Against Justice (was: Re: US Out of Everywhere)

Gordon Fitch gcf at panix.com
Wed Oct 9 21:16:39 PDT 2002


Nathan Newman:
> ...
> The Left has an overwhelmingly negative agenda, especially on foreign
> policy, when what is most desperately needed is a positive agenda of global
> justice.

You can have freedom, or you can have justice, but you can't have both, because the notion of justice implies an authority to decide what's just and then impose it on those who disagree with it. In particular, _global_ justice would have to be the work of a global empire of enormous, probably totalitarian power, since it would have to suppress the billions of contrary wills, desires, perceptions and judgements of what is and isn't just which would be certain to arise among its subjects. It is hopeless to expect that even an ideal democracy could settle this question; it would have to be imposed by some on others.

And one should not assume that _justice_ will necessarily take the form often attributed to it by leftish European social democrats, by the way. Those who came to dispense _justice_ might be Islamic fundamentalists or hard-core social-Darwinist fans of capitalism, who have very different ideas about it, and are just as convinced of their correctness as everyone else.

Instead of justice, my suggestion for the agenda of the Left is the abolition of the State power which enables the West and its imitators to rob and destroy the earth. The ugly characters that have been noised about, Milosevic, Pinochet, Idi Amin, Saddam Hussein, Pol Pot, all would have been no more than minor sociopaths had it not been for the machinery of the State, in particular the Western sovereign-nation-state model. International (that is, inter-national-state) organizations of justice are no more than yet another swig from the same old bottle of poison, and it is not surprising to see them dutifully pursuing those, and only those, who have fallen out of favor with the imperium, or were of too lesser a breed to be taken seriously by it in the first place.

We can start with gun control -- in the White House.

-- Gordon



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