Posted on 08/04/2007 3:03:50 PM PDT by jongaltsr
Since you apparently did not do my reading assignment, go read the criticism of not slaughtering the pope and all his cardinals when you have the chance to, again. (Machiavelli was incidentally there, as Florentine diplomat to the pope). Also read the preceeding 26th chapter, which explains how a tyrant should make everything knew by shoveling around entire peoples like sheep. Notice that Machiavelli does not call this a wonderful moral procedure, but instead says that it revolts not only every Christian but every human being - and then goes right ahead and recommends it anyway, for anyone not willing to live an entirely private life and avoid politics completely.
And that is both false, and evil.
You are correct. Very Correct as a matter of FACT.
This is the type of intercourse I hoped I could get started on this subject. Thanks
In this instance (I personally) think you are wrong.
You are thinking like a modern american educated thinker.
As long as you think like the academics of today you will think exactly what they think.
Try and think like a person in that time and in that context and don’t try to put labels on times and life you may not be familiar with.
In a sense he recognized reality and effectiveness. His commentaries on HOW it should be should be reviewed moreso than his commentaries on what is or what works.
As far as I know - Rome.
If my response is not correct please clue me in.
Thanks
Hillary!08 is a complete machiavellian. Remember this when you view her first three months in office with that deer-in-the-headlight look.
Machiavelli was evil by who’s standard? Did he believe in torturing subjects those that were a threat to stability - Absolutely. He did not moralize over details. What was good for stability of the Republic was “sometimes” but not necessarily “always” necessary. It was the stability of the Republic and the people of the Republic that was ultimately important. If the ruler was hated (terribly cruel and unfair) the people would rise up and destroy that ruler. If he was terribly nice and friendly, the same would happen but for different reasons.
The end justifies the means? I believe in his context and in his time that was often necessary as times were harsh, not like it is today. That does not mean that at some time in todays world that we may have to be harsh.
WWII was an example. We interred the Japanese because we could not afford to trust them. They were imprisoned unjustly and when released they were not properly compensated. It was something we had to do to survive. Could it have been handled better? YES. Could we have been more lenient? Yes, however, then we would have taken a chance that some of the Japanese would have turned on us and threatened our success. We could not afford to take than chance. We won, the Japanese survived, they were forgotten and life went on. Just what Machiavelli would have suggested (I would think).
Torturing (killing, jailing, deporting) those that threatened stability was a necessity then and to some degree now. Machiavelli thought so too.
I am not trying to whitewash him into some moralizing patriot. He was practical above all. WE NEED TO BE THAT WAY AT TIMES ALSO.
The people are ultimately the more powerful party. He also said that the ONLY army that is trustworthy was an "army “of the people” and not hired armies such as we rely upon - for example - The UN.
Those that ignore politics are ruled by ignorance, self interest and whatever is popular that day. This is a prescription for total anarchy and complete failure of the system. You can be a nice guy and prod people to respond appropriately, or you can smack them on the back side and have them stand up and take notice.
Your parents (I hope) took that approach with you as a child. Without a reminder of who is boss, you will wallow in selfishness and sloven behavior. If your parents or your government places “demands” on you from time to time and enforces those demands in the strictest of methods you will not pay attention and do the right thing.
Right?
_______ Finally ________
I would personally like to take the time to thank you for stimulating my mind in this area as I am learning and clarifying my ideas even more than if I had no outside input. You have many valid points which you brought up and in most cases I think you are right on. However you and I see things from slightly different perspectives. Some of that will never be completely resolved but that will give us common ground for understanding each other and the world in general.
Machiavelli was evil by who’s standard? Did he believe in torturing subjects those that were a threat to stability - Absolutely. He did not moralize over details. What was good for stability of the Republic was “sometimes” but not necessarily “always” necessary. It was the stability of the Republic and the people of the Republic that was ultimately important. If the ruler was hated (terribly cruel and unfair) the people would rise up and destroy that ruler. If he was terribly nice and friendly, the same would happen but for different reasons.
The end justifies the means? I believe in his context and in his time that was often necessary as times were harsh, not like it is today. That does not mean that at some time in todays world that we may have to be harsh.
WWII was an example. We interred the Japanese because we could not afford to trust them. They were imprisoned unjustly and when released they were not properly compensated. It was something we had to do to survive. Could it have been handled better? YES. Could we have been more lenient? Yes, however, then we would have taken a chance that some of the Japanese would have turned on us and threatened our success. We could not afford to take than chance. We won, the Japanese survived, they were forgotten and life went on. Just what Machiavelli would have suggested (I would think).
Torturing (killing, jailing, deporting) those that threatened stability was a necessity then and to some degree now. Machiavelli thought so too.
I am not trying to whitewash him into some moralizing patriot. He was practical above all. WE NEED TO BE THAT WAY AT TIMES ALSO.
The people are ultimately the more powerful party. He also said that the ONLY army that is trustworthy was an "army “of the people” and not hired armies such as we rely upon - for example - The UN.
Those that ignore politics are ruled by ignorance, self interest and whatever is popular that day. This is a prescription for total anarchy and complete failure of the system. You can be a nice guy and prod people to respond appropriately, or you can smack them on the back side and have them stand up and take notice.
Your parents (I hope) took that approach with you as a child. Without a reminder of who is boss, you will wallow in selfishness and sloven behavior. If your parents or your government places “demands” on you from time to time and enforces those demands in the strictest of methods you will not pay attention and do the right thing.
Right?
_______ Finally ________
I would personally like to take the time to thank you for stimulating my mind in this area as I am learning and clarifying my ideas even more than if I had no outside input. You have many valid points which you brought up and in most cases I think you are right on. However you and I see things from slightly different perspectives. Some of that will never be completely resolved but that will give us common ground for understanding each other and the world in general.
Recall what the Clintons did when they first took the White House. Recall the Travel Office. That was warmups.
He is also talking about slaughtering the pope and all the cardinals, not because it is expedient, but to show men how little rulers who rely on any notion of right are respected, and also because destroying piety and religion and morality were his major purposes. Not any republic anything, about which he could care less. Borgia as pope, sure, exactly.
Machiavelli is deeper than your average bastard because he has thought it all through, and his mature and considered opinion is that morality and values of every kind are utter bumcomb. They are mere fraud, to him. So is pretending to support "the people" when it helps one to be popular or powerful or otherwise to get one's own way. He only cares about power.
But power, in reality, is a means to decent ends and not an end in itself. When instead it is made into the only end, you get what his disciples have created in all places and times - a desert, a wasteland, morally economically and soon enough politically as well. The real Romans were moralists, Machiavelli's are not. The real winning side in recorded history has been the moralizing side, and not the cynics. The cynics are constitutionally incapable of accomplishing anything, beyond the few decades of destruction they each last for.
Scan the globe and ask yourself where Machiavelli's maxims of politics are more thoroughly adhered to. Africa, in spades. The middle east, in spades. Parts of Asia. Now, scan the world again, looking for powerless hellholes and squalor. Same places. Not a coincidence.
You seem to have a bit of vile built up for this person. Sure he is “tough” by our standards but you do not allow for the times in which he lived and the people he had to deal with. He was no angel for sure, then again, neither am I.
I just hope that someone like you doesn’t write how terrible and cruel I am sometime in the future. I would hate to have someone look at the time I spanked my daughter after she repeatedly lied to myself and my wife. After the 5 or 6 whacks she received on her backside immediately changed her attitude. From that day forward I had to contend with her honesty on everything. Things I really did not need to know, but I would much rather have that then the alternative. More importantly it worked and it worked well.
I used cruelty well as Machiavelli would say.
I was cruel by your standards (I would guess) but the benefits were well worth the effort.
Take that to the larger scale of politics.
Place that in the late 1400’s and early 1500’s
Put the Medichies in charge
Now tell me what level of cruelty existed then.
I think you would have had great difficulties trying to deal with that level on control over your life, but you would have to quickly adjust if you planned to live more than a few days.
Prime Example
Good point to say the least. Wish I had made that connection regarding that issue. I know for a fact that the entire Clinton administration used the darker side of Machiavelli to the max.
I also think that most, if not all people in modern politics know about Machiavelli and try to apply his ideas with modern methods and techniques.
Machiavelli denies that moral standards are historically relative, himself. He says the weakness of the world is due to the present religion, and he intends to change that weakness by changing that religion, and to bring back the ferocity of the ancients, and to go them one "better" by being cynically and consciously as a matter of course, what some of their rogues were occasionally. And he is doing this not to serve "the republic" (that is just another bit of fraud meant to rope in those who have that particular sympathy), but to win eternal fame for himself as the smartest cynic ever and the man who exposed morality as buncomb and thereby replaced Christianity with secularist immorality and ushered in the modern age.
You do not praise him by making him some conventional child of his times who didn't really mean it and wasn't really serious about the power of entirely immoral expediency, you just fail to understand him and turn him into someone no one would pay attention to for more than five minutes. Machiavelli was a radical. His teaching was understood in his own day to be frankly demonic by his critics, while his supporters saw him as condemning present Christianity root and branch and read their own, much more moderate, anti-papal or secular humanist ideas into him (e.g. Bacon). And the latter was already a whitewash and a weakening of the man himself.
Clintons are not Machiavellian, they are “Dick-Morissian”. Dick Morris was their adviser (also Trent Lott’s before that). If you remember Dick Morris wrote a book called “New Prince” few years ago, with which he is trying to associate his style and methods (like “triangulation”) with great Niccolo.
Considering the fiasco that most of that administration has been, I would say that Morris is nowhere near Machiavelli, he is not a “New Prince”, he is a “False Prince” or a “Faux Prince”.
Another recent fiasco - expensive and inefficient corn ethanol energy policy - has been pushed by Dick Morris and, unfortunately, adopted by Bush administration.
Machiavelli wouldn’t be happy to have his name associated with disasters of Clintonian proportions that have been advocated by Dick Morris.
Clintons can go from one fiasco to another without skipping a bit or losing a smile because they have been and are protected by the media, not because they are good politicians in Machiavellian sense.
To paraphrase Lloyd Bentsen, “Dick Morris, you are not Niccolo Machiavelli!”
See my link in the post #10 of this thread.
The underpinning of Hillary's socialist ideas was camouflaged by Dick Morris through the populist and "Third Way" (public-private "cooperation" http://www.third-way.com) or even supposedly (big part of "triangulation") "market-based" solutions presentation and initiatives. The innate corruption, meanness, cruelty and heavy-handedness in execution of such must be directly attributed to Hillary, with Bill mostly relegated to amiable, likable salesman role.
Either way they were never completely "competent" and the Media can only prop up a fool for awhile before the public realizes that fact.
Thank heavens for that incompetence, and let's hope that liberal media continues to lose their grip on influencing public's thinking and decision-making.
BTW, a bit off subject, but one of the psychological things I noticed a long time ago about liberals in general is their need to project what they are, what they feel and what they do onto conservatives and/or Republicans, i.e. their enemies. Think about constant accusations of "lies", "corruption", "dishonesty", "criminality", "conspiracy", "drunkenness", "addiction", "filthy rich friends and donors" etc. that they throw at their opponents at the drop of the hat to discredit their opponents when their own arguments don't stand up to slightest scrutiny.
“These books are among the best ever written. All educated men should read them.”
Gonna go waaaay out on a limb here and say maybe that’s why they re still around.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.