Oh for fucks sake!
The bastard is in the last weeks of the process of dying from terminal cancer. He's not anything but a sad, dying human being who did some awful things, but what do you want? Should we try to make him suffer as much as we can? Is that what we are reduced to?"But he didn't show any mercy to his victims on flight 103".
Nope. He sure didn't. Once again, are we going to draw our moral guidance from the worst of our enemies, or shall we look to the best of our heroes? Is it somehow important that, in extremis, we reach down inside ourselves and, in our deepest irreconcilable hated tailor our behavior to the worst of our enemies in hopes of, perhaps, what, frightening them into not fighting us?
What is it we hope to accomplish? Whether this piece of human garbage spends his last days in a cell or or at home, nothing changes. More importantly, it's just not about HIM. How do we see ourselves? What is the bedrock meaning of our society? Do we simply want to ape the worst instincts of our enemies, or should we consider holding ourselves to a higher standard?
This is a conflict with no defined borders, and no functional rules. Isn't it incumbent upon us, if we so desperately want to view ourselves as the "good guys", to try to find a higher moral plane than that which we view as our "enemy"?
Or put another way, if we decide that, in fighting them, we must become them, haven't we already lost?
Interesting Update:
Lt. William Calley has recently apologized publicly for his actions in My Lai in March of 1968. According to AFP:
I find the juxtaposition of the views of a survivor of the My Lai massacre and the insistence of the Pan Am 103 families that Megrahi spend the last weeks of his slow death from terminal cancer in a prison cell to be worth consideration but will leave you to draw your own conclusions...A survivor of mass killings by US troops in the Vietnamese village of My Lai in 1968 has said he welcomed the public apology made by a former officer convicted for his role in the atrocity.
"It's a question of the past and we accept his apologies, although they come too late," Pham Thanh Cong, who saw his mother and brothers killed in the massacre, told the news agency AFP on Saturday.
"However, I prefer that he send his apologies to me in writing or by email."
Pham Thanh Cong, who is the director of a small museum at My Lai, said: "I want him to come back... and see things here.
"Maybe he has now repented for his crimes and his mistakes committed more than 40 years ago."
posted by mikey @ 6:08 PM
9 Comments:
I'm sorry to see that you've basically accepted the official anti-Libyan view of the case.
The evidence was never there. The conviction was bogus. Rumproast has a good summary (http://www.rumproast.com/index.php/site/comments/megrahi_oh_what_a_tangled_web/) if you've missed reading the Wikipedia entry.
so there, nya nya nya!!
[sheesh!]
Yeah, really.
I have NO IDEA if the guy's guilty or not. And nothing but a bunch of opinions to base any conclusion on.
But his guilt or innocence doesn't have any bearing on my point, which is simply that there's no downside to letting him go home to die, and for Hillary and Obama et al to argue that he should not be shown even this minimal mercy is to demand the same kind of inflexible savagery that we're supposedly better than.
There, that wasn't so hard, was it?
...no downside to letting him go home to die...
the upside being, he'll be experiencing his eternal damnation sooner rather than later, n'est-ce pas? (Consistency is important, I always say.)
As with any incident on this scale, a vast body of conspiracy theories has sprung up.
But many of these have not just been espoused by the usual cranks.
..well, depends what you mean by usual..
Thanks for this YAFB. I remember driving by the wreckage on my way home from Scotland when I was in the WRNS. It is the first time I had ever seen a MINIMUM speed limit. They didn’t want people slowing down to look and causing traffic problems so you HAD to drive at least 45mph.
QED
leave you to draw your own conclusions...
Where are those fuckin' torture prosecutions?
Also, this:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and_americas/article6808160.ece
Cancer is awful way to transpire. As much as I hated that, the harder way was simple old age. Those patients got a tear from AG at the bedside.
On the whole, I'd imagine he'd rather be in Philadelphia.
But I don't know if there's a GOOD way to go, AG. Pain free may be the best anybody could hope for.
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