General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: When Men Hate Women: Femicide in Ciudad Juarez [View all]BainsBane
(52,999 posts)To pretend there is a moral equivalency between policies that result in death and those that seek to spare lives is to be complicit in those deaths. I firmly believe that. I need not shoot anyone to be complicit in gun violence. I need only sit back and pretend that justice does not require me to act in defense of life.
Another example would be an an analysis of genocide, like the crimes for which Efrain Rios Montt was recently convicted in Guatemala. One could pretend that there is an objective position in which genocide and the war on communism were equally valid positions, but that would be be fundamentally unjust. One sought to maintain US power through mass murder; the other for Ixil Maya's right to live, farm, and be free from extermination. To fail to denounce evil is to be complicit in it. That is at the heart of what it means to have a social conscience, and without a social conscience one is indifferent to justice and humanity. It is a continuation of Edmund Burke's idea that "all that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men to do nothing.
Octavio Paz, Mexican writer, poet, and winner of the 1990 Nobel Prize for Literature, one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Octavio_Paz The sort of legacy you consider repulsive.
From his 1998 obituary by Edward Hirsch in the NYTimes, 1998
I have been devouring Paz's poems and essays most of my life now, and feel as if a radiant light passed out of the world when he died on April 19 at the age of 84. A literary era, the whole cultural landscape of the Americas, seems diminished. There was an energetic clash within Paz between poetry and history, each making its competing claims on his formidable intelligence. One was a wayward siren song calling him to a perpetual present, to an erotic consecration of instants and to a superabundance of time and being, whereas the other materialized as a measured speech reminding him of the social and political needs of others, a voluble lecture about the nature of civitas, the importance of worldly concerns and the laws of temporal process.
http://www.nytimes.com/books/98/06/07/bookend/bookend.html