Subject: Re: I Was a Humorless Intellectual
Date: Dec 27 14:08:19 1997
From: Michael Price - mprice at mindlink.bc.ca


Hi Tweets,

Jim Brewster writes:

>I detest the rape of the planet that continues to this day, but I have a
>difference with those who would place the life of an animal above that of a
>human. Somewhere, somehow there is a balance between the two.

War--almost invariably the calamitous consequence of accumulated political
stupidities and misjudgements--is the vilest insult we can offer to our
humanity. That anyone or any animal (and perhaps it's time to begin
considering animals as part of the world's refugee population) dies an
unnecessary violent death disgusts and saddens me. As Ursula LeGuin wrote in
her wonderful novel, The Left Hand of Darkness, "If civilisation has an
opposite, it is war. Of those two things, you have either one, or the other.
Not both."

As far as the necessity of the Korean DMZ--and by extension the extensive
minefields--being there in the first place, it's arguable that if a US
government and military command had not installed a trustworthily
anticommunist thug, Syngman Rhee, in power over the Koreans after the Second
World War, had they not ignored repeated explicit Chinese warnings not to
attack north of a certain point beyond which the Chinese would intervene in
force, had they not through their hubristic arrogance provoked the massive
Chinese counterattack (which the Chinese always held was in part defence
against an invading army) which eventually led to the stalemate along the
ceasefire line, a political--not military--resolution to return to the
status quo ante bellum *might* have been possible and possibly the whole
damnable thing--including Jim's misery in the hellish killing grounds of the
DMZ--avoided.

But perhaps Francis Bacon should have the last word, "The inclination to
goodness is imprinted deeply in the nature of man: insomuch, that if it not
issue toward men, it will take unto other living creatures."

In that I think you find your balance, Jim, should such exist.

Michael Price A brave world, Sir,
Vancouver BC Canada full of religion, knavery and change;
mprice at mindlink.net we shall shortly see better days.
Aphra Behn (1640-1689)