Power and ethics

How can one overcome the logical dilemma in the relation between power and the values it carries? Does power have the legitimacy to change rules, to twist logic, and to neglect consistency? If it does, isn’t it a “regression” towards the law of the jungle; towards anarchy?
Some people, especially in the “Democratic West” have the general tendency to avoid such ethical questions, or at least ask them from a different viewpoint. Such questions threaten their moral grounds and the very foundations of their society’s moral supremacy. In other words such questions reveal the real beneath the beautifully presented illusion of freedom and human rights. Once the cover is gone one cannot but observe the means by which this seemingly moral authority is exercised: force and domination.
There are very few, if any, fundamental differences between the way human societies functioned during the “pre-modern” times and the way they do in the present. In other words domination, power, force, and violence constantly shape the way people and societies interact. If anything, what changes is merely the way this force is exercised (not as in with violence or without; force and authority are always violent) and the moral grounds on which a discourse of power presents itself, the constituents which makes it discourse and not simply force.
Some of those who do believe in the goodness of man, and Liberal Democracy (as it is applied in the West) as the achievement of human societies throughout the ages (of course human societies here refer to Europe and its ramifications, as the monopoly of Justice, History, Science, and Evolution), often fall into denial when observing the atrocities this system had to commit in order to bring peace and freedom to their quarters. In other words they refuse to look at the “non-democratic” countries as being of their own making, as the cornerstones, the masterpieces of Human Rights and Democracy in the “West”. This is no accusation of corruption to leaders, or absolute evil to people and civilization, or injustice committed by misleading or mislead men in power; it simply is the natural course of things; it is an economical, strategic, and epistemological need.

What We need is a spectacle. Herds of uncivilized people screaming for freedom and democracy (in the way We understand them) as if these were the basis of their human nature, people who are summoning Our assistance to fulfill their dream of finally achieving the status of real men and women, of “westernized” primitives. This is the image needed to sustain the discourse of supremacy, to sustain Our colonial superiority. What the “West” expects from the “Iranian society” is this “normal”, “natural”, but “suppressed” outburst of real emotions when “all Iranians” will be Free to express their desire for a western way of life, their desire to become like Us. The implicit message of the Western discourse about Iran is that if Iranians were human beings (since the anti-racist political correctness imposes that they are) they must act like human beings, they must act like Us. If they were left to their real selves women would tear off their chadors, men would discover the wonders of homosexuality, and everyone will look towards the West with amazement and submission.
The underlying universalism of Human Rights and Liberal Democracy discourse denies any representation of Freedom and Rights which is different than its own representation of these concepts. Its overt tolerance for “multiculturalism” and “diversity” fundamentally denies this right to be different. Difference must be within the set values, it must be different within the set barriers of conformity to what we understand as “Good”. Within this framework anything that does not conform to these values becomes Evil, it becomes abnormal, an intrinsic and absolute otherness so perverse that it drowns itself consciously in the abyss of absolute destruction. This is the structural role of the image of the terrorist. The terrorist is not a “normal” human being subjected to similar passions, emotions, and hopes. The terrorist is a structurally different being: he represents the very otherness of Us. His violence must be gratuitous and inherent because it is directed to Us. His words must be silenced because he accuses Us of creating him. His words must be seen as absurd madness because they threaten the very foundations of Our moral superiority. The terrorist is a notion that is, ironically, the very opposite of the notion of human rights. In other words, the notion of terrorist specifically deprives a human being of its humanness; it justifies our exclusion of the terrorist from the “Human group”. In other words we are all humans and we all have claim to human rights except those We call terrorists, in other words except those who resist Our domination.