Re: How to measure evil

["Agustin Toro Solís de Ovando." <atoro@corfo.cl>]

dear sirs

I didn't read the mail for a while, but now I have noticed some changes. Speaking about political movements in other countries needs, at least, to know all the facts and points of view.

I think and know that all the discussion about Chilean military goverment is more an emotional pointt of view, instead of an objetive historical study. I respect personal judgment, but to state a fact you need to  know more about what you are really speaking.

Best regards

Agustín Toro Solis de Ovando
Santiago, Chile.

----------
> Dear Giles & interested parties:
>
> At issue is my statement that "it is possible, of course, for a people
> on the defensive to become hardened and commit greater atrocities than a
> people on the offensive, but McCarthy does not equal Vyshinsky and Chile
> does not equal Czechoslovakia.  It astonishes me that there is still a
> desire to push a moral and political equivalency argument in regard to
> the Cold War."
>
> In your response you do not challenge the McCarthy/Vyshinsky equation,
> for which I am grateful, but do take issue with the Chile/Czechoslovakia
> one.  I must confess that your arguments on this score have caused me to
> think and make me less certain of my position. I could have made a
> stronger argument had I said that Chile does not equal the Baltic
> Republics, where thousands of people were arrested and sent to Siberia,
> or does not equal Poland, repeatedly ravaged by Soviet forces.  With the
> example of Cz, it is true, I was thinking of the 1968 invasion, the
> tanks, the replacement of the government, etc., but also the universal
> questionnaires that followed and the ironclad grip on the country by the
> Soviets for the next 20 years.  But maybe CIA subversion of a
> democratically elected government, with a bloody coup and a military
> dictatorship, does not noticeably occupy higher moral ground.
>
> A couple of points.  I think body counts, though gruesome, are important
> for measuring evil, so long as we hold individual life to be valuable. 
> But perhaps a distinction should be made between evil absolutely and
> evil historically.  Charles Manson is probably as evil as Hitler in the
> absolute sense, but historically he doesn't count.  Stalin and Hitler
> probably stand even in the absolute sense, but Stalin dwarfed Hitler's
> evil acts.  So duration of evil, body counts, etc. help us to judge
> historical phenomena.
>
> Another criterion is whether an act is consistent policy or an
> aberration.  The argument used to be made that Stalin was an aberration
> of Leninism, just as Stalinists used to argue that Beria, not Stalin,
> was responsible for atrocities.  I think the Bolshevik state showed a
> marked consistency, so that the invasion of Cz was consistent with its
> nature, not an aberration.  I would hope that the CIA destabilization of
> Chile would be considered an aberration of US policy, but I cannot be
> sure of it.
>
> Clearly it was not a defensive act, though it came from a defensive
> mentality.  Enemies become like each other, as we all know.  Perhaps it
> was feared that Chile would become a base for subversion, propaganda,
> terrorism, but that does not justify a coup.  I do not want to offer up
> excuses for the overthrow of Allende.  If I had lost a friend there I
> certainly would not take a broad, impersonal view.  I would be enraged
> and focused on the evil that occurred.
>
> But insofar as I can step back and be impersonal, I think that, despite
> evils on both sides, there was no real moral equivalency:  the Soviet
> Union was indeed the Evil Empire.  And because I think the burden of
> good was with the USA, though its hat may not have been pure white, I am
> dismayed by its subsequent development--the unchecked megacorporation
> world of idiotic entertainments and consumerism--after the fall of the
> Soviet Union.
>
> Perhaps there is an application of Jünger to one or another point?
>
> GK
>