andie nachgeborenen wrote:
>
> > Carrol Cox wrote:
> >
> > "I want torture to stop -- but it's incidental to me
> > whether someone is made morally responsible for its
> > occurrence."
>
> No, you don't.
Well, what can I say. You know more about what I really think/feel than I do.
> This is the sort of silly claptrap that
> liberals and leftists feel obliged to pronounce
> because they think that retribution (channeled
> revenge) is ugly.
Not ugly. Quite understandable. But sort of silly. It falls under the heading of closing the barn door after the horse is gone.
> It is ugly, but it is justice and
> virtually everyone, including you, really accepts its
> moral, psychological, and social necessity.
I'll skip the first (moral). As to the second, yes -- momentarily, and there are contexts in which following that momentary urge is probably reasonable. As to the third, I am in agreement, but within the context of rejecting the moral or psychological necessity. Had a revolutionary movement actually emerged in the '70s, and had a Popular Committee or whatever come to power in Chicago, it would have been reasonable to try & shoot Hanrahan, not for the sake of justice but for the sake of public trust in the new regime. And at the time I was rather pleased that he broke his arm or something trying to tackle a Weatherman on the streets. (The only useful thing any Weatherman ever did!) But it's sort of silly & a waste of energy.
If punishment/justice _is_, under a given set of circumstances, socially/politically necessary, and only if, then o.k.
> It's time
> to stop lying to ourselves. You want see the torturers
> jailed or executed, the same as all decent people do.
> You would not think it was OK if the torturers were
> just to walk away from their tools, leaving the
> prisoners unchained and the doors of their cells open.
> That would be good, but it would not be right. What is
> right is that the prisoners go free and the torturers
> are punished proportionately.
An unreal situation, and I'm not enough of a novelist to create the sort of thick context which would make such an instant cessation of torture realistic. Things happen as part of a process. In _most_ contexts that I can think of abstractly, in which the _power_ to punish the torturers exists, punishing them would probably not generate anything except some sullen family members and friends of the torturers & only temporary satisfaction, if that, of the tortured. Socially undersirable.
I frequently feel the strong urge to "get" someone for something or other, and I'm not claiming I don't. But really, it's only a passing urge. It gets boring. I'm feeling such an urge right now re the fucking president of DePaul U. Guthrie is good here:
I was right there in Boston the night that they died, I never did see such a sight in my life; I thought the crowds would pull down the town, An' I was hopin' they'd do it and change things around.
I hoped they'd pull Judge Thayer on down
>From off of his bench and they'd chase him around.
Hoped they'd run him around this stump
And stick him with a devil tails about ever' jump.
Put the name of DePaul's president in for Judge Thayer and the sentiment is just right. But that sentiment would/will ebb, & the desire for Finkelstein to get a place in some faculty somewhere is a hell of a lot stronger, or at least more lasting.
Justice makes a nice slogan on a poster or in a short speech to a forum, but it is really a bore and a distraction over the long run. The stanza following those quoted above, and the end of the song:
Wash this tequila down with gin An' a double straight shot of your black Virgin rum. My ale bubbled out an' my champagne is flat, I hear the man comin', I'm grabbin' my hat.
Still pissed off, but pointing to the present/future: the continuing power of "the man" and the need to respond -- "Im grabbin' my hat" is nicely open-ended.
Carrol