The Prince, Chapter 23, Avoiding Flatterers

 

The Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli, Chapter 23 

In What Mode Flatterers are to be Avoided 

[Translated by Harvey Mansfield]

I do not want to leave out an important point and an error from which princes defend themselves with difficulty unless they are very prudent or make good choices. And these are the flatterers of whom courts are full. 

For men take such pleasure in their own affairs, and so deceive themselves. They defend themselves with difficulty from this plague and in trying to defend oneself from it, risks the danger of becoming contemptible, for there is no other way to guard oneself from flattery. 

Unless men understand that they do not offend you in telling the truth, but when everyone can tell you the truth, they lack reverence for you. Therefore, a prudent Prince must hold to this mode, choosing wise men in his state, and only to these should he give freedom to speak the truth to him, and of those things, only that. He asks about and nothing else. But he should ask them about everything and should listen to their opinions. 

Then he should decide by himself in his own mode. And with these councils and with each member of them. He should behave in such a mode that everyone knows that the more freely he speaks, the more he will be accepted. Aside from these, he should not want to hear anyone. He should move directly to the thing that was decided and be obstinate in his decisions. Whoever does otherwise either falls head long because of flatterers or changes, often because. 

Of the variability of views from which a low estimation of him arises. I want to bring up a modern example in this regard. Father Luke. A man of the present Emperor Maximilian, Speaking of His Majesty, told how he did not take counsel from anyone and never did anything in his own mode. This arose from holding to. Policy contrary to that given above. For the Emperor is a secretive man who does not communicate his plans to anyone, nor seek their views. But as in putting them into effect, they begin to be known and disclosed, they begin to be contradicted by those whom he has around him. And he an agreeable person, is dissuaded from them. From this it arises the things he does. On one day he destroys on another that no one ever understands what he wants or plans to do, and that he cannot. And that one cannot found oneself on his decisions. 

A Prince, therefore, should always take counsel, but when he wants, and not when others want. On the contrary, he should discourage everyone from counseling him about anything unless he asks it of them. But he should be a very broad questioner. And then in regard to the things he asked about a patient listener to the truth, indeed he should become upset when he learns that anyone has any hesitation to. Speak to him. And since many esteem that any Prince who establishes an opinion of himself as prudent is so considered not because of his nature, but because of the good counsel he has around him, without doubt, they are deceived, for this is a general rule that never fails. 

That a Prince who is not wise by himself cannot be counseled. Well, unless indeed by chance he should submit himself to one alone to govern him in everything who was a very prudent man. In this case, he could well be, but it would not last long because that governor would, in a short time, take away the state. But by taking counsel for more than one, a Prince, who is not wise, will never have United Counsel, nor know by himself how to unite them. Each one of his counselors will think of his own interest. 

He will not know how to correct them or understand them, and they cannot be found otherwise, because men will always turn out bad for you unless they have been made good by a necessity. So one concludes that good counsel. From wherever it comes, must arise from the prudence of the Prince and not the prudence of the Prince from good counsel.

Nigel's 24th Birthday

 

Nigel turns 24 today

My youngest child and youngest son is Nigel Garrison Gussman. He was born November 19, 1999, in Pittsburgh where he lived until he was six weeks old when we brought him to Lancaster. He was officially adopted a year later.

Nigel lived in Lancaster until 2021 when he moved to Minneapolis, Minnesota, where he lives now. His sister Lisa Stanton lives just a few miles away. 

Nigel is named after 1992 Formula 1 World Champion Nigel Mansell and the writer Garrison Keillor, host of Prairie Home Companion and author of several books, and his Mom's favorite pop culture personality.

Like me, Nigel is a fan of Formula 1 racing. We have both followed and cheered for 7-time champion Lewis Hamilton since his rookie year in 2006.  We are both hoping he will get one more championship before he retires at the end of the 2025 season.

Nigel raced bicycles and played basketball when he was in school and coached middle school basketball recently in Minneapolis. 

We won our age groups in Sunbury

At the start in Farmersville

Nigel rode the tandem with me beginning at 5 years old

Nigel was great at cheering. He cheered for Lisa on every lap at 3 years old.

Dressed up for a dinner

Visiting the Major Dick Winters Memorial in Ephrata

Family photo almost a decade ago

Visiting his brother JacariWaddell

5 years old

With favorite stuffed animal Elmo

Happy 24th Birthday Nigel!!!

Transcript of HAMAS Terrorist Bragging About Murder--To His Parents

From the podcast Making Sense by Sam Harris:

There’s a piece of audio from October 7th that many people have commented on. It’s a recording of a cell phone call that a member of Hamas made to his family, while he was in the process of massacring innocent men, women, and children. The man is ecstatic, telling his father and mother, and I think brother, that he has just killed ten Jews with his own hands. He had just murdered a husband and wife and was now calling his family from the dead woman’s phone. Here's a partial transcript of what he said: 

“Hi dad — Open my ‎WhatsApp now, and you’ll see all those killed. Look how many I killed with my own hands! Your son killed Jews!” 

And his dad says “May God protect you.” 

“Dad, I’m talking to you from a Jewish woman’s phone. I killed her, and I killed her husband. I killed ten with my own hands! Dad, ten with my own hands! Dad, open WhatsApp and see how many I killed, dad. Open the phone, dad. I’m calling you on WhatsApp. Open the phone, go. Dad, I killed ten. Ten with my own hands. Their blood is on their hands. [I believe that is a reference to the Quran] Put mom on.” 

And the father says, “Oh my son. God bless you!” 

“I swear ten with my own hands. Mother, I killed ten with my own hands!” 

And his father says, “May God bring you home safely.” 

 “Dad, go back to WhatsApp now. Dad, I want to do a live broadcast.” 

And the mother now says, “I wish I was with you.” 

“Mom, your son is a hero!” And then, apparently talking to his comrades he yells, “Kill, kill, kill, kill them.” 

And then his brother gets on the line, asking where he is. And he tells his brother the name of the town and then he says “I killed ten! Ten with my own hands! I’m talking to you from a Jew’s phone!” 

And the brother says, “You killed ten?” 

“Yes, I killed ten. I swear!” Then he says, “I am the first to enter on the protection and help of Allah! [Surely that’s another scriptural reference] Hold your head up, father. Hold your head up! See on WhatsApp those that I killed. Open my WhatsApp.” 

And his brother says, “Come back. Come back.” 

And he says, “What do you mean come back? There’s no going back. It is either death or victory! My mother gave birth to me for the religion. What’s with you? How would I return? Open WhatsApp. See the dead. Open it.” 

And the mother sounds like she is trying to figure out how to open WhatsApp… 

“Open WhatsApp on your phone and see the dead, how I killed them with my own hands.” 

And she says, “Well, promise to come back.”

 

Fast Tour of Philadelphia and NYC

 

Cliff and I in front of the Customs House in Philadelphia. 

I was showing him where the Tuesdays with Toomey protests were held.

My best friend from the 1970s Army and I made a fast tour of Philadelphia and New York City on Monday and Tuesday this week.  I met Cliff Almes in 1978 in Wiesbaden, West Germany. We were both sergeants in the American millitary community headquarters. We were roommates in 1979 until Cliff left the military and eventually became Bruder Timotheus in a Lutheran monastery in Darmstadt.  

In October and November, Cliff was in the U.S. to visit his family and spent the last five days in Pennsylvania, visiting me Lancaster then Philadelphia and NYC before flying back to Germany.

In Philadelphia we visited the Liberty Bell, the Customs House where I was part of protests against former Senator Pat Toomey for six years as part of Tuesdays with Toomey, my former workplace at the Science History Institute and Independence Mall.

We drove from Philadelphia to New Jersey, taking the ferry from Hoboken to Wall Street in Lower Manhattan. We took a ferry that went north to Port Imperial in Weehauken NJ before turning south, so we saw a lot of Manhattan lit by the late afternoon sun.

When we got to Wall Street, we heard about aPro-Israel protest in Central Park West. It was rush hour. We had to go across town and north. The fastest route was three transfers because of delays on the A Train. We missed the event but talked to a guy leaving the event.

We had dinner with friends in Noho, which meant more subways and walking. We got back to the hotel in New Jersey taking the PATH train to Hoboken. It was midnight by the time we got back, not Cliff's usual schedule.

The next day we took the ferry back to lower Manhattan and visited the World Trade center Memorial and the new tower. 

We walked from there over the Manhattan bridge to look at the Brooklyn Bridge and up and down the East River.  

Then we went to Williamsburg. Cliff is a big fan of "Unorthodox" and wanted to see the Brooklyn neighborhhod at the center of the drama. We walked a few hundred feet from the subway station to an Orthodox shul. 

We then went to Grand Central Terminal. Cliff's dad was a big fan of the Oyster Bar in GCT so Cliff wanted to see it. We went from there to Park Avenue, then over to Times Square just after sunset. We then walked over to 9th Avenue and had Chicken Teriyaki at a ramen restaurant. We walked the PATH train by way of Penn Station and the Moynihan Train Hall before returning to New Jersey.

The next morning I dropped Cliff at Newark Airport for his flight home by way of Charlotte NC.

  

Cease Fire? Sure! The Day After HAMAS is Destroyed.

 

In 2016 when Steve Bannon was named chief of staff to the President, I started reading about the Holocaust. In particular, how the Holocaust happened. Bannon owned the company that hosted Nazi and other racist web sites.  Personnel is policy and Trump said everything I needed to know with that appointment.

One of the sadder refrains of German Jews in the mid 1930s was "Herr Hitler will go no further." Hitler went further.

The HAMAS terrorist leaders, coddled by Qatar in the Four Seasons Hotel, said that October 7 was just the first attack of its kind. HAMAS will keep burning and beheading Jewish babies and raping Jewish mothers in front of their children until they are destroyed. Completely destroyed.

Hitler told Germans what he was going to do. They voted him into office. He slaughtered Jews. Rural German Christians were his most loyal backers. 

HAMAS was voted into power in Gaza. They said they would kill all Jews. They showed themselves to be exactly who they said they would be.

Nazi power ended in an unconditional surrender.  There was no cease fire with Nazi Germany. If there was Nazi Germany would still exist.  

HAMAS is a genocidal terrorist group. Israel will suffer more slaughters like October 7 unless HAMAS is destroyed. 

Then there can be a cease fire. 

How to Tell If You're a Left Anti-Semite: A Checklist by Ben Wittes of Lawfare

The last few weeks have been rough. Your Jewish friends have been extra needy. It’s not enough that you support their right to own land and enter the professions, that you don’t keep them out of clubs and universities, that you accept their citizenship, and that you don’t describe them as “rootless cosmopolitans” or “international banking conspirators.” 

Now it feels like you’re walking on eggshells around them every time you comment on the news. They have you suddenly wondering: Am I actually an anti-Semite? It’s a painful question. You want to be a good person. You believe in diversity, equity, and inclusion—including of Jews. 

And we all know that antisemitism is not a thing that good people do. And it’s not inclusive. And yet you keep saying things that create what seems to be a stricken look on the faces of Jews of your acquaintance. But then when you ask them whether it was okay to say that thing you just said, they all sound reassuring. But you’re not sure. Is that because it was innocuous? Or is it because they are just being polite and are secretly judging you? It can be hard to tell. 

So as a public service, I thought I would create an “Am I a Left Anti-Semite?” checklist. The checklist consists of ten probing yes-or-no questions, each with an assigned point value of associated with the anti-Semitism of the left. Go through the checklist, add up your score, and see where you rank on the scale of 0 to Pogrom. I have added explanatory notes as needed to each question. By the way, this is an official publication of the entire Jewish community, for which I speak. 

Question #1: Have you ever referred to Hamas fighters as “our martyrs”? If so, give yourself ten points. If not, have you ever referred to Palestinians killed in the Israeli fight against Hamas as “our martyrs” in a context in which a reasonable person might understand you as referring to Hamas fighters as martyrs? If so, give yourself two points. 

Question #2: Have you ever expressed the sentiment that Palestine must be free “from the river to the sea” or any similar slogan that calls for the destruction of any Jewish sovereign presence in Israel proper and that might reasonably be construed as a call to remove or kill Jews from that region? If so, give yourself ten points. Deduct two points if you cannot identify the river in the slogan. Deduct another three if you can’t identify the sea in question. If either or both of these two conditions are met, you might be less of an anti-Semite than an ignorant idiot who has no idea what you’re saying. 

Question #3: Do you find yourself radically more engaged by the plight of Palestinians displaced, injured, or killed in Gaza in response to a massacre of Israeli civilians than by the millions of Syrians displaced, wounded or killed in the murderous war by the Syrian government against its own people; by the millions of Ukrainians who have been killed or made refugees by Russia; or by the brutality of the Taliban? If so, give yourself ten points. 

Question #4: Do you have an urge to shout at or harass Orthodox Jews or others who are visibly Jewish—or to protest at Jewish or kosher institutions—because of your objections to Israeli policy? Give yourself ten points if you have this urge. Give yourself 50 points if you have ever acted on it. 

Question #5: More generally, do you believe the rise in antisemitic incidents, on college campuses and elsewhere, around the country is understandable under the circumstances? Give yourself five to fifteen points depending on how understandable you think it is. 

Question #6: When 1,400 Israeli civilians were massacred, did you have a strong urge to add a “but” to any statement of condemnation you may have issued on social media or elsewhere? Give yourself three points if you had the instinct. Give yourself five points if you, in fact, qualified whatever public statement you made. 

Question #7: Have you ever secretly wondered whether there is such a thing as an Israeli civilian? If so, give yourself ten points; that’s some dark shit. Give yourself an extra ten points if you’ve had this thought about Israelis but never had a similar thought about the nationals of any other country. 

Questions #8: Was any part of you secretly relieved by the speed and ferocity of the Israeli response to the October 7 massacre, as it allowed you to stop talking about the largest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust and instead talk about Israeli policies and actions you could condemn? If so, give yourself five points. Give yourself an extra five if you never seriously contemplated what realistic alternative options Israel might have to protect its people than the course it is taking. Give yourself an extra five still if the first statement you made or protest you attended took place in response to Israeli action, rather than the Hamas action. 

Question #9: When you heard about the riot that broke out in an airport in Dagestan the other day, in which rioters looked to attack passengers on a flight from Tel Aviv, did you instinctively want more “context” or to understand the rioters’ point of view? If so, give yourself five points. 

Question #10: Do you interpret the Biden administration’s support for Israel principally as evidence of Jewish political power in the United States? Give yourself five points for a soft yes, ten points for a more emphatic yes. 

Scorecard 

0-to-10 points: Not an anti-semite. I absolve you of sin. 

11-to-30 points: You have been infected with left antisemitism, but it’s nothing a little reading on the history of the Arab-Israeli conflict and the history of the left won’t cure. 

31-to-50 points: You’re dabbling in some serious antisemitic ideation. You clearly don’t mind violence against Jews very much. 

51-to-75 points: You’ve got a serious problem. 

76-and above: You’re a member of the Raging Bigot Club.

Here is the original post.

Breakout Sessions at the Hannah Arendt Conference 2023: Friendship & Politics

In addition to the general sessions at the 2023 Hannah Arendt Conference, I enjoyed the breakout sessions. I wrote about some of the general sessions at the conference here.

Jana Mader

The first was a session titled: Is Reading a Poem an Act of Friendship? led by Ann Lauterbach and Jana Mader.

Ann Lauterbach

The session began with Ann Lauterbach talking about her work, particularly her eleventh collection of poetry Door published this year.  She also read from her work. 

Jana Mader, Director of Academic Programs at the Hannah Arendt Center, guided the discussion on poetry as an act of friendship. I chose this breakout session because of the group I formed on Camp Adder in Iraq 2009 to read Inferno and Aeneid.  

Mader is also the host of the new podcast "Reading Hannah Arendt with Roger Berkowitz. 

After the breakout session, I talked with Stephanie Frampton, a literature professor at MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology). Her research area is Ancient literature so she was delighted to talk about soldiers reading Virgil and Dante. 

Nelly Ben Hayoun-Stépanian

I went to a second breakout session titled: Friendships and Federations of Care: Forms, Alliances, and Multiverses led by Nelly Ben Hayoun-Stépanian, an award-winning designer of experiences, creative director and director.  During a discussion about spaces we learn and teach in someone asked about unusual places in which we have taught classes.  

I was the only one in the room who had taught a class inside a tank turret.  

My classroom in 1976 an M60A1 Patton tank on 

the south gunnery range, Fort Carson, Colorado.