:

The Prophet said, "War is deceit."

http://www.usc.edu/dept/MSA/fundamentals/hadithsunnah/bukhari/052.sbt.html#004.052.269

Sura 3:54 says that Allah makara. The Arabic word makara means to deceive, scheme, or plan.

[....]

The person who is a makir (same form as the word kafir) speaking of the attribute of a person is one who would outwit someone else to cause them harm. It speaks of one who would reveal the opposite of what he plans to do. The reality is that he is scheming evil for that person. So yes there is the sense of planning and scheming but mostly it means to trick, outwit and deceive for the purpose of overpowering and conquering the other. A makir is one who devises a secret scheme against someone else. Synonyms would be cheating, defrauding, double-crossing, deceiving, tricking, in all cases makara has the sense of defeating the one you have tricked.

[....]

Pickthall's translation of 3:54: "And they (the disbelievers) schemed, and Allah schemed (against them); and Allah is the best of schemers."

http://www.muslimhope.com/DeceptionInIslam.htm#_Toc170282507

http://www.thereligionofpeace.com/Quran/011-taqiyya.htm says that on the transmission on 9-11 flight 93, the hijackers told the passengers there was a bomb on board, but that everyone will be safe if their demands are met. That was certainly a lie, but were the 9-11 hijackers being hypocrites here? No, they were not, because the hadiths said they could practice deception in war. But again, until the hijackers took over the plane, the men, and even women and children on board had no idea their fellow passengers were at war with them.

At: http://www.muslimhope.com/DeceptionInIslam.htm#_Toc170282495

Islamic culture is primitive and savage. Those who follow it are, thus, primitives and savages. The greater the depth of immersion in Muslim culture the deeper ones depravity. We are at war with Islam, a world-wide poligion, a political religion, an historically ethnically based imperialism of Arab supremacy. Anyone can join. Thus, though Islam is an Arab supremacy, it is not strictly a racist but a world-wide totalitarianism. To struggle against Islam is not to be racist, if it matters to those who struggle indeed, but a struggle for human freedom-- even for Arabs and Muslims. The struggle for human freedom is universal. Below is how a a deceitful Muslim sees it:

Cornwall: Attacks against Islamic Center

Racism is rearing its ugly face in Britain's south-western county of Cornwall with a series of Islamophobic attacks against British Muslims of Asian origin, The Independent reported Saturday, June 21.

"Racism is showing its ugly head," Tipo Choudhury, deputy secretary of the Islamic Center of Cornwall, said.

Choudhury has recently announced plans to establish a community center in the city to serve the Asian community.

But since then, the center has been the target of spate of racist attacks in the recent weeks.

Last Thursday, an obscene graffiti defaming Islam and espousing the cause of Cornish nationalism (the movement calling for more autonomous authorities for the county) was splattered across the center walls.

A pig's head was also nailed early this month to the center's door and "KKK" - referring to the Ku Klux Klan which is a name given to racist organizations – was painted in red gloss on an outside wall.

In a third incident, grafitti featuring far-right nationalist Party BNP slogans was painted on the center walls.

Choudhury also was racially abused by a passing motorcyclist while standing outside the building.

"It shows prejudice is alive and kicking," Choudhury said.

Police said they are dealing with the attacks as "critical" and linked.

So far, only one suspect has been arrested in connection with the attacks but he was later released on bail.

Shame

The attacks have drawn a strong condemnation from all the county leaders.

"(The attacks had) brought shame on us all," said local MP Andrew George, who also doubles as president of the Council for Racial Equality in Cornwall.

Dick Cole leader of Mebyon Kernow, the Party for Cornwall, also denounced the attacks.

"(It is) a crude attempt to foster division and intolerance," he said, calling for confronting these racist attacks by all means.

Police inspector Mark Richards said the attacks are tarnishing the country's reputation.

The graffiti was offensive "not only to Asians and Asian religions, but also to Christians and Cornish nationalists whose name has been taken in vain," he said.

Victor Downer, director of the newly-founded anti-racism group Unity Cornwall, said the attacks have sent shockwaves across Cornwall.

"If people are prepared to do this, to sneak out in the middle of the night and run the risk of arrest, what next? The community is feeling very vulnerable," he said.

Britain is home to a sizable multi-ethnic Muslim minority of nearly 2 million, mostly of Indian, Pakistani and Bengali backgrounds.

UK Muslims, who have been in the eye of the storm since the 9/11 attacks, complain of a growing Islamophobic climate in the European country.

A recent Financial Times opinion poll showed Britain is the most suspicious nation about Muslims.

A poll of the Evening Standard also found that a sizable section of London residents harbor negative opinions about Muslims.

An earlier British study had accused the media and film industry of perpetuating Islamophobia and prejudice by projecting Muslims as violent, dangerous and threatening people.

Source: Islam Online (English)

http://islamineurope.blogspot.com/2008/06/cornwall-attacks-against-islamic-center.html

The Western world is a Combat Zone. Throwing tantrums and nailing pig-heads to gates is not an effective response to such a struggle. Over the course of the life of this effort we will look perhaps at strategies and tactics better suited to our struggle and its eventual victory in freedom universally.

Welcome to the Combat Zone.