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do you find planned and deliberately arbitrary politically motivated violence to be virtuous and productive?
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i take it that you want to do this as an ethical convo. i see this as a political matter.
so you are looking for a particular type of response from me.
it ain't gonna happen.
let's step back a level:
if your take on this question is primarily ethical, it follows that you have a particular view of ethics and that view (from what i can tell anyway) seems to turn on a requirement for a priori principles. without them, presumably, you tend to see only the inverse--anything goes.
to my mind, ethics applies primarily to what i would do.
right now i am---once again---sitting in a chair in chicago.
that means, again, that i occupy a particular space that is shaped by a host of ambient factors--so the situation in which i am is particular. i might prefer to pretend that it isn't--and there is every ideological reason to do so---but once i make that move, i abstract myself from exactly the types of parameters that throughout this thread i have been arguing are fundamental, that have to be taken into account in the fashioning of judgments about the nature, meaning and justification of any given political action that unfolds in a context which differs fundamentally from my own.
so sitting in my chair, staring (AGAIN--geez, where did my life go?) at my computer monitor, can i imagine myself initiating a violent political action? no.
why?
well....my situation is such that my personal aversion to violence can remain operative.
at the same time, i do not understand my situation as self-contained--it is a function of a particular socio-economic and political system that has among its features a particular geography of oppression that functions so that the fact of it is, as they say, experience-distant.
if i think about the types of contexts that i have been referencing here, that thinking involves a degree of empathy or projection--these contexts are not mine.
if i imagine action in those contexts in a way that maps onto them the dispositions i am in a position to maintain in this one, then i am substituting the arrangement of dispositions it is my luxury to maintain in this space onto actors in that other space (x) who do not have that luxury.
the inverse does not follow (that i am therefore unable to make any judgment at all)----and while there are problems (i do not have and will not have complete information)---i nonetheless KNOW that if i approach these contexts with a priori assumptions about what i would or would not do in what i imagine that situation to be like, i am just mapping my dispositions onto those available in another context and erasing fundamental dimensions of that context in the process. i presume to know better than the people who live that context what the meanings of actions are. when i do that, i am no different from any other colonial boy.
since the parameters for thinking about this sort of situation are not in any way delimited for me by what i take to be the fundamentally bourgeois category of ethics (sorry, but sooner or later my inner residual marxist is going to surface in this kind of debate), i retain the prerogative to look at the situation to the extent that i can, decide on what kind of information is relevant and make a judgment about a given action--on political grounds.
this is not to say that there is a basic separation between politics and ethical committments--but as general ways of thinking that allow for integration of different types of information, they are separatable from each other. the converge again in the problem of fashioning judgements that speak to questions of whether i would consider action x justified and action y not justified.
there is a consideration that cuts across this: i find state violence, routinized violence administered via a bureaucratic apparatus FAR more ethically and politically problematic than i find response to that violence.
2. i agree with you (and pigglet) re. the desirability if international interventions in situations like darfur. but that is a scenario within which the people there are already pulverized--and the central cuase of that pulverization is the civil war in the sudan and the apparent collusion between the janjawid (i keep thinking ganga weed, as i suspect everyone does) milita and the sudanese government and the political situation that is being impacted upon by that collusion--which is a function of the civil war, an extension of it. were the people who have been massacred and/or herded about by this conflict in a position to react with violence to what is happening to them, i would not be inclined to see it as senseless--would you?
another problem: from what you say above, it seems that you would be inclined to blame these people were they to react with violence to what has happened to them. well, so far they really haven't--they are not in a position to---in what way is the situation improved by that exactly?
it also seems to me that to treat the cycle of violence as if it were autonomous, independent of choices made by actors on the ground, as it sounds like you do here:
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And it is for nothing. It's a cycle of revenge and retribution that will never end of its own accord.
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is WAY too simple. so the jangawid are simply reacting to some climate problem, their actions are like the weather and so they bear no particular responsibility for anything? the primary point of an international intervention in that region would be to disable that militia, by military means if that is the only way to do it. THEY ARE RESPONSIBLE FOR THE VIOLENCE IN THE REGION and behind them stands the government in khartoum. PERIOD. this is not automatic, it does not follow like the wind, building on itself and leaving people no choice but to go along with it....
god this is long.
sorry about that.