Ho’oponopono – Remembering Judge King

Review by Bill Doughty

He’s been gone for 15 years, but the remarkable legacy of Federal Judge Samuel P. King, a Navy veteran and Republican icon from Hawaii, lives on.

And, considering the chaos of today, his philosopher’s voice needs to be heard for its common sense, clarity, and relevance.

King was born in China in 2016 to a U.S. Naval officer father (who later became governor of Hawaii). His dad captained USS Samar (PG-41) as a river pilot navigating on the Yangtze.

Sam, himself, joined the Navy as an intelligence officer show spoke French and Japanese. He served during World War II, including aboard the minelayer USS Adams (DM-27).

King was one of the first Americans to visit and see the destruction of Hiroshima in 1945.

His autobiography, “Judge Sam King: A Memoir” (Watermark 2013), published posthumously, was written with the help of newspaper reporters Jerry Burris and Ken Kobayashi.

The book’s foreword is penned by another WWII veteran, Hawaii’s late Senator Daniel K. Inouye, who commends King for helping to navigate Hawaii from territory to statehood.

Hiroshima Memorial

One of the highlights in “Memoir” is in an appendix with King’s keynote address to the Japan-Hawaii Lawyers’ Association in Hiroshima, Japan, in April 1985, a speech given 40 years ago –– and delivered 40 years after WWII ended. Speaking to fellow lawyers, he said, in part:

“That August 1945 explosion over this city was a terrible event in the history of mankind, and one which mankind must prevent from ever happening again. The attainment of world peace is the most important duty of our leaders, yet we all have a responsibility to exert our best efforts to the same end. Lest we lose our sense of urgency in this struggle, Hiroshima exists as a reminder that our goal has not been achieved until the chance of nuclear war has been rendered impossible.

“We lawyers and judges and law professors may not be able to guarantee peace in our world, but we can and do make substantial contributions to peace. After all, our training centers around dispute resolution. It is our function in society to identify the points of conflict between individuals, develop the facts, apply accepted principles and reach just conclusions.

Within a single country, our activities may well be limited to disputes and conflicts that relate to internal harmony. What we do at home in handling divorce cases, breach of contract suits, civil rights actions, etcetera has little bearing on world peace. But when we cross over our national boundaries and concern ourselves with disputes and conflicts that arise between persons in different countries, we build bonds of understanding and friendship that ease the way to dispute resolution in international transactions.

I do not mean to claim too much for this modest beginning. We are not here to fashion solutions to disputes between nations. I do maintain that in relations between peoples of different countries, every increase in understanding, and every expansion of friendship, and every consensus on a procedure for resolving disputes, makes international harmony— and therefore world peace-more likely.”

Another appendix is King’s remarks in 1969 to the Pearl Harbor Commissioned Officers’ Mess for Law Day USA. Titled, “Justice and Equality Depend Upon Law –– and YOU,” King spoke about each individual’s responsibility to embrace the rule of law, including accepting personal accountability.

“Our system of criminal justice depends very largely upon the acquiescence and even support of those charged with crimes,” he said.

In the same remarks to those naval officers, delivered during the height of the Vietnam War, King spoke of the importance of mutual understanding and love in the pursuit of justice:

“If we love one another, justice becomes a byproduct of our humanity. Where there is unrestricted freedom, there is unleashed equality.” And he said, “A little mutual respect will go a long way toward bridging the apparent chasm in understanding.”

King’s father, Samuel Wilder King, entered politics as a Republican member of the Honolulu Board of Supervisors, and was later elected as a Hawaii Territory delegate to U.S. Congress. As a libertarian, the elder King strongly opposed the military’s imposition of martial law on civilians in the aftermath of the infamous Massie case (see previous related Navy Reads post from 2019).

“Partly in response to the Massie case, my father was a very strong champion for statehood and introduced a bill for statehood in 1935.” He would go on to write a draft constitution for Hawaii and serve as chairman of the Statehood Commission.

“Dad served three terms in Congress but withdrew right after Pearl Harbor to return to the Navy as a commander, and later became captain. My father's second round of Navy service took him to Saipan, American Samoa and eventually aboard a ship assigned to Japan to repatriate American prisoners of war. After the war, he returned to Hawaii, where he busied himself with politics and the pursuit of statehood.

Dad felt strongly about the need for statehood. He was one-eighth Hawaiian and very proud of it. He resented that we were only a territory and had no political representation, whereas all the states had two senators and more power to control their own destinies. Congress could do anything it pleased to a territory –– declare martial law, for instance –– and it wouldn't have any say in the matter. He had a very low opinion of most of the congressmen, especially the ones from the South. Back in those days, you got off the airplane in Atlanta and everywhere you looked, it said whites only, blacks only.

He didn't want people who came from that mentality making decisions for Hawaii.

After the war, he returned to Hawaii where he busied himself with politics and the pursuit of statehood.”

Samuel Wilder King went on to become governor of the territory before retiring from public service. He passed away in 1959 just two weeks after Hawaii became the 50th state.

After his own service in the Navy, younger King honored his father’s long career of service by becoming a judge. His proudest achievement, he said, was creating Hawaii’s family court. He conducted thousands of marriages and signed many divorce decrees, including the divorce papers for the parents of President Barack Obama.

He believed in accountability, integrity, and truth and was strongly in favor of “justice tempered with mercy.” His watchwords were “aloha,” “pono” (respect), and “ho’oponopono” ("doing something the right way, the just way").

As a Federal Judge, he oversaw cases involving organized crime, including tax evasion, murder (including the Palmyra Murders Case), treason, and other criminal issues.

He also championed environmental issues, abortion rights, nuclear disarmament, and anti Death Penalty initiatives. He believed strongly in defending the Constitution, especially the First Amendment. For example, he sided with the media after Mayor Frank Fast banned some reporters from news conferences, calling Fast’s act “unconstitutional.”

Understandably, folks wondered whether Sam King was really a Republican, and King admitted he was “not like the right-wing conservatives we have today.” He said, “I’m a strong believer in the ‘three party’ system: Republicans, Democrats, and Incumbents. And the Incumbents almost always win.”

King is author with Randall Roth of “Broken Trust: Greed, Mismanagement & Political Manipulation at America’s Largest Charitable Trust,” published in 2006, a landmark book in Hawaii credited with cleaning up corruption by the rich and powerful –– ensuring accountability and ho'oponopono.

On ‘Erasing History’ –– Why?

Review by Bill Doughty

Why –– throughout history –– do fascists and authoritarians attack schools, ban books, and try to whitewash or erase history?

Deep thinker Jason Stanley explains the phenomenon and answers “the Why” in an easy-to-read and yet comprehensive examination, “Erasing History: How Fascists Rewrite the Past to Control the Future” (One Signal Publishers / Atria; Simon & Schuster, 2024)

From the preface:

“One lesson the past century has taught us is that authoritarian regimes often find history profoundly threatening. At every opportunity, these regimes find ways of erasing or concealing history in order to consolidate their power. Why is this? What does history do that is so disruptive of authoritarian goals? Perhaps most importantly, it provides multiple perspectives on the past. Authoritarianism's great rival, democracy, requires the recognition of a shared reality that consists of multiple perspectives. Through exposure to multiple perspectives, citizens learn to regard one another as equal contributors to a national narrative. And they learn, we learn, to accept that this narrative is open to continued collective reflection and re-imagination, constantly taking into account new ideas, new evidence, new perspectives and theoretical framings. History in a democracy is not static, not mythic, but dynamic and critical.

Erasing history helps authoritarians because doing so allows them to misrepresent it as a single story, a single perspective. But it is impossible to erase a perspective entirely. When authoritarians attempt to erase history, they do so through education, by purging certain narratives from the curricula taught in schools, and perhaps by forbidding their telling at home. However, authoritarians cannot erase people's lived experiences, and their legacies written into the bones of generations. In this simple fact lies always the possibility of reclaiming lost perspectives.

All of this is true of authoritarianism generally, but it is especially true of one specific kind of authoritarian ideology: fascism, which seeks to divide populations into ‘us’ and ‘them’ by appealing to ethnic, racial, or religious differences.”

Stanley’s “Erasing History” examines the history of fascism and presents some illuminating insights: a link between U.S. colonization in Hawaii and education of freed slaves in the antebellum South, the Soviet Union’s erasure of the history of the Holocaust, and Putin’s lies and manipulation used as justification for the violent invasion and ongoing attacks in Ukraine.

Stanley outlines what he calls “supremacist nationalism” where exceptionalism and patriotism can become toxic and often cruel, usually with a religious or racial component galvanizing an effort to separate and “otherize” and ostracize. These fascists lead efforts to control what people can read.

On May 10, 1933, the Nazis conducted a massive book burning in their campaign to create a nation of ideologues devoted to racial purity and antisemitism. Nazi educational policy called for a separation of gender roles, glorifying motherhood for girls (including offering medals for multiple babies), and promoting straight white male domination. Also,“The Nazis regarded (Aryan) abortion as murder, and hence were staunchly ‘pro-life’ in current terminology.”

Countless contemporary examples throughout this book shine a light on how, today, politicians and national leaders are attacking institutions of Higher Education, concepts of the Enlightenment, and the principles of Diversity, Equity [better: Equality], and Inclusion, replacing liberating ideals with a “culture of hierarchy.”

From the epilogue:

“Cultures of hierarchy— such as colonialism, nationalism, or fascism— involve practices that place one group above others. And as is the case with all other cultures, or forms of life, these practices are in large part shaped and reinforced by schools.

Every education system involves erasure — one simply cannot teach everything. There are, however, certain kinds of erasures that are constitutive of authoritarian systems. For example, erasures of social movements for democracy, such as the Chinese government's erasure of the Tiananmen Square protest and massacre of 1989, or the state of Florida's erasure of the 2020 Black Lives Matter uprisings from a social studies curriculum. By removing the history of uprisings against the current status quo from the curriculum (or never allowing that history to be taught in the first place), authoritarians leave students with the impression that the status quo has never been—and cannot be challenged.”

Fascists wish to foment division in the population and create myths about a nostalgic past where minorities and women as “outgroups” were “relegated to second-class citizenship, at best.”

And they attack education, in general, and schools in particular.

“Schools and universities allow for critical inquiry into these myths,” Stanley writes, “and so attacks on them are always the canaries in the coal mine of authoritarianism.” He adds, “There is a reason there are no American-style liberal arts colleges in authoritarian countries.”

Ultra-nationalists also want to discard the rule of law, destroy the balance of power in democracies, deploy the military as homeland police, disrespect the judiciary, and prevent free and fair elections.

So, what can be done to counter attempts to erase history, ban books, demean a free press, and attack norms? 

The answer, Stanley says, is “civic compassion” and people power.

“Social protest movements have traditionally been an engine by which the people try to make those in power see reality. Participating in these movements is an exercise of democracy. Cracking down on them is an exercise of authoritarianism.” In other words we must defend freedoms of assembly, expression, and the press.

People must be able to exercise critical thinking, even in a new age of AI, to discern truth from lies. “The protection of democracy requires measures that will ensure people’s continued ability to distinguish between true and false.”

As we consider “why” fascism is rising, it’s remarkable to note that among the hundreds of books removed from the U.S. Naval Academy this year, Mein Kampf was not on the list of purged books. But the following books were among several anti-fascism titles removed: “America, Amerikkka: Elect Nation and Imperial Violence” by Rosemary Radford Ruether, “Hate on the Net: Extremist Sites, Neo-Fascism On-line, Electronic Jihad” by Antonio Roversi and Lawrence Smith, and “The second coming of the KKK: the Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s and the American Political Tradition” by Linda Gordon.

Why?

‘Origins of Totalitarianism’ in Context

Review by Bill Doughty

Seventy-five years ago, in her preface to the first edition of “The Origins of Totalitarianism,”  Hannah Arendt warned of the rise of authoritarianism. She decried the complacency of people in accepting and even supporting antisemitism, imperialism and totalitarianism.

Her preface to her first edition, written in 1950, describes dark clouds of pessimism just five years after World War II and in the heart of the Cold War with the Soviet Union. The dark clouds in these excerpts (from the preface) sound familiar today:

“Never has our future been more unpredictable, never have we depended so much on political forces that cannot be trusted to follow the rules of common sense and self-interest - forces that look like sheer insanity…”

“Desperate hope and desperate fear often seem closer to the center … than balanced judgment and measured insight.”

“To yield to the mere process of disintegration has become an irresistible temptation…”

“The totalitarian attempt at global conquest and total domination has been the destructive way out of all impasses. Its victory may coincide with the destruction of humanity; wherever it has ruled, it has begun to destroy the essence of man.”

“And if it is true that in the final stages of totalitarianism an absolute evil appears (absolute because it can no longer be deduced from humanly comprehensible motives)…”

We have reviewed Hannah Arendt’s remarkable book several times over the years. In this review, we are focusing on Arendt’s preface to the first edition as well as a compelling introduction by historian Anne Applebaum in the recently reprinted Mariner Classics HarperCollins paperback (2024). 

Applebaum puts Arendt’s warnings against autocracy and authoritarians in context, including those who lie, grift, and threaten to invade neighboring nations as well as promote inequality in society.

The world has experienced an increase in inequality, xenophobia and extremism in recent years. That combination has led to a rise in autocracies, kleptocracies, and oligarchies over free-thinking, people-powered, and liberal democracies. 

According to Applebaum, the rule of power and force wants to overtake public order and rule of law. Even the antisemitism and imperialism Arendt writes about, along with totalitarianism, is on the rise. Unfortunately, complacency, submission, and blind obedience have allowed those anti-freedom (what Arendt calls “evil”) forces to take hold. Applebaum writes:

“And yet the questions Arendt asks remain absolutely relevant today. She was fascinated by the passivity of so many people in the face of dictatorship, by the widespread willingness, even eagerness, to believe lies and propaganda— just consider the majority of Russian people today, unaware that there is even a war going on next door and prevented by law from calling it such. In the totalitarian world, trust has dissolved. The masses ‘believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and that nothing was true. To explain this phenomenon, Arendt zeroes in on human psychology, especially the intersection between terror and loneliness. By destroying civic institutions, whether sports clubs or small businesses, totalitarian regimes kept people away from one another and prevented them from sharing creative or productive projects. By blanketing the public sphere with propaganda, they made people afraid to speak with one another. And when each person felt himself isolated from the rest, resistance became impossible. Politics in the broadest sense became impossible too: ‘Terror can rule absolutely only over men who are isolated against each other.. Isolation may be the beginning of terror; it certainly is its most fertile ground; it always is its result.’ 

Reading that account now, it is impossible not to wonder whether the nature of modern work and information, the shift from ‘real life’ to virtual life and the domination of public debate by algorithms that increase emotion, anger, and division, hasn't created some of the same results. In a world where everyone is supposedly ‘connected,’ loneliness and isolation once again are smothering activism, optimism, and the desire to participate in public life. In a world where ‘globalization' has supposedly made us all similar, a narcissistic dictator can still launch an unprovoked war on his neighbors. The twentieth. century totalitarian model has not been banished; it can be brought back, at any place and at any time.”

Military leaders have long studied the wisdom of Hannah Arendt and other thinkers. Arendt’s “The Origins of Totalitarianism” is on the DOD Overdrive Professional Reading List. It was listed on the U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings site as a recommended book in 2008. In 2013, retired U.S. Army General, Stanley McChrystal, discussed his book, "My Share of the Task: A Memoir,” at the Hannah Arendt Center.

‘On Freedom’ Found Haiku, Finding Wisdom

Review by Bill Doughty

Timothy Snyder dedicates “On Freedom” (Crown New York, 2024) “to those who wish to be free.” He attempts to define “freedom” –– positive freedom –– as not destruction and absence of things, but creation and presence of values, including the right kind of moral and political values.

“Virtue,” he writes, “is an inseparable part of freedom.”

So, too, is accountability, honesty, humility, and rule of law.

His book begins on a train in Ukraine, one of three trips to the democratic country he writes about after Putin’s Russia invaded its neighbor.

Snyder takes us along as he travels to and through Ukraine and contemplates the birth of the idea of freedom and democracy in ancient Greece. His writing is beautiful, poignant, and painful –– especially in light of the current state of affairs in the United States and the world where storm clouds seem to be gathering.

He condemns the rise of autocracy, oligarchy, inequality, and what he calls “sadopopulism.” And he offers prescriptions for standing up to greed, grift, and the abuse of power.

“As the future crashes in, we can panic and blame others. Those predictable reactions make us part of the mob and the catastrophe. Or we can, as free people, take responsibility, look deep into Earth’s past, and save the world.”

Freedom must be fought for. It is not a birthright, and it is not preordained. “The moment you believe that freedom is given, it is gone,” he warns.

A recurring theme in “On Freedom” is the need to confront racism in a free country. The military, up till now, has made a concerted effort to increase diversity and reject racism.

World War II was a watershed event: defeating fascism and creating democracies in Japan and Germany while also confronting bigotry, prejudice and discrimination on the home front. Snyder cites examples of veterans of the Second World War who returned to face hate and segregation. He discusses the Freedom Fighters of 1961 and the role of Martin Luther King Jr. and John Lewis in the peaceful fight for freedom, equality, and voting rights. 

We must engage, he asserts, writing on a train ride within Ukraine.

Snyder

And we must reject complacency, supplication to authority, leaders' hypocrisy, and our own lazy thinking, including confirmation bias (treating information as evidence only when it confirms what we already believe).

It is also important to recognize “the false tragedy of choice” presented by social media algorithms — between entrepreneurship and social justice, for example.

“On Freedom” includes an appendix that compares positive and negative freedom. The positive view: Government must be made for freedom; the negative view: Government must be dismantled for freedom. Science is either (positive) how we engage with the world or (negative) “one opinion among others.” Racism is either a historical fact requiring reflection or strictly “personal, irrelevant to freedom.”

Extrapolating from the appendix, security and prosperity are achieved through rule of law and accountability (positive freedom) or strictly imposed through strong-arm policing (negative).

We cannot sacrifice liberty for safety, Snyder advises.

“We believe that we can trade freedom for security. This is a fatal mistake.” A government of, by, and for the people should not be shunned or belittled.

Snyder writes, “We enable freedom not by rejecting government, but by affirming freedom as the guide to good government. Reasoning forward from the right definition of freedom, I believe, will get us to the right sort of government.”

He describes “five forms of freedom” as the “logical, moral, and political links between common action and the formation of free individuals.”

“The five forms are sovereignty, or the learned capacity to make choices; unpredictability, the power to adapt physical regularities to personal purposes; mobility, the capacity to move through space and time following values; factuality, the grip on the world that allows us to change it; and solidarity, the recognition that freedom is for everyone.”

Sometimes the best way to see oneself is through the eyes of others. That applies to people specifically and nations generally. Snyder says his book is for the United States, but, as a historian, he draws comparisons with western Europe, eastern Europe, the Soviet Union, and Nazi Germany.

Synder relies on other Western historians, philosophers, and critical thinkers: Frantz Fanon, Václav Havel, Leszek Kolakowski, Edith Stein, and Simone Weil. And he calls on more familiar names such as Socrates, Thomas Jefferson, George Orwell, and Ray Bradbury to help illustrate his point.

This vital book answers some of the questions brought up in Snyder’s “On Tyranny.” 

In this follow-up, he shows how to fight oligarchy (reject disinformation) and confront climate change (embrace to search for fusion power).

He champions actual infrastructure initiatives, real freedom of speech, and a commitment to civil rights.

We discover hidden unintentional “found haiku” in Snyder’s writing. Seventeen syllables, 5-7-5, displayed in three lines, that capture and focus an insight or truth like a laser. Here are a few:

Freedom is not just

an absence of evil but

A presence of good

Empathy is a

precondition for certain

knowledge of the world

Overconfidence

makes us vulnerable to

the propaganda (of tyrants)

A free person sees

the world in color, as through

a kaleidoscope

Synder’s prose travels effortlessly through countries, eras, and moods, both light and stormy. One moment he writes of oppression in the former Soviet Union and hope in Cold War-era Czechoslovakia; the next moment he expounds on the roots of rock and roll, the Velvet Underground, Louie Louie, and Frank Zappa’s Mothers of Invention. “On Freedom” is a fun, enlightened, but ultimately serious ride on Snyder’s train of thought. 

(Top photo of Ukraine's Carpathian Mountains courtesy of Pixabay)