[lit-ideas] Re: Stanley Fish, Ayers & the Manson Family

  • From: cblists@xxxxxxxx
  • To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • Date: Wed, 10 Sep 2008 13:41:49 +0200


On 10-Sep-08, at 7:57 AM, Mike Geary wrote:
I understand the rage that drove the radicals of the 60's but violence only breeds violence and condemnation. They might as well have shot themselves. In fact, that may have been more effective ...
This reminds me of poor misguided philosophy student Jan Palach, 'Torch Number One', who burned himself to death in protest of the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in January of 1969. Apparently there were to be ten such torches .... 

This in turn reminds me of Gandhi's comments on the Holocaust:
“Hitler killed five million Jews. It is the greatest crime of our time. But the Jews should have offered themselves to the butcher’s knife. They should have thrown themselves into the sea from cliffs … ”
A further turn of thought about persons sacrificing themselves for a cause seems inevitable given the anniversary to be observed tomorrow, where the distinction between dying for a cause and killing for a cause gets more than a little blurred. 

'As He died to make men holy,
Let us die to make men free ...'
may well express a worthy sentiment. 'As He died to make men holy, let us kill ourselves to make men free' has more than scansion problems. 

Chris Bruce
Kiel, Germany
PS: As to 'Let us kill ourselves and several thousand others to ...' - well, I still think Nietzsche had his finger as insightfully on *that* pulse as insightfully as any other commentator of the past few hundred years. The completion of that line was for those who killed and died 7 years less a day ago not 'make men free' but purportedly 'bring the world Peace'.
'There is nothing so powerful as an idea whose time has come' - well, I think it is from fragile, often damaged or otherwise exceptionally needy egos that the will comes to provide the power behind such 'ideas' (such as the 'World Peace' envisioned by those 'Islamists' for whom no act of destruction, mutilation and murder is too terrible to use as an aid in bringing about.) 

-cb
--

------------------------------------------------------------------
To change your Lit-Ideas settings (subscribe/unsub, vacation on/off,
digest on/off), visit www.andreas.com/faq-lit-ideas.html

Other related posts:

  1. Home
  2. lit-ideas
  3. Archive
  4. 09-2008