Not that I deem these short essays precious, but hey: some drops of life have been brewed in, so:
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Like no programming language exists which can avoid coming down to a test alert box waving the traditional line: "Hallo World!", likewise no approach to an international crisis can exist without coming down to the worst case scenario.
So in case a war in the gulf breaks out and the Usa face a defeat, let's sketch the blueprints which might ensue:
 
UN - in case of a victory it is dismissed. Such dismissal of the United Nations is not an accident - it is in the plan. Of course the United Nations can still avoid that by voting a Uk/Usa led resolution, but paradoxically the US plan would go better if the United Nations vetoes instead of voting it: it would be easier to create a third and new body (what I in some essay called the Third Phoenix) that could address the international strife more effectively than the United Nations did so far (the only results they achieved to date by the UN have been in the Korean war -call it an even result- and in the Gulf War: both results achieved by the massive use of US and/or UK forces).
In case of a defeat, the United Nations are to gain momentum and be regarded as the only forum able to resolve international crisis: the direct consequence of this is the raise of an overwhelming confidence by every quarter of the world that whoever wants to attack its neighbour, can do that which much more confidence and with higher stakes of impunity: the United Nations is darn slow, characteristically can take even years to tackle an issue throughout, and the USA would no longer be used.
 
NATO - it would get pulverized since it is already faltering. France and Germany would attempt to pose themselves like the new core of an euro defense - of course, this would mean that after 5 years or so the idyll of the pacifists with france would finish: France would be considered just a new "warmonger". There is even a chance Germany could re-arm itself - with all the implications of the case that history spells.
 
GERMANY - Schroeder would lose in both cases, either the Usa win or lose. Actually, if the USA win, he is more posed to be re-elected for he could still count on fanning his alleged pacifism. If the USA lose, next elections he would be dismissed (paradoxically) because the voters would have no longer the spur of pacifism to keep him and his appalling economical records in place.
 
FRANCE - it is the only state that could gain by a USA defeat, at least in the middle Term. In fact the main shift would be from a USA centered international order to a somewhat france based. Somewhat, because after all France would never be able to gather forces like the Usa.
 
MIDDLE EAST - it is to role out any "raising" in the muslim word: this thing, simply doesn't exist. Many fantasies get impressed by this idea that the muslims are 1 billion. well, induists are nearly as many as them, chinese are more, and christians are as many as them at least. Anyway masses do not raise, they just want to be safe.
The whole area moreover would be utterly prey of infighting within 2 years and they'd have more to think about their own struggles than anything else. Qaeda may resort to its ultimate goal of seizing Saudi Arabia.
 
HYDROGEN - should overtake oil within 20 years: this would be accelerated. Oil producers will try to avert this by blackmailing with terrorist attacks.
 
PALESTINE - it would be virtually impossible to achieve any statehood whatsoever at any time. Moreover Israel would radicalize even more, would have no spur to retire its colonies, as well as palestinians would be more enraged and hopeless than ever, with no gain for both sides. In other words, for both of them it would be a sheer disaster, perhaps they would be the nations to suffer more the consequences.
 
USA - it is not going to face diresome consequences. As Clausewitz wrote:

"Another question is, whether, through the loss of a great battle, forces are not perhaps roused into existence, which otherwise would never have come to life. This case is certainly conceivable, and it is what has actually occurred with many nations. But to produce this intensified reaction is beyond the province of military art, which can only take account of it where it might be assumed as a possibility.
If there are cases in which the fruits of a victory appear rather of a destructive nature in consequence of the reaction of the forces which it had the effect of rousing into activity—cases which certainly are very exceptional—then it must the more surely be granted, that there is a difference in the effects which one and the same victory may produce according to the character of the people or state, which has been conquered."

This is exactly the case of the USA. If a miscalculation was made in these years was believing that the Afghan guerrilla defeated the USSR :it was Reagan's policy that drained USSR, not Afghanistan in itself.
From such wrong premise it got argued that the Usa could be dragged in a war over there, with the same consequences. It all missed an important point: when the Usa lost in Vietnam, it didn't collapse them like the Afghan defeat matched the USSR dissolution: in fact the latter event occurred given the cooperation between the military expenditures Reagan imposed on USSR and which made such defeat much more meaningful of what it could have been otherwise: arguably without the armament race that Reagan imposed, the USSR would have not lost the afghan campaign because it would have hurled there, and not in armament race, all its strength and resources.
Needless to say, the republicans lose the presidency for two decades.
 
GENERAL - global decrease of the USA power which may require 10 years to recover, if actively pursued.
 
EUROPE AS A WHOLE - many oppositions would seize the occasion to raise to power with a fake "anti" Usa politics just to govern.
Endless lesser and opportunistic governments would fatally ensue, which eventually would bring along a global euro crisis in the management of the finances.
 
EU COMMUNITY - its bureaucracy would be bolstered, and an euro constitution (currently in the working, presiding constituent officer is an ex french President) reflecting only french interests would pass immediately, and would be imposed to all the EU members. Some new members would not be accepted. Turkey would be brushed aside by a diehard french diffidence.
 
RUSSIA - Nothing really changes for it anyway. The only difference is that a struggle between France and Russia to gather some of the crumbles would naturally follow, with unpredictable consequences insofar France would ultimately ask for... Usa support!
 
WHOLE - Incredibly enough, and thoroughly unexpectedly, we assess that nearly nobody has to gain from a Usa defeat, but nearly everybody has something to lose by it - which paradoxically might include Iraq.
The only real exception is France, whose policies, given their dogged and provocative nature, must be entirely determined by Euro-preeminence considerations and expectations (in themselves legitimate, although shortsighted enough) .
 
Of course, it can still be argumented, and actually it is, that such consequences would not be to be dreaded at all if the goals of a world order would not be pursued out of the United Nations in the first place: namely either if the Usa abstain from interventions of any kind, or if the world resorts to an entirely diplomacy based approach to national and international strife.
 
The matter with this position is not just that it openly bases itself on the assumption that men and politics are essentially rational and reasonable creatures, and that you can -a la Mandeville- turn a big beehive virtuous. But even more consistently the matter is that a wilsonian approach would still produce as much of a gigantic beast as any other approach does: a pachyderm is not less sizeable than a tiger is, the fact it is slow doesn't mean it is not headed towards the water of the same pond, and thereby ultimately it is likely to be going to be regarded as fettering as well, and not to be sensed less fearful than the other at all.
It is still a machinery which is ultimately to be perceived as much intrusive as another, with the only difference that it is more likely to face sudden and deeply disruptive events which would compel it to reverse its course and nature.
 
Ther is no need to pretend we're inventing wilsonianism when Woodrow Wilson invented it before us.
Wilsonianism already existed, and when Wilson reluctantly entered WW1 and ended it, he withdrew Usa forces from Europe only to let Roosevelt witness no later than 15 year after such withdrawal a new, and more devastating world war. Stationing forces there, conversely, have presided a pace amidst democracy which has no previous record in the European history since pleistocene.
 
In fact, the real issues of human discord very rarely are about the means, at least insofar we ought not to forget that before a nation can get concerned about the means of the others, it gets firstly and foremost concerned with the ends.
This is why most of the numberless entirely diplomatic efforts attempted so far in history have proved themselves so irremediably pious: no one who disputes an outcome is ready to declare himself happier if the outcome turns against him because it did it with a smile instead than with a grunt.
 
A thoroughly isolationist approach could still be advocated in the face of the last observation, and none the less it is not a prerogative of the Usa to have ends, but of every nation in the world; to the consequence ridden extent that:

«Some still hold the now somewhat obvious delusion that the United States can safety permit the United States to become an island, a lone island in a world dominated by the philosophy of [others]. Such an island may be the dream of those who still talk and vote as isolationists. Such an island represented to me and to the overwhelming majority of Americans today a helpless nightmare, the helpless nightmare of a people without freedom. Yes, the nightmare of a people lodged in a prison, handcuffed, hungry and fed thorough the bars from day to day by the contemptuous, unpitying masters of other continents.» [F.D. Roosevelt]

The only environment favorable to such endless and pacificated a perspective, is an eldorado environment where all nations, with no exceptions, intentionally gave up whatever finality they may harbour, they granted the persistence in this politics regardless of the turn over of the governments, and whichever degree the eventual outcome may fall short of such requirements, it would immediately precipitate the situation back in the embrace of Theodore Roosevelt's consideration that:

«Nothing would more promote iniquity that for the free peoples deliberately render themselves powerless while leaving every despotism and barbarism armed.» [T. Roosevelt]

An idealistic isolationism actively pursued is far from being deprived of invasive effects. And diplomacy envisioned like a huge encompassing body committed to the grand task of solving all the clashes, is still a napoleonic organism so much hyperactive as any deliberate interventionism (which doesn't subsume itself in military actions only) is.
In fact intentions are not affected to the least degree by this merely conventional shift in the means, and whereas the ends are not changed because they reflect reality and therefore they can not, neither the results are to be affected: and a full isolationism is far from being a neutral stand, but still exports full chains of effects that keep smouldering and that never cease fathering sparkles in the wood.
 
The prudent presidents of no consequences, the good fellas that did nothing, have not been as a matter of fact the disciples of diplomacy or isolationism, as Wilson was, but they have been presidents like Coolidge and Eisenhower: they have been those guys who did nothing because there was nothing that had to be done, and the time demanded little.
Sometimes the gods are satiated.
 
Of course, it is still true that you never know when a policy is implemented because there was no way out. Some presidents do not like to wait too long for things, like Kissinger writes:

«British public opinion was isolationist much like that of America two centuries later. The prevailing argument had it that there would be time enough to resist a [looming] threat, when and if the threat presented itself. There was no need to fight conjectural dangers based on what some country might do later on.
(...) Lord Carteret, Tory foreign secretary, [said] (...): 'to disregard all the troubles and commotions of the continent, not to leave our own island in search of enemies, but to attend our commerce and our pleasures, and, instead of courting danger in foreign countries, to sleep in security, till we are awakened by an alarm upon our coasts'.»

Other presidents are looked upon with suspicion by default, and rightly: at least insofar it was quite sensible a doubt the one Ernest Hemingway raised in the following passage wrote on 1935 when president Roosevelt's personality was not well known yet (indeed, Roosevelt was among those presidents whose opposers didn't miss the occasion to call the equivalent of Hitler. History dictated later who was right and who was Hitler):

«(...) it depends on the extent of Franklin D. Roosevelt's ambition. If he is ambitious only to serve his country, as Cleveland was, we, and our children, and their children will be very fortunate. If he is ambitious personally, to leave a great name, or to eclipse the lustre of the name he bears, which was made famous by another man, we will be out of luck because the sensational improvements that can be made legally in the country in time of peace are being rapidly exhausted.»
[Ernest Hemingway, By-Line: The Malady Of Power]

History once again addressed the question definitely, and proved which fabric Franklin D. Roosevelt's ambition was made out of, and as Hemingway so rightfully predicted it has been a blessing not only for our children, but also for the children of our children.
 
Now, while these concerns are to be with us forever and as long as this planet exists, what we're discussing here is not the ambition of a hero of our time, but we're talking of everyday men who none the less unexpectedly find themselves facing the insurgence of prolific monsters and challenges that demand their attentions.
 
The reason many opposition leaders start like revolutionists and, once in office, disappoint their own electors, doesn't rest on the fact they're cheaters, although this is one of the most common cases indeed. But here we're talking of the really good ones, the "brightest and best, come away" Shelley was writing about: which is what makes my arguments stronger.
The reason this happens is that once in command they realize with finality that what they meant and hold care in their propaganda never, never really belonged to what objectively could be fulfilled and done: because the nature of the challenges and the scale of the tangle and of the real facts they can see now with the privileged clarity of the office, provide them with raw and crude data possessing an unescapable kernel of their own.
They find, in other words, that as soon as you enter your office, before your eyes an immense gulf suddenly spreads between what you were pleased to believe and what you are forced to see, both as objective means at your nation's disposal and as outer limits tenaciously arrayed against them; thereby the ample prairies of unlimited idealistic intentions instantaneously shrink to a stubborn core of refractory flint, and the unlimited, audacious rides of a sweeping imagination have to confront themselves with the boundaries of an arena with rooms of maneuverability reduced to a limited set of options, at times all equally disagreeable.
 
There genius belong if, as Hemingway pointed out, we're not out of good luck - or out of presidents.
Because the fantasy of a cynic, in matters of such scope and gravity, would be as much of a delirium and import as much of irretrievable harm as the fantasy of a naive idealist or of a stubborn ideologist would do. Cynicism is an ailment of the sould and of the mind that obstructs realism and vision as much, if not still more, as any frantic idealism does. Cynicism is a realism killer in disguise of realism.
Which is why every presidential office should be arranged to be sure that it can quickly recast into decency even those who may have landed there by some fortuitous chance. And the only foe the USA really have to fear is overconfidence.
 
I do not deny at all a wilsonian world is possible: I only say it comes last.
It comes along only when all the nations are one nation indeed; no one can foresee with any certainty when such a thing may occur: the only thing which can be seen with clarity and now, is that such a result is not to be attained at once, which is a fact no one can contend, in the same fashion no one can solve all the grievances of the world everywhere and all at once.
Unfairness can and must and perhaps will be removed everywhere: I actually am a believer of this ultimate dream. But such a biblical result coincides, essentially, with the reunification of the world - and no one can seriously believe it is going to happen in the next five minutes or years.
Anyway a reunification of the globe could theoretically be sponsored under a universally republican or under a global tyrannical form of government, because at least in mere theory they both appear equally fit.
Hitler and Napoleon, with significant differences in attitudes, both gave the latter a sound try.
 
Such integrally isolationist approaches are basically a gambit that always made me remember of a sentence from Elemire Zolla -(two 'L's, it is not Emile Zola the novelist): "Give to Caesar what belongs to Caesar and to God what belongs to G-d: but would be Caesar satisfied and go away with it only?"
 
The problem with wilsonianism is: If the Usa leave the world alone, would the world leave the Usa alone?
And if the world leaves the Usa alone, would it be so kind not to make another little world war of its own?
 
And if the world decides to undertake a new global turmoil by itself, is this a gamble whose risk we all can take and most of all whose eventual price both the Usa and the World may afford to pay - and the living and the dead account for?
By and large it looks like what Irvin Shaw would call a "Tip On The Dead Jockey": maybe yes, maybe no, maybe maybe.
I don't know these things. Do you, Antichrist?

Best viewed/read listening to Schubert's 8th symphony, the "Unfinished"

We don't fight against things: we wrangle with our degree of identification in them.
 
Persuasion is the name of our own enemy, for what troubles us with whatever fact is more our interpretation of the fact than the fact itself.
Even with brutal pain in mind, the significance this pain instills in our minds, the persuasions it arises within us, are far more lasting of a legacy and of a violence, and far more actual a fact, than the fact itself.
 
Dostoevski and Freud taught us that you're not one, but two to say the least; and that many conclusions can be drawn within yourself without you being fully aware they have been sanctioned and endorsed by your aliases.
First comes the interpretation, the version; then the identification, the belief which precipitates the interpretation as a catalyst and solidifies it: for many a time our thoughts aren't but the catabolic byproducts of a complex.
 
We believe, we identify with our interpretation, although Freud stresses it may well happen the other way: first an identification, then its suitable interpretation ensues to justify it.
The signified is always beyond the signifier: as such any meaning is always an act of sagacity, at time of arbitrariness, in both cases an act of interpretation.
I do not say a meaning is an act of hermeneutics, which is an academic synonym for interpretation, because hermeneutics sets itself apart from interpretation insofar hermeneutics harbours an ambition: hermeneutics claims it can prove the correctness of the furnished interpretation.
To have ears capable of listening, this means to be able to perceive and spot the abstract lives of the possible meanings beyond a fact, beyond the signifier. This is a matter of Art, for "neither by land nor by sea shalt thou find the road to Hyperboreans" [Pindar].
There is then what I call the Ars Artis, the Art of the Art, a metaphor in the line of The Holy of the Holies

«It is the novel of the novel, the creation of creation. Or God of God, Deus de Deo»
[Henry Miller]

Ars Artis is refined in respect of mere Art, because the former distils a quintessence from the latter, and it signifies the capacity to discriminate within a meaning its arbitrary nature, show it like an entomologist, then unlike an entomologist admire it for its beauty. Ars Artis means to unveil the artifact beyond the fact, and then intentionally elate yourself in the beauty of its falsehood which generates a chant and a fugue of meanings out of nothing.
That's the absurd and the beautiful at once.
 
We can say every reality ushers us into a symbol, its own, and donates it. First comes the false, the apparent reality, then the symbol, third comes the true reality: because symbols are not symbols, symbols are reality beyond reality [warning: foul word ahead] «and this we shall call the super-cunt, since it is not of this land at all" [Henry Miller], and this we shall call the super-reality, for it is not of this land at all, but it is this land that belongs to it in all, and without it no transcendency is possible; listen once more to Henry Miller:

«'the dragon castle on the floor of the sea', 'The Heavenly Harp', 'the dark pass', 'the space of former Heaven'. I remained locked in, a prisoner of Forculus, god of the door, of Cardea, god of the hinge, and of Limentius, god of the threshold'. I spoke only with their sisters, the three goddesses called Fear, Pallor, and Fever»

So, would you dare contend 'The Dark Pass' exists? You have stepped through it already.
We live these symbols; they are our daily reality: we're within them, we flounder unto them, we swim in them, we float on them.
When men like John Milton or Ludovico Ariosto endlessly spake of monsters and shadows and chimeras, they were not just blabbering as at times the obtuse courtesans and politics they had to coax to make a living accused them. These symbols even whisper to us about secrets that might empower us: like in Thomas Mann's Magic Mountain people suffering with tuberculosis gathered, their symptoms were pallor and fever indeed: but the symbol says to us that there is a symptom which went unnoticed, the dreadful fear within the soul, the petrification at the sight of a god or a trauma that may have contributed to generate that pallor, and arouse that holy fever.
 

A Joshua Reynolds painting: lord Heathfield (1787)

Among these meanings, what makes us reluctant to acknowledge our carnal father the prerogative of conjuring up "our father who art in the sky" (doesn't it clearly summons and beckons the existence of another father?) is that our earthly father appears as someone else than ourselves, while our heavenly father cannot conversely be but we ourselves.
 
On the one side we sin of apostasy anyway, any route; on the other side nothing is hardest than recognizing ourselves: our true alien is ourselves.
The original sin, a guilt the Bible says nothing about but that everybody ascribes to it with such an insistence that this doctrine attained the certainty of a never predicated fact, is that we cannot offend our carnal father without thereby offending our heavenly father, yet we cannot reach out our heavenly father if we firstly do not offend our earthly one.
Like a man who has a foe from within, like a man who gets betrayed by his most loyal servant, as soon as we clearly perceive ourselves in the mirror, we have also already inflicted ourselves atrocious self wounds.
Nero set Rome ablaze, because he could neither accept nor believe there are alternative ways to inflame bystanders and posterity, and that true fire never dwells in earthly flames.
We are inhabited, and we cannot get acquainted with our inhabitants without injuring ourselves, and others, in the process.
 
Darwinism doesn't say that races deliberately fight against races and that the fittest has a right to survive against the unfit.
Darwin says that all animal breeds are equal in this, that they all fight against a common foe, which is the same protagonist that brought breeds forth: Nature.
You cannot do without it. You cannot do against it. You cannot do but against it.
Evolution -and involutions indeed- come out of this paradox: there is no infighting among genders, which as such are all Brothers from the same Father: there is infighting between Fathers and Sons.
The strong appeal of transcendence, when not a figment, is the masterstroke of the individual genius who finds a solution to this riddle.
That is the question of the Sphynx.
 
This riddle is something hard both to guess and to understand, or to accept.
Many are in wonderment before the christian symbol of the Cross (and let me stress I'm throughout here speaking of symbols, I'm not taking stances): how can a God lose a game?
Goethe said that the Cross is one of the four things he cannot endure. Nietzsche followed. We even find currently other religions that find the Cross unbearably unconceivable.
Many see in the Cross something scandalous: but I see in it nothing less but something obvious; firstly, a God that imposes to men the human condition, must also have experienced it to the dregs, if He wants to preserve its credibility.
 
Undoubtedly, all flesh is to die. - much worse: it is to rot. Actually, it has never been alive but it has always been since the onset a living cadaver that walks.
If it weren't for a breath that animates it and which performs all, it wouldn't even sin.
Devoid of such breath, a body is like a Golem -a Frankenstein- whose letter "Life" has been deleted from its forefront, and as soon as it has been wiped out, the big monster instantly crumbles to its own feet.
 
Thus God didn't make us just out of mere biblical "clay".
As even kids know, the Bible speaks by symbols: and what is mud but an undifferentiated dark substance picked from the ground? We are made with heavenly excrements, the bullshit of God.
Only God's breath inflates us with life. And that a man is made up with muck would you doubt whenever you face one of those persons that believe only in death or that made a point of going unnoticed just in order to be able to perform filthy actions that are the more repelling the more they are petty and basically unnecessary?
Flesh is a hyule, a tangle of snakes dwelling in humidity and mire that has the potentiality of being whatever, like a still unarticulated staminal cell.
Knowing nothing of your own future and fate, besieged by every quarter by the desperate frailty which goes with flesh, seduced by your very same foul reek into being nothing more but the thing made of shit, you're then forlorn and isolated and your only real chance for glory is indeed to listen to the breath of God that spells - notwithstanding, life matters:

«Everything great that a human being ever accomplished in life, has never been a thanks to this, but a despite that.»
[Thomas Mann]

The pagan Gods made strange things indeed: they reeled thorough a whole set of animal avatars - just think of the metamorphoses described by the latin poet Ovid, or:

«The god themselves,
Humbling their deities to love, have taken
The shapes of beasts upon them - Jupiter
Became a bull, and bellow'd; the green Neptune
A ram, and bleated; and the fire-rob'd god,
Golden Apollo, a poor humble swain»
[Shakespeare, A Winter's Tale]

God -whatever it is, for who knows his face?- traverses an infinity of states, of instants, likewise those sequences of casual happenings from under whose futile surface strange shapes or gods seem to simmer; like Henry Miller described:

From the Prologue in Heaven where Adam was made, to the bulls and the rams he feigned himself with, God finally become a human being, was charged with felony "under Pontio Pilato", and died by trial like a wretch.
The circle is squared, the symbolic toil is complete: consummatum est.
 
But secondly, and perhaps most importantly, the symbol of the Cross is pivotal in the sense that only what has endured the trial can prove it is true gold.
Can this trial be endless? yes: when what is in the furnace is not true gold; and since what is in the furnace is you yourself, the trial is to be unappropriated and endless when you yourself are not sure about how true gold sounds like: you cannot be a competent tester when you don't know what the appropriate return of a successful test is to be:
 

Morale: the golden bowl can have one flaw, even a mortal one: it doesn't have to be utterly flawless to be utterly exquisite. But if you try it long enough, your very same ascertaining process would destroy what you meant to ascertain. And you'd have proved nothing.
Except perhaps what a fool God and you must have been when He put in your hands such precious a thing.
Unless, of course, a God was testing exactly you.
 
How much at odds we are with ourselves.
In the paradox we experience between the earthly and the heavenly, their divorce demands our struggle to be reconciliated: can we test ourselves or are we to get lost in the process?
Bertrand Russel remembers us how diseducative the behaviour of the greek Gods was:

«The curse descended on his sons in the form of a strong, if not actually irresistible, impulse to crime. Thyestes corrupted his brother's wife and thereby managed to steal the famous golden-fleeced ram. Atreus in turn secured his Brother's banishment, and recalling him under the pretext of reconciliation, feasted him on the flesh of his own children. The curse was now inherited by Atreus' son Agamemnon, who offended the Goddess Artemis by killing a sacred stag, sacrificed his own daughter Iphigenia to appease the Goddess and obtain a safe passage to Troy for his fleet, and was in turn murdered by his faithless wife Klytaimnestra and her paramour Aigisthos. Agamemnon's son in turn avenged his father by killing his mother and Aigisthos.»
[Bertrand Russell, History of The Western Philosophy]

It is very ancestral to value animals more than sons, so that a stag may demand being ransomed with a man's life or the extermination of a family down the branches of the generations.
Note, in fact, that this prototype is invariably crossed by omnipresent familiar linkages, frequently in the very closest degrees: you don't have to toil either too hard or too long in order to guess and tell, sooner or later, in all these otherwise utterly senseless and gratuitous vicissitudes, the enigmatic presence of a leitmotif that accounts for them all, summarizes them all, and whose shrewd dissimulation, once unveiled, answers for the location of the true causative spring; these cruelties where an object's misplacement has to be paied with your own blood, they're all within the family, all encompassed within the boundaries of the familiar nexus: they're the oedipus.
 

An August Sander photo (1906)

Many authors who never read Freud, still quote Freud despising him: from Wyne W. Dyer to Steven Pinker, how many guys lost a wonderful occasion not to prove how little acquainted they are with Freud's inquiries.
 
But having understood Freud means having understood this: nothing, absolutely nothing in a man's life is more destructive than an unresolved oedipic complex; until you've not understood this, until you've not felt this, you've not understood Freud.
And, of course, this doesn't apply to the epiphanies, to the barbarous outcome: one has to know "the hand which gently slaughters" [F. Nietzsche], and how many a time the victim is functional to the persecutors; this applies to normalcy, not to the extra-ordinary.
 
Oedipus, that tangle of wrangles, of emotions, subversions, sensations, rivalries, unsaid, remorse, feelings, guilt, and of course confederations that develop within the bosom of families.
Blanketed with an omission bent attitude, the magnitude of these folded and ciphered heinousnesses invariably goes by with a strong pretence and claim of absolute normality, most of the times they go beautifully ignored by the members of the family themselves: all respectable people, all normal households, all fairly happy menages, all going to the church, all good fellas, all good fathers who work hard, all good mothers who attend the housework, all good sons who study hard, all good daughters who play with dolls, all normal, all serene, all so all right. The Beautiful and the damned: the family picture freezes this illusion, it portrays the whole group sporting broad smiles meant to prove how satisfied they are with themselves, with the fact they have met.
But they learned well how to pay retribution to each other and to themselves. Suddenly, one day: squashes of blood up to the moon, flashing blue lights flickering in the dusk, noses of the hurriedly waked up and intent neighbors pushed against the windows, and Detectives and Investigators pacing the secluded Crime Scene. Sic transit Gloria Mundi - so mundane glory passes off.
Manifold are the roads to perdition, for basically it's just a matter of Weapon of choice, but only one goes to salvation.
 
Oedipus is the most intensely destructive force which stalks by day and dashes by night, on the whole of the earth. Nothing parallels it.
The indifference that many subsequently develop towards violence and blood isn't but the most natural consequence, it isn't but the physical translation of that very same moral indifference they had to develop and breed over years, in order to make it possible to go on ignoring the familiar folly they kept living in day after day.
And please take very good note: this includes the rebels, for why are they rebelling with such a stubborn gratuity but because they want to be even more deep inside the Oedipic logics? Still identified with its model, we combat for it, pretending we don't. We're still in the trap, still wounding ourselves.
 
There are men and women, many indeed, who believe that to be faithful to a realistic idea of man, they have to set the level at the lowest level: there only, authentic realism would belong and would be attended at properly, sharing the fate of the dungs.
In fact men, morales, and ideal statures all greatly, all too greatly vary; and by shooting too high you may surely miss a few of them.
 

Jack London Jean Paul Sartre

But all men have feet, all trees have roots, all roots are sucklings of the ashes, their deeply submerged branches drink from the underworld of the Shadows, nourish themselves on the icy waters of the river Lethe, and so life partakes of death, for death supplies it with its maintenance: a daily fix of necrosis is what life is in want of, and isn't that the "Law of Life" as Jack London described it in his tale, in all its devastating cruelty? So shoot at the lowest floor, and you're bound to encompass the whole of the beings, sparing no one in their worthless ranks: the common denominator of life is that it starts low.
Crawlers of the world, unite.
The world belongs to the vermin; a vermin with no ambitions of putting wings, of course: for a vermin who wants to dominate is still not enough of a vermin. What's more essential then than a protoplasm? Even better, what's more essential than the inexorability of a still, senseless mineral? And tell me, what's a man but a mineralized skull in disguise?
 
A reflection on life, what is it worth of for some persons? We can do and live on also without literature, those senseless descriptions of life which struggles. As Jean Paul Sartre said:

"Of course we can do without literature; we can do even better: we can do without mankind."

The planet would just roll on.
 
The man that before the library in Alexandria said "if what the book stored here say is the same than the Holy Book, then they're unnecessary and they can be destroyed; if what the books stored here say is other than what is written in the Holy Book, then they are impious and they must be destroyed. In both cases destroy them", was inferior to the towering belief he proclaimed: he should have cried "destroy the books and the Holy Book with them, destroy all the books", for the same God Who doesn't need the books doesn't need the Book as well: God is certainly able of taking care of Himself, for a God Who needs a servant to be attended is not self sufficient, is no longer a God.
 
The man that issuing the order of killing the huguenots was asked how could the soldiers discriminate between the huguenots and the christians wearing none of them any uniform, answered "kill'em, kill'em all: then God will take care of finding out His ones", was still another guy not up to his generous vision: he should have added "and kill me too, then God will verify whether my order was one of those in his name or not". But of course, needless to say that before the apparent objectivity of his own theory, he found any hereafter evaluation about the validity of the command itself and about he who issued the order itself, much less urgent a task for God than the involvements and consequences for those upon which the order was issued and carried out.
So now crawl.
 
All men are mortal; thenceforth death, being the ultimate and a "non moot end of our mundane venture" [Michael de Montaigne], is the ultimate reality too.
Being the ultimate reality, it must also be the true, reliable, last and given parameter to measure life with. Could you perhaps measure death with life?
All men, no matter how lofty in their illusions, how engrossed in their vain projects, after an adequate amount of pain and torture would beg for mercy, all eyes get downcast in a prison, so pain is the real ruler, and the proper collector of new ideas and delusions. From Pandora's box all vices flew out except hope: from this box, all hopes fly in except mine, and get imprisoned so that they stop bugging the world, and only mine would go on plaguing undisturbed:

«and the incorruptible Professor walked, averting his eyes from the odious multitude of mankind. He had no future, He disdained it. He was a force. His thoughts caressed the images of ruin and destruction. He walked frail, insignificant, shabby, miserable - and terrible in the simplicity of his idea calling madness and despair to the regeneration of the world. Nobody looked at him. He passed on unsuspected and deadly, like a pest in the street full of men.»
[Joseph Conrad]

Pushing further and further this logics, the Nausea described by Jean Paul Sartre, feeling it so compelling to some eyes to be devotedly pursued, they elaborate theories where intransigence tries to stick to the most farfetched approaches it evoked, and reduction by reduction we approach the cipher which only would represent us and quench our thirst for a meaning in life we could no longer retrieve.
 
But the bewildering fact with this attitude is: if I am so persuaded that death is the only reality we're worth of, and that all men under an adequate measure of force would either obey or crush, and I strictly implement this theory, and I dream of an iron fist, or I implement it if I have a chance, or being enlightened by this consideration I grow so loathsome and weary with mankind that whenever I see a reasonable guy I start suspecting all he wants with his chatters is to dilute and pollute my purist stance with his doubts and hollow reasonings, and therefore I further escalate into intransigence, in a frenzy to reduce all men into a periodic system of inorganic elements, well: all this happens because, actually, I'm utterly unpersuaded by my own theory. What need have I to reiterate my attitude repeatedly, to show it off continuously, instead of enjoying the pacification which should ventilate under its capable wing?
 
It is always possible to devise a path following which even the strongest of men can be destroyed or reduced to supplicate for mercy. That this consideration imports a predicament about what life is, is a consideration of interest only for those who are interested in committing some crimes just to prove some thesis, a thesis about whose validity they none the less desperately need to be reassured; therefore a thesis they are not actually persuaded of despite the compelling nature they declare it endowed with.
The best evidence that human virtue has an actual meaning is not the virtuous man, because he can still be extinguished: the best evidence that life matters is the wicked man, which although attaining and having trespassed the threshold of inhumanity, still is in search of a confirmation.
 
In fact, if I were persuaded by it, why should I invariably and insistently seek to prove it with such vehemence, trying to annihilate whatever voice attempts to whisper that man is not only death, obedience, and pain?
It is because there is a tiny voice in the deepest back of my fury and of my mind that spells: life is not matter, life matters.
If such a voice weren't there, if such a beam would not keep irradiating that single thin line of dim green light within this ocean of beloved darkness, some guys wouldn't have been so strongly committed to prove the contrary, and to divert that glow. Which hand put it inside us, plunging it at so deep a level that nothing horrible we do to others and to ourselves can obliterate it? It doesn't even spell survival: survival instinct sounds carnal when it rings from within, and not metaphysical like this impudent voice does, for only the triviality of physical urgency calls survival to the fore, and it appears as much distinctly as the biggest of the hulks, not at all stealthy and slim like this voice is; and when survival is in the limelight of the game I do not find it adverse to my delirium but perfectly fit and consistent with it: this is why I can even relish it when I kill or despise, for it appears as a pulsion, disordered as every pulsion is, so it doesn't spell certainty but despair of the victim. And despairing of life fits my scheme beautifully, proving I'm right twice.
But that voice which keeps me unpersuaded, hasn't the demeanour of survival: it is not desperate, it is steady.
 
Albert Camus wrote: "at that time reason had to adapt itself or die. It adapts itself". The same destructive approach on life (not by Camus, anyway) thrives on this as well: a reason that adapts is reasonable, but at the price of prostituting itself through adjustments that thwarts truth, which is its founding objective and its only source of legitimacy.
When reason adapts, some argue that the life which spells life matters, has been compromised in the process: life isn't but a commercial bargain, proves its trivial nature by coming to an agreement, thenceforward isn't but a swindler. And who would be considerate with a swindler?
But this means that the voice that calls us to life, also picks from within a few of Nietzsche's profoundest insights: it doesn't call us merely to life, but "prompts us to seek a life of the greatest honour, and not just of the greatest security" [Seneca]. It summons us not only to live, but to a role on the stage. An implication we didn't expect: this voice has a tonality.
 
My frenzy into destruction and contempt isn't but the perpetual race to quell this rustling voice from within, engaging the more violence in the committment the more the murmur goes on with the impudency of matching an unbelievable resilience with the characteristic of being but a whisper. How can an utterance be so enduring? How can it survive so long a string of overwhelming evidences of men, women, ideas, plans so openly continuously and consistently humbled and squelched into nothingness? How does it dare importunate His Majesty? Am I not master in my own sultry Palace of Rags?
So crawl.
 
Politically, I could rule by democracy and get wealthy; I could rule by tyranny and get analogously wealthy. So what's really at stake, being the gain identical? Death or life?
I could just execute my opposers quickly; I could just set some tortures to be sure some fear is in place; but fear is never enough to my eyes, cries never loud enough to soothe and reassure my ears, violators never cracked down enough, violations that beget violators never made innumerable enough; I want more, still more, always more: I want executions and tortures get stronger and stronger, I want them even beyond logics, I want eyes out of their sockets, I want heads slowly sewed into pieces, I want kids killed and packed, I want parents mailed back to their kids into a box; this when I'm a dictator. If I'm not, I'm just contended in wanting all doubters to be exterminated from my sight, repelled by the inexorability of my gaze, rebuttals, and disdain. No body will contaminate the truth I've found about death. If only I wouldn't be harassed by this voice, I could even turn back being human and decent. Isn't there a delirium called cynicism, and a dream land called anarchy whence all honey flows by for we've given up all illusions about honey?
So now let's crawl. We are noughts, but at least together all marching towards the cliff.
 
Some intransigent guys are not really busy converting the others of their most absurd theories, not even in the process of attempting of persuading them: how could you persuade with such empty a quiver? they are actually busy attempting to persuade themselves, that little voice which spells: life matters. The necessity to preserve the purism of the only version of life I believe in, is a necessity that only the urgence to cover up my inner voice arises, for how can it still go on spelling such evidently absurd a thing?
 
These considerations may even help us develop an exegesis capable of enabling us to spot when and if a writing, an author, is attempting to cheat us with something that seems gold, but is actually only his/her most intimate wounds, his/her lack of ability to come to terms with his/her own destructiveness. We don't have to follow them everywhere.

Henry Miller

Man can refute facts. Man can refute even time. We can set ourselves into a fantastic time: Nietzsche said "Some are born posthumously"; Kierkegaard reminds us how some men "are like trivial currency, they pass from hands to hands without bothering".
You can read Nietzsche or Henry Miller and you can forget the former wrote a few statements that may appear anti semitic, the latter wrote a lot about sexual encounters. You forget it without even having to be lenient about it: you forget it because, indeed, the fulcrum of what they have to say is so clearly elsewhere that you really do not want to meddle with the details.
When you read Schopenhauer, you do it without remembering that once he also wrote an absurdly racist sentence in Parerga and Paralipomena. The beauty of the archetype they evoke is so obvious and complete in its consistency that you get simply mesmerized by its glare and rightly you brush aside the details.
If you don't attain this level of reading, the level where you yield and let the fascination conquer you, you can say you've never read the book. If you read, you must get moved nearly to tears by the dance of the meanings.
 
Of course, none the less it comes along a time when you re-read.
Only then the details seem to acquire a rounder shape and stack to the fore. Obviously, I'm not arguing about the really isolated details, but about those instances of details that recur.
Undoubtedly, you've to hope for good readers too. For instance, it would be pointless to bash Nietzsche for each passage of his where he extolls the will of Power meaning by it a vitalistic force (by the way how comes Nietzsche has been rubricated after the voice nihilism whereas his proper place would have been vitalism, is one of those clear signs revealing how rare finding a good reader can be, for some mistakes are honestly too gross), you'd end up bashing the whole of his work, maybe even in the name of that catholic faith which Nietzsche always opposed as anti-vitalistic: which proves once again what I'd mean by bad reader: whoever, being afraid of the potential evil a misunderstood Nietzsche might entail, entirely overlooks what factual evils a misunderstood Gospel generated in world history.
 
So the details I'm speaking about are not the core of a work: they are exactly the details that none the less seem to show up with some frequency.
If you have already rejected an opus, a work, because of its core contents, you've done it on grounds which are not those that concern me here, now.
The details that stack to the fore I'm discussing about here, are those details that strike you and seize your attention with the vertigo of a revelation which threatens, if corroborated, to mine the shape of the whole and recast the meaning of the entire kernel under another light which is not a partial nuance but that seems to be the new global tone, the appropriate dressage; they are those moments when you're suddenly beleaguered by the fatal thought: "isn't it, possibly, that the author has not been meaning all the time this, but exactly that?"
 
These moments partake of the quest for truth, and fulminate you on the doorway.
These moments excavate the cave of doubt within an otherwise and till then homogeneous fabric: were those details really marginal, or were they the symptom of an underlying clandestine symmetry well wider than it appeared at first sight, and which attempts to smuggle itself in my mind, and generate from within a full sequence of correlated interpretations like the Oedipus did?
When we ask this to ourselves, we ask it because if such were the case, the danger might be enormous: unwanted persuasion may even fling the world into the worst of the facts, the worst of the situations: and what is then to me the best of the thoughts and the best of the Arts if I have then to live in a world where I cannot enjoy them?
It reminds me of those persons complaining that a museum got raided in a war: but is the museum for men or are men for the museum? For the whole of Micahel Angelo is zero to me if I'm not free, and I'd gladly sacrifice the whole of the Sistine Chapel for my own salvation: for I'm sentient, but the chapel is not.
An urgency of clarification imposes itself.
 
Often authors defend their works complaining that everything would been interpreted into a political light, and it should not.
Recently the famous german (note: german. A chance?) historian Ernest Nolte defended some anti semitic (by the way I am not jew: I'm not singling out this example because of any personal interest) statements of his, precisely on this ground: he sourly said that the task of an intellectual is to analyze facts, not the be muddled by political considerations. That is typical: many intellectuals invoke for themselves the niche of the Olympian, which is precisely the location from which they can do the most of the apollinean "damage".
This typical olympian demand tantamount to defend oneself from the striking doubts our words arise in the readers we intentionally chose to address with them, hiding oneself behind an intellectual mannerism.
Now, either this intellectual mannerism is equivalent, in its serene lack of conscience, to a reckless and careless teenager, or its surgical coldness isn't but the deliberate attempt to anaesthetize the horror of the wounds it is going to inflict upon us, in order to let them pass overlooked. But if it had to go overlooked, why you have written it?
Obviously, because you meant it extremely relevant, and thenceforth your whole strategy gets suddenly exposed, like in the topos of the Mission Impossible movies when the hero emphatically unmasks himself revealing in the very same intentional plasticity of his gesture the intention of unleashing the forthcoming steep climax.
 
These inquisitive techniques of mine are not crafted to censor the writer but to shelter the reader in order to safeguard oneself from the chance of an impending disaster.
If we were to discover or to understand that indeed a writer harboured such stealth intentions, we'd know that either we don't need read him (or her), or we'd know how to read him (or her).
This is the only reason why we can get concerned, and not because we have to censor the author. We have no right to censor any author, but we have a right to find out whether a book means what it says or whether it is trading in subterfuges: censorship is a crime and a sabotage on an author, trading a surreptitious content behind a fictitious appearance is the crime, the sabotage of an author towards its readers; and the only solution which harms no one is that the reader knows how to locate the case.
 
Claiming that the intellectual value of a remark has to overtake the conspicuous and glitzy political implications that may flow from it, means to ignore how many times in history an innocuous intellectual theorem has been overwhelmed by an harmful political praxis: that the enlightenment brought about the French Revolution we may be happy, that Lenin brought about Real Socialism is less a reason of rejoicing. We can undertake a political path, but we ought to undertake it with our eyes open.
 
An intellectual may say that such wasn't his intention, and he goes absolved as far as the misuse of his work can occur in the future.
But when his/her statements clearly dive their roots inside a past which is already consolidated as an historic tragedy of remarkable features, his/her statements are no longer liable to go unquestioned, neither is the author to go absolved.
Let me insist: I do not mean absolved in the judiciary sense, but I mean it in the alchemic sense: absolved in the sense of getting his questionable remarks diluted, solved in the wide body of his/her main work, and let them be rightly forgotten within this wide ocean.
This is something we can accord only inasmuch as the arguments and blueprints outlined above are met, otherwise we'd be right to withhold our prerogative, as readers, of considering those sentences as somewhat meaningful and beckoning upon the whole, and consequently fit to cast a sinister and tarnishing shade upon the whole of the work instead of letting them dissipate within its greatness.
 
Henry Miller goes absolved because, let's say it, even if he would have been hinting at (and he was not) a kingdom of sex, that's a kingdom that doesn't frighten anyone.
Nietzsche goes absolved too: he built a system that relied elsewhere, and so remarkable in its novelty and depth; and anti semitic nazism follows him, does not antecedes him, and less than ten sentence in this direction do not make of him a follower of Hitler: the man that judges Bismark the same as Hitler has not been seen yet.
I'd be less indulgent in absolving Ernest Nolte. Some remarks he decided to end his career with are staining the meaning of the whole of his work; and consequently, far from going disintegrated within such vast sea, they float upon its surface like catchy pollutions that welcome the newcomer and seem to warn him about a danger stalking in the depths.
 
That a man in his 80s decides to compromise all he has written in a full honoured life, is silly.
The consolation we're left with is that in senile age we can still make some of the errors that go with age while retaining all the virtues that accompany it. Think of how many young men, allegedly "anti conformist", appear to a cunning eye like born already old, holding of old age all the vices that belong to it, but none of its attached advantages such as culture and wisdom.
 
Some authors, refusing either to disavow or to clarify with sufficient vigour a few statements of theirs, while at the same time refusing to acknowledge they could imply what they did seem to imply, leave us with an immense regret of not being allowed to love them with full momentum.
 
There are men of the present without a future, men with "a great future behind their shoulders", men that are trivial currency, other that are posthumous, others for whom what goes on is "the fight between yesterday and the day before yesterday" [Dahrendorf], others which claim they belong to "the day after tomorrow" [Nietzsche], others that plunge ahead towards a future without a past ("To destroy everything is to pledge oneself to building without foundations" [Camus]), and still others that deliver themselves to a great past which they have stripped off of all the chances of fathering a commendable future.
Before Oedipus, the only thing which matters is to insist in the bloody loser's game, but this round being more judicious: that is, shedding more blood.
 

a Rene Magritte painting: The healer (1962)

Best viewed and read listening to Beethoven's Kreutzer Sonata

There is a codified right to withstand tyranny that doesn't proceed from pretexts and which is not perfunctory, but which is rationally undisputable and that cannot be rationally withstood: it is enshrined by consentium gentium, that is universal assertion; and such assertion is universal in this: that if somebody is unpersuaded of it, anybody can get persuaded of it without great effort and through stringent arguments. Thence universality of the principle flows by, from its stringency.
 
Its undisputable nature is not evinced insofar as it cannot be nullified by vicious deeds, for it certainly can: the arrogance of facts is such exactly when it overcomes legitimacy.
So its undisputable nature gets evinced not from facts, but inasfar as it founds itself on logical basis which are so transparent, consequentially self-fulfilling, and so compelling to provide such legitimacy so expeditiously that they turn any negation of it into an assured act of overbearing arbitrariness.
Competing to attain the threshold of accomplished rationality means competing for legitimacy: for being rationally founded is like being endorsed not by force of man but by the assent of the Gods: force can overwhelm a legitimate order, but legitimacy can never go really vanquished and its protest keeps creeping in and kindling the fire of a possible fury, undermining the system: brute force can rule perpetually only at the price of being perpetually challenged from within.
 
Vaclav Havel called legitimacy "the might of those who have none".
Francis Fukuyama analyzing the so named 'legitimation crisis' with an eye to the pivotal marxist idea of the so called 'contradictions of the system' as apexes of crisis which trigger the actual -and no longer just feared or predicated- crumbling of the system itself, observes:

«In contemporary liberal democracies it is not enough to point out and blame problems, even if serious ones, such as public debt, inflation, criminality or drug abuse. A problem is not raised to the status of 'system contradiction' [by the fact it appears and has to be dealt with], but only when it cannot be solved within the system because it corrodes the sense of the legitimacy of the system itself»

That is, a system is legitimate when the self confidence it has in its legitimacy is such that it regards itself potentially able to stand firm even without a police implementing its bedrock tenets, without having to fear such a move would outright sparkle or unleash simmering internal annoyance so intense to challenge and eventually crush such tenets.
In other words, the system knows it has attained a critical level of factual consent.
 
So, how the right to resist a tyranny became legitimate and achieved such status?
Jus naturalism is that stream of thought that determined beyond any reasonable doubt which rights belong to a man regardless of any ideology, as if they were the euclidean axioms of whatever form of government (more: of State) you can envision, were it Democracy, Oligarchy or Monarchy: you can obliterate these axiomatic principles by force, but you cannot contend they are untrue, no matter what latitude of well tempered or autocratic power you live in.
 
Jus naturalism has two roads to the same outcome. They both proceed from stating what type of environment a man would live in if no external power would be in place: and the reason this extreme type of stage is the one upon which jus naturalism draws its conclusion, relies on this: that if a law can be inherently deduced from a state of brutal lawlessness, than such law must be an eternal law: in fact what law could be more of a legal law than the law that imposes itself as superior even amidst the lawless?
 
One road to jus naturalism is Thomas Hobbes': he acknowledges that, being the natural state of man a state of perpetual war against each other where everybody is virtually entitled to everything, there are none the less rights that cannot be transferred, because such state still imports the quest for personal advantage as a founding element which cannot be stripped off; Hobbes is neater than me:

«For he that renounceth or passeth away his right, giveth not to any other man a right which [the latter] had not before, for there is nothing which every man had no right by nature; but [the former] only standeth out of [the latter's] way, that [the latter] may enjoy his own original right without hindrance from [the former], nor without hindrance from another. So that the effect which recoundeth to one man by another man's defect of right is but so much diminution of impediments to the use of his own original right.»

All entitled by nature to all, why should one gratuitously turn his right over to another so that this other may reap more than his already omni-comprehensive lot?
So, and very consistently, boundaries leap forth from the very bosom of the state of nature:

«Whensoever a man transferreth his right or renounceth it, it is either in consideration of some right reciprocally transferred to himself or for some other good he hopeth for thereby.
For it is a voluntary act, and of the voluntary act of every man the object is some good to himself. And therefore there be some rights which no man can be understood by any words to have abandoned or transferred. As first, a man cannot lay down the right of resisting them that assault him by force (...) And therefore if a man by words or other signs seem to despoil himself of the end for which those signs were intended, he is not to be understood as if he meant it, or that it was his will, but that he was ignorant of how such words and actions were to be interpreted.»

The Habeas Corpus ensues, and it isn't but this: that police cannot by mere brutal force enter your house, storm it on its own right whatsoever, and kill you right down, however, whatever.

«For though a man may covenant thus: unless I do so, kill me; none the less he cannot covenant thus: I will not resist you, when you come to kill me. For man by nature chooseth the lesser evil, which is danger of death in resisting rather than the greater, which is certain and present death in not resisting.»

Of course, in the last case it is not just a matter of that. In fact if my life is granted and spared only as long as I yield I will not oppose and resist intruders and abuse, then it is well needed to ascertain what type of life is to be meant in store for me. For if such life is so destitute a life that all my rights that make it a life got stripped off, it is no longer a life, and certainly not mine: as still Hobbes says:

«He that transferreth any right transferreth the means of enjoying it (...) As he that selleth land is understood to transfer the herbage and whatsoever grows upon it; nor can he that sells a mill turn away the stream that drives it.»

If I am negated my natural rights to the degree I have no longer a benefit but basically that of being left merely alive, also a vegetal existence is alive; if my entitlements are removed, my person humiliated in the precariousness of being exposed any time to power abuses that most certainly would go unchecked and unquestioned, if such life is so iron-framed that I hardly patch up a meal, and most of all I have the feeling that this is certain: that I will never be allowed to go beyond my current elemental status namely I have no perspectives in the future but the reiteration of the present, then how would I call this a covenant I meant for myself? For my whole lifetime wouldn't be then but a disguised death sub judicio of arbitrariness and unchallengeable chance.
What life and what concession is the concession that is made upon me to live in a condition the one who concedes it to me, would never envy in the least nor wish it for himself? That would not be a bargain, that would be a robbery. What type of social pacification is such? Peace is not a value in itself but for an automata of the good intentions.

«(...) The Almighty hath not built
Here for his envy, will not drive us hence;
(...) Who overcomes
By force hath overcome but half his foe.
(...) Where there is then no good
For which to strive, no strife can grow up there
From faction; for none sure will claim in hell
Precedence, none whose portion is so small
Of present pain that with ambitious mind
Will covet more.»
[John Milton, Paradise Lost]

Therefore not just in the case I face a life threat, but even in the case of a life which is not such and namely is not just threatened but already defiled and violated, I have a right to resist, choosing the lesser danger of exposing myself to a possible death in order to restore to myself an acceptable perspective, rather than accepting, for fear of the greater danger of a certain death, the life of a larva whose life no one will desire:

«What is this good thing that no one advocates for himself?»
[A. Lincoln]

Now, if Hobbes attains these conclusions by kind of the right-wing side of jus naturalism, Jean Jacques Rousseau -the second great jusnaturalist- reaches the very same conclusions by kind of the left-wing side: thereby all conclusions insist on one focus and revolve on the same hinge.

«(...) a king does not live cheaply. Do subjects then give their persons on the condition that their real estate will also be taken? I fail to see what remains for them to be preserved.
It will be said that the despot assures his subjects of civil tranquillity.
Very Well. But (...) what do they gain if this very tranquillity is one of their miseries? A tranquil life is also had in dungeons; is that enough to make them desirable? The Greeks who were locked in the Cyclop's cave lived a tranquil existence as they waited for their turn to be devoured.
To say that a man gives himself gratuitously is to say something absurd and inconceivable. Such an act is illegitimate and null, if only for the fact that he who commits it, does not have his wits about him.
(...) Madness does not bring about right.(...)
One has the right to kill the defenders of that state as long as they bear arms. But as soon as they lay down their arms and surrender, they cease to be enemies. They return to be simply men and no one has no longer a right on their lives. (...) For war does not grant a right to what is unnecessary to its purpose. These principles are not those of Grotius. They are not based on the authority of poets. Rather they are derived from the nature of things; they are based on reason.»
[Jean Jacques Rousseau, On The Social Contract]

As Rousseau points out "I cannot make a convention with you that is wholly at your expense and wholly to my advantage; and, for as long as it pleases me, I will observe it and so will you": such is not a covenant, for I have no need to concede and to convene to the observance of a pact that grants me all and grants you nothing.
"Every legitimate government is republican" concludes Rousseau. Legitimate means republic always, anyway everlasting republic: "Were there a government of Gods, it would govern itself democratically. So perfect a government is not suited to men", which is exactly why so many republics get lost either by the hands of those who, so accustomed to live in them, know no longer their value, or by the hands of those never having been living in them, know no longer what it takes and what it means being once again free men in a free republic.
For a prolonged dictatorship devastates the very fabric of the social tissue, and no true recovery is possible any longer after one hundred years of solitude; and a wealth granted by no fight to preserve one's freedom makes only sophisticated dandies ready to protest against those who won't kill them and go mum before those who will. "Old Europe" doesn't mean an aged sage, it means a spoilt child eager to return to the old vices.
 
And then, also, from a man who still knew what being free means and also knew the horrors of wars for he fought two world wars in his lifetime, and gave his american blood against autocracies thriving on european soil:

«You have to see what happens in a military debacle to understand this. It is something so utterly complete in its disillusion about the system that has put them into this, in its destruction and purging away of all the existing standards, faiths and loyalties, when the war is being fought by a conscript army, that it is the necessary catharsis before revolution. (...)
It is too long a story to go into here but our present literary revolutionary mouthpieces ought to study a little contemporary history. But no history is written honestly. You have to keep in touch with it at the time and you can depend on just as much as you have actually seen and followed. And these boys started too late. Because it isn't all in Marx nor in Engles, a lot of things have happened since then.
What the boys need to play the races successfully, is past performances.
They also need to have known horses for a long time, and to be able to tell them in the early morning around sun-up with no numbers, no colours, with blankets on them, and to be able to clock them, then, as they go by in the half light.»
[Ernest Hemingway, By-Line, Old Newsman Writes: A Letter From Cuba]

It was Rousseau who first said "man is born free", adding "none the less every where he is in fetters". This is not an opinion, an aspiration, an auspicious dream: it is a self evident fact: we are born free, and they lay the chains upon us at a second time.
Rousseau lands on the same territory by arguing the opposite as Hobbes: whereas Hobbes imagine the man being naturally wicked Rousseau imagines him naturally good - and evil ensues only by perversion of this natural goodness through wrong laws or distorted educative precepts.
 
Therefore everything concurs, that to resist tyranny I need no justification.
 
And the identification of what is tyranny and what is not, doesn't constitute a controversial set of characteristics in the least, and is consequently open not to interpretation.
What is more tyrannical as a matter of fact, than he who seizes power by a military coup, lingers in absolute unbalanced power and personal rule for decades, tortures at his ease and even declares that torture is legitimate, impoverishes and ravishes his own country, builds up a personal account of manifold thousands of millions of bucks while its population is kept starving, exiles or wantonly kills all of his opponents, never summons nor let assemble the Parliament upon a regular and frequent basis, doesn't allow political oppositions, celebrates his own image and it alone everywhere, bans every right, every party, is not subject to any superior jurisdiction in the least of his deeds and whims, whatever he speaks becomes law without hindrance, and wherever he wants to plunder he can do by a gesture of his hand?
And if my resistance is such that I kill non combatant and innocent civilians inside a country where democratic elections are held, leading such vicious an attack by inside a country where I chose to live in and where no election is ever hold, and I declare that the right price for a barrel of oil is 144$, and I spend money outlandishly in order to kill but I never divert one penny to alleviate the diresome conditions of the whole of my countrymen, then I am not a partisan and this, definitely, is not a resistance to an alleged tyranny, but a deliberate attempt to the installation of a certain one where there was no one.
 
That all is not equivocal, that all is not a matter of interpretation. And so in order to topple a tyrant no justifications are required, only the subjects have to be spared as much as possible.
Since a tyrant's power is based on no justifications but his power, and has no other foundation but the persistence of his oppression, then no justifications are required in order to capsize his power by power, all the less if it trades a non legitimate rule by a rule open to jus naturalistic legitimation building.
Since he elected to run the life of the usurper, he chose in bundle with it the chances of witnessing his usurped rule being terminated and stripped off of him any moment, any time, with a convenience that cannot be once again his own.
This is why pacifism before dictatorships is functional to dictatorships alone.
Once something is legitimate, the amount of strenght and prudence I put to the defense of my freedom does neither enhance nor vilify in the least degree the legitimacy of its foundation. But upon illegitimate deeds, it relies squarely and uniquely on the amount of the exerted and available force that a tyrant bases the values of his regime; and if one finds a force superior, a force bigger than the tyrant's, this is not to be regarded as a misfortune about the intervening force, but as a sheer auspicable fortune that in the land of the Shadows, under an evil empire based upon concentration of personal might and coercion, yet you can still find force enough gathered elsewhere capable of coercing the tyrant and restoring a higher legitimacy where none at all was any longer.
Democracies never fought wars with democracies. But autocracies did with both.
 
Not that these conclusions should sound reassuring.
But since they derive of Hobbes and Rousseau, and moreover are acknowledged by the official doctrine of international law as it is mentioned and taught in every academy and manual, evidently the shiver and the tremor we experience in allowing this doctrine before the gaze of our eyes, aren't but lesser dreadful shivers and tremors than those we should feel when, having made up our mind to ignore it or to raise questions of law and chicanery to hamper it, we have by this very same choice implicitly decided to leave a tyrant and his unlawful rule, in the name of the law he never abided by, undisturbed in his place - which ought to be wherever but not in power and not in command.
 
This is a powerful consequence ridden reasoning, and it isn't even mine, for I only re-called and gathered from all the edges of the ancient robe the same doctrine that all courses of constitutional law never fail at least to mention as a non moot and pivotal principle.
I just told you why it is not moot - I just told you why I do not need a justification to topple a dictator whose portrait is as much unambiguous as the status he deserves should be:

«either without vice or without power.»
[Francesco Guicciardini, (1483-1540)]