Meatspace,

Faustine a3495 at cotse.com
Fri Jul 20 12:01:43 PDT 2001


Jim wrote:

>> > I find it much more plausible that commies did bad things, things
>> > characteristic of commies, because they were bad people.
> 
> Faustine
>> True: but then there's always the gray area of exactly what's done in
>> the  name of "what bad people deserve" that keeps me uneasy about the
>> whole  thing. Have you read Gordon Thomas' book about the Mossad,
>> "Gideon's  Spies"? He was allowed to interview all the top agency
>> people, so you can  be sure nothing got out the agency didn't want
>> out. Even still, it's a  fascinating, hard-hitting look at what
>> happens when an organization of  brilliant, ruthless people come to
>> exist in a system with limited  accountability: hardcore realpolitik
>> at its most elemental.
> 
> We know the spooks do bad things.  They have done bad things to people
> who post on this list.  We also know commies do bad things.
> 
> The argument I object to is that all the bad behavior, the
> authoritarianism, the crimes, the repression, that we saw from the new
> left during the seventies is somehow the fault of the spooks, and
> somehow not the fault of the people who were doing it.
 

Point well taken. But the same could be said of the "crimes and bad 
behavior" at Waco and Ruby Ridge; it might have been their fault, but
they sure as hell didn't deserve what ultimately happened to them any
more than the commies did. I'm not out to defend any ideology, only the
idea of government agents' accountability to the rule of law.

~Faustine.





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