> > Is this some kind of sick joke? McVeigh killed women and children. He
> > wasn't even man enough to try to kill someone who was armed; he's no
> > Assata Shakur (whose autobiography by the way is very good) or Mumia
> > Abu Jamal (who of course has been mistaken for his brother).
> ===================
> Eh, it's manly to kill another man with just because he has a weapon? All
> killing of humans is an act of cowardice "just war" theorists to the
> contrary. When you signing up for plan Colombia?
>
> Ian
>
Ian is collapsing some important distinctions here. While I think both are wrong, I recognize a crucial distinction between an Irish republican who shoots a British policeman or soldier, and an Irish republican who sets off a bomb in the London underground or in the middle of a crowded shopping street. The latter is sheer, unadulterated terrorism, without any conceivable moral or political justification. McVeigh blew up a day care center, and then called the dead infants "collateral damage." Rhetorically playing with and identifying with this kind of "resistance" to the state, a la Cockburn, Ignatiev and now Vidal, is, in my view, a pose of "revolutionary real politik" designed to show that one is subject to weak, vulnerable human feelings, such as minimal nuruturing care for an infant. There is, I might add, an obvious gendering to this discourse.
Ian may want to argue for a pacifist position. Of all the moral absolutisms [ie, moral doctrines which allow no exceptions to their rules], I think pacifism is most defensible. If you are going to insist upon an universal prohibition, than the taking of human life is about as good a prohibition as I can think of. But this does not allow for the taking of human life in self-defense, or in the defense of someone unable to defend him/herself. And I recognize that necessity. A just war can be a war in self-defense.
Leo Casey United Federation of Teachers 260 Park Avenue South New York, New York 10010-7272 (212-598-6869)
Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never has, and it never will. If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet deprecate agitation are men who want crops without plowing the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its waters. -- Frederick Douglass -- -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <../attachments/20010509/a3d0904d/attachment.htm>