> On Fri, Apr 24, 2009 at 11:29 AM, James Heartfield
> <Heartfield at blueyonder.co.uk> wrote:
>> In the 1980s (and before then) the IRA used punishment beatings,
>> interrogation and what I guess would be called torture. So did many
>> other national liberation movements. I wouldn't say that they were
>> right to, or wrong to, only that it was their right to decide what
>> means to use in the prosecution of their cause, and that that was a
>> secondary question to whether their overall cause was just.
>>
Secondary? If the arguments grounding their claim that "their overall
cause was just" are compatible with the assertion that torture could
be a legitimate "means to use in the prosecution of their cause,"
then, recalling the Marxist conception of the interdependence between
ends and means, we have to conclude that their argument fails and that
their end, "their cause," is in reality as worthless as their means.
Shane Mage
> This cosmos did none of gods or men make, but it
> always was and is and shall be: an everlasting fire,
> kindling in measures and going out in measures."
>
> Herakleitos of Ephesos