Dictators without Borders

Well, poor old neoliberal dictator Alberto Fujimori lost his bid for parliament in Japan, but he remains under house arrest in Chile (ahem). He has to stay there in order to be safe from extradition for human rights violations committed as president of Peru. Ironic, it seems to me, not only that he is hiding out in Chile, of all places, but that the last "terrorists" to give him any real trouble in Peru were not the famous lunatics, Shining Path, but the pseudo-indigenous (Inca) Tupac Amaru (when they took over the, um, Japanese embassy in 1996).

On a side note, the Economist mounts an interesting defense of international courts, noting:

It is easy to pooh-pooh international courts. After the creation of the world's first international war-crimes tribunals in Nuremberg and Tokyo at the end of the second world war, it took nearly half a century before another one was established—the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), set up by the UN in The Hague in 1993. But since then, progress has been impressive. Of the 161 people the ICTY has indicted, only four are still on the run; 59 have been convicted.

tags technorati : Alberto Fujimori Peru Japan

Nietzsche meets Gandhi: Revenge is for the Weak

As the reincarnation of an Icelandic berserker-poet, I'm very familiar with revenge and blood-feuds. The thing about blood-feuds is that they never end. And if you're lucky, you realize it's turning you into a monster while there's still time to recover your humanity. When blood-feuds are elevated to a political ideology, that's when you get, oh, let's say, Abu Ghraib, just to pick one. Or Gitmo. Or 9-11. Or the massacres of Afghans, Taliban and civilian. Or pretty much the whole Israeli-Palestinian conflict in its current state. And legalized torture as a permanent state of exception.

We don't need revenge. We need justice. Christian, Jewish, Muslim theology confuse these things. God's "justice" is weighed against God's mercy. But this is worse than a false dichotomy. It is the perpetuation of a barbaric ideology of retribution that humanity ought to want to transcend. Instead, the US turns Afghanistan and Iraq (and Gitmo and Abu Ghraib) into the fiery lake of Revelation and we sit and enjoy the sights, sounds, and smells of the suffering of the guilty.

I'm not a pacifist, but it seems to me (and I'm deeply conflicted about this) that violence ought to go somewhere. Justice misconstrued as revenge, as payback on a debt you're owed, is like trying to dig your way out of a hole.

How fucking hard is this to understand?