Is that an attempt at criticism (ITAAC), or are you just trying to be amusing (AYJTTBA)?

Yes, you are.

Haven’t you heard of acronyms, Mr. Turner? ANTTEIAC fits easily on a bumper sticker, as does NGSEB (Never give a sucker an even break.), or KTALAGSTO (Kill them all and let God sort them out). Problem solved.

A wise ruler ought never to keep faith when by doing so it would be against his interests.

If an injury has to be done to a man it should be so severe that his vengeance need not be feared.

It is much more secure to be feared than to be loved.

No enterprise is more likely to succeed than one concealed from the enemy until it is ripe for execution.

Politics have no relation to morals.
—Niccolo Machiavelli

Yes, Alan, there are different ways to read Machiavelli (The Prince, anyway.) Take that bit where he seems to extol Cesar Borgia as the ideal, a passage held up by none other than Leo Strauss as pretty much the slam-dunk case for Machiavelli as a “teacher of evil”. Unambiguous, right?

Not really. I’ve seen it more persuasively argued the other way. Anyone who understood the immediate political context (and that would include the very narrow audience The Prince directly addressed) would see that Machiavelli was being deeply and elaborately sarcastic, that he was laughing through his sleeve at Cesar Borgia, who at that point had actually screwed up very badly and was on his last legs.

And yet, Machiavelli is also hedging here, further cloaking his meaning for those not already clued in. Although The Prince was intended as an “eyes-only” attachment to his resume, in applying for a specific job for a specific boss, and not for the ages, there was always a chance that it would leak into hands hostile to Machiavelli’s interests. Machiavelli was well acquainted with those sorts of fumbles (which reminds me, wait—is the game on yet? No, OK, I can keep typing for now) from his career of shuttling sensitive diplomatic documents around war-torn Europe. And Machiavelli, at the time of writing that little chapter on Cesar Borgia, had not long before been one of Cesar’s torture victims, before being sent off into ignominious retirement in the countryside. So this part is written in such a way that Machiavelli, in the worst-case scenario (i.e., Cesar rehabilitated, the manuscript for The Prince intercepted or copied by Cesar’s spies) could defend himself even he became a Cesar’s captive again. He could grovel in chains before Cesar and point out this chapter where he obviously praises Cesar to the skies, mewling and pleading that he in fact worships Cesar, that he had actually committed himself to Cesar-worship in ink, when he was free, and when everyone was laughing at Cesar. Machiavelli could easily imagine himself in that position, and set himself up to be able to act as any good little broken torture victim would, especially a former victim in the middle of a Stockholm Syndrome flashback. Even crouched and bowed before a reconstituted threat, Machiavelli would still have a chance to hold himself up, unbroken, in his own mind, and—most important—avoid being tortured again, in which event (he knew well enough) he would only be broken again. He would save himself then—through Cesar’s wounded vanity.

Now, taking Machiavelli at face value, you get the neo-cons, with their beloved teacher Leo counseling them that they must learn from this “teacher of evil” so that they’d know how to be evil when the time came to use evil in the service of good. But if you actually put yourself back in the time of writing The Prince, where everyone in the know is snickering nervously about how that rat bastard Cesar seems finally to have gotten his fucking come-uppance, may he never darken our doors again, you will read our Niccolo as snickering (nervously, tentatively) along with Borgia’s enemies—but still planning several moves ahead, which after all was his fated role in things political.

Taking Machiavelli’s texts at face value, you can make your way to a cold calculus of apologetics for torture on an administrative basis. Reading him in deep context, a gaunt, agonized human face appears before you, dimly, behind the bars of a cell in a dungeon, and you want to reach through the bars, put your hand on his shoulder, and whisper solemn promises that you’ll do everything in your power to get him out.

So if I may suggest a more informed axis: all Machiavelli, all the time, with the spectrum ranging from Florence to Mayberry. The way I read it, Mayberry’s on the run these days, they’re gonna need a Hail Mary Pass to pull it out now: a casus belli for martial law. Hey, they might be saying to each other, it says here in the Prince never to trust defectors, ‘cuz they’ll say anything to get revenge and vindication. So we get this Iranian defector to say . . . . oh, c’mon, it worked before, didn’t it? Well, OK, you’re right, too soon since that last one. You got another Hail Mary Pass idea?

Which reminds me. The game’s on, gotta go.

Disraeli was a Jew, and Golda Meir was a woman. Clarence Thomas, Colin Powell, and Condoleezza Rice are all black. So what?

Is “you” at the non-striker’s end? ‘Cos if “you” isn’t then your metaphor is a french-cut onto the stumps.

For example, lying as a defensible means to desirable ends is rejected in principle by Kantians. It may be argued that this view will ultimately prevail on pragmatic grounds in a highly interconnected world. As society becomes more tightly integrated, the utility of lying diminishes, because greater transparency and closer coupling of individuals and institutions reduces the advantages of lying and increases the penalties. Right now, the global financial system is being devastated as a result of widespread lying about risk, combined with huge amounts of leverage and closely coupled financial institutions. Eventually, the behavioral root of this debacle (Machiavellian zero-sum conduct) will be recognized and addressed.

The Left/Right conflict is mainly about the degree of concentration of resources and power, not about how power is to be exercised. Thus it misses the central issue of checking destructive behaviors, and the historical evidence of this fault is the emergence of equally dysfunctional Leftist and Rightist regimes.