Monday, November 21, 2005

School of the America's protest

From today's Gamecock.

Rather than worry about the Carolina-Clemson rivalry over the weekend, three S.C. Honors College students traveled to southern Georgia to protest a controversial center that some claim trains Latin American soldiers in torture.

[snip]

The rally coincides with the anniversary of the murder of six Jesuit priests, their housekeeper and her daughter at the University of Central America in El Salvador. A UN Commission in 1993 cited 27 Latin American soldiers as responsible for the murders, 19 of which were graduates of the Institute.

SOA Watch alleges that many human rights violations and murders were conducted by SOA graduates in their Latin American home countries and that the school trains personnel in torture. The Army denies that it trains soldiers in anything that violates human rights standards.
SOA Watch

An article by a pastor who was tortured in Brazil in the early 70s, allegedly the same techniques used by US soldiers in Iraq.

Editorial from Foreign Affairs in 2000.

Given the ludicrous debate we're having about torture (ludicrous that we need to debate it at all) , it's important not to forget the goings on at SOA!

4 comments:

Fr. Gaurav Shroff said...

Well I was expecting something nicely reactionary from you, but this is just lazy. Be properly reactionary please!

[Snuggling into the armchair]

Fr. Gaurav Shroff said...

Thank you. We've had this conversation several times in the past.

First of all, apart from the ius ad bellum aspect of the just war theory, there is the ius in bello portion as well. Just war doesn't give blanket approval for just about anything during the course of a war.

But mainly, I simply say that economic-sounding pragmatism is not the absolute moral principle.

(Besides, I know your somewhat irrational [to me] prejudice against protesters to begin with.)

Nor do I agree that human rights are a luxury that come only with a certain level of Western democracy and stability. That may, in fact, be the case on the ground. But one doesn't simply accept the reality on the ground as the normative reality, the way the world ought to be.

As Christians, we really need to be talking about the way the world ought to be.

And while I tend to agree with the particular pragmatic philosophy of yours when it comes to the world of economics, I certainly don't think that Marx was right in reducing everything to economic materialism.

Now to the armchair morality comment. I'm not seeing the analogy here. An armchair quarterback is someone who isn't really a quarerback but pontificates on the same from the armchair. The same with a traveler. So, an armchair morality is someone who practices armchair morality ... ie. is not really a moralist and therefore ought not to pontificate about morality at all? Or someone who doesn't really get it, so shouldn't speak at all?

So, you, then, "really get it" presumably? :)

Fr. Gaurav Shroff said...

[Whoops. Last paragraph should be "an armchair morality refers to someone who is an armchair moralist"

assiniboine said...

Ahem. I thought we had got past this notion of torturing confessions out of people (remember the Court of Star Chamber?) when we cut off King Charles I’s head. That was in 1649, remember, folks?