At 12:25 AM 11/13/98 -0500, you wrote:
>I don't know about Foucault, but Nietzsche might have had a thing or two
>to say about the thirst for vengeance against Pinochet. What good does it
>do?
>
>Matthew
At 05:37 PM 11/12/98 -0600, you wrote:
>Further, I think that today the same reasoning applies. Even though I am not
>a Pinochet supporter, I have to agree that this intent to judge Pinochet is
>a political act.
Yes yes, I have to agree with these posts. I mean, How many of us have
ever been harmed in any way by General Pinochet? In fact, I have it on
good authority that he is in fact a rather kindly, gentle old man. I also
hear the same things about Botha and De Clerk, and, again, I wonder just
how many of us on this list have ever been directly wronged by these men.
Plus, Chile is clearly a democratic country now, and may in the near
future be as prosperous and as free as us North Americans. Let sleping
dogs lie. Clearly the extremists -- no doubt Puritanical Leftists -- in
Spain and elsewhere are unaware of their own bloodlust.
Justice, like Truth, is but a mobile army of metaphors. Surely we all know
this, and surely we can all agree that -- therefore -- politics should be
kept separate from this concept-metaphor, at least politics in a social,
institutional sense. Dont we all realize how inherently dangerous, if not
evil, it is to actually try to put into practice ideas or values like
Justice? Mixing politics and justice is a recipe for the Gulag, esp if you
throw some Hegel into the mix.
As Hayek and Foucault and of course Nietzche have definitively shown, there
is no such thing as social justice. To think that there is, let alone to
desire to see Pinochet tortured unto death, is in the last analysis part of
a primitive, herd or tribal mentality that we ought to leave out of
eternally recurring history/time.
Daniel Vukovich
English; The Unit for Criticism
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
>I don't know about Foucault, but Nietzsche might have had a thing or two
>to say about the thirst for vengeance against Pinochet. What good does it
>do?
>
>Matthew
At 05:37 PM 11/12/98 -0600, you wrote:
>Further, I think that today the same reasoning applies. Even though I am not
>a Pinochet supporter, I have to agree that this intent to judge Pinochet is
>a political act.
Yes yes, I have to agree with these posts. I mean, How many of us have
ever been harmed in any way by General Pinochet? In fact, I have it on
good authority that he is in fact a rather kindly, gentle old man. I also
hear the same things about Botha and De Clerk, and, again, I wonder just
how many of us on this list have ever been directly wronged by these men.
Plus, Chile is clearly a democratic country now, and may in the near
future be as prosperous and as free as us North Americans. Let sleping
dogs lie. Clearly the extremists -- no doubt Puritanical Leftists -- in
Spain and elsewhere are unaware of their own bloodlust.
Justice, like Truth, is but a mobile army of metaphors. Surely we all know
this, and surely we can all agree that -- therefore -- politics should be
kept separate from this concept-metaphor, at least politics in a social,
institutional sense. Dont we all realize how inherently dangerous, if not
evil, it is to actually try to put into practice ideas or values like
Justice? Mixing politics and justice is a recipe for the Gulag, esp if you
throw some Hegel into the mix.
As Hayek and Foucault and of course Nietzche have definitively shown, there
is no such thing as social justice. To think that there is, let alone to
desire to see Pinochet tortured unto death, is in the last analysis part of
a primitive, herd or tribal mentality that we ought to leave out of
eternally recurring history/time.
Daniel Vukovich
English; The Unit for Criticism
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign