If you want to get fancy about it, holocaust by starvation (unless intended as a form of killing), if even if foreseeable and just as bad a thing as holocaust by intentional murder, is less culpable for the culprits because they don't have the bad intention to actually kill people and maybe would just as soon not, if it could be avoided without compromising their other goals. In general terms their crime is reckless homicide rather than intentional murder. That said, I wouldn't mind seeing Larry Summers and other architects of neoliberal mass death face capital charges; as a prosecutor, I could make a case they they merit death too. And I'm a criminal defense attorney with a clientele of murderers. (Maybe it's _because_ I'm a criminal defense attorney with a clientele of murderers.) I'm not sentimental about these fuckheads (Summers, Cheney), I don't think it meaningfully reduces the violence of society to be nice to them beyond the requirements of due process, and I would not morn their execution, although I'd oppose their lynching.
All that said, I am perfectly willing to acknowledge that a society civilized enough to have the death penalty might eschew it, and I wouldn't fight for it if such a society did. My point is just that I am not a principled abolitionist -- I oppose a racist death penalty that applies only to the poor and the freakishly. A death penalty for large scale criminals against humanity, the formerly high and mighty, a death penalty equitably applied in a relatively equal, classless, nonracist society, these don't seem particularly objectionable to me. People do do things so atrocious that I think it's not unreasonable to think that they deserve to be killed by the state -- after a fair trial and with the right to a meaningful appeal.
--- dredmond at efn.org wrote:
> On Sat, October 13, 2007 10:25 am, andie
> nachgeborenen wrote:
>
> > I discovered that after reflection on Nuremberg
> that I
> > am not a principled abolitionist:
>
> The deeper problem is the non-equivalence of
> causality and agency in the
> world-market. Britain was one of the most democratic
> states in the world
> in the late 19th century - heck, even Marx could
> live and write in London
> - but British colonialism also murdered 1 million
> Irish peasants and 25-35
> million Indian peasants. Is that really more
> forgivable than the Nazi
> death-camps?
>
> I don't know what justice would look like, but I
> suspect it would involve
> a cessation of violence, not its continuation.
>
> -- DRR
>
>
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