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Read other letters about this article
Jeffrey would rather acknowledge his laziness than do anything about it. His position is that he'll look at a few pro-Sharon web pages and then stop when he gets tired of clicking.
Rather than going through all the tedious work of actually sifting the pro and the con, and having nothing else to go on, he accuses me of his own faults:
>But Den is blind to history
Au contraire...
>George Washington made his reputation slaughtering Indians
There's a certain amount of truth to this. George Washington did compare Indians to wolves and call for their extirpation. As a Colonist and as a commander in the United States he prosecuted savage wars. He bought and sold Indians land without their consent. He owned 500 slaves. On the other hand, Washington was also known for 18th century gentlemanly courtesy, which included aid to the wounded, truces, avoiding needless destruction and courtesies. In a quick search, I found a letter from Washington in which he returned a stray dog to an enemy British General.
So, Sharon was a soldier defending his new country, and Washington was a soldier defending his new country. Does this mean that they're exactly the same? I don't think so. On its simplest terms, I suppose the question is, how many villages did George Washington slaughter? It's still up to Jeffrey to prove that Washington was as much an atrocity-monger as Sharon.
But there's more to it than that. Jeffrey at one point was arguing that I had to look at Sharon as a creature of his time and place. Sharon's atrocities were legitimate, Jeffrey argued, because they were acceptable in Sharon's time. I pointed out that this was not the case and that several of Sharon's excesses were appalling by the international and Israeli standards of his time. He really was committing monstrous acts as his peers defined monstrousness.
What if we applied Jeffrey's standard to George Washington. The man of two and a half centuries ago was quite a different creature from us. Things we found appalling were commonplace. By the standards of his time, Sharon was a monster. By the standards of his time, was Washington a monster? No. Jeffrey's argument breaks down.
By the standards of our time, Sharon is truly a monster. If we argue for an independent univesal standard, and we've got evidence that Washington committed genocide... then that doesn't rescue Sharon. It merely means that we have to reappraise Washington, to wipe away the sugar coating and acknowledge the long hidden evil.
Of course, Jeffrey will get into none of this. He can't be bothered.
> - Nelson Mandela headed a group known for killing it's opponents by burning rubber tires over their heads,
Well, sort of true. Except of course that Nelson Mandela was in jail when all the necklacing was going on. Except that the group was nonviolent when he was running it. And except that his own wife, in the post-apartheid regime, went to jail for necklacing and kidnapping.
So let's hang Mandela for things he didn't do and had no control over, and lets ignore the fact that he chose to allow the rule of law to apply to his wife when she committed those acts.
Then of course there's Kennedy and Clinton but you get the idea...
The point of it all is that Sharon is a good person because everyone else is equally bad. To which I say, nonsense.
The usual place I see this sort of bad logic is with the Holocaust deniers: One of the favourite gambits of Hitler apologists is to claim that Stalin is far worse than their guy, but doesn't get half the bad press. Heck, diehard Stalinists even say nice things about him. Well, sorry. Hitler is a monster, and comparing him to Stalin doesn't make him one bit less monstrous.
Jeffrey, consider the company your arguments bring you to.
> Sharon was a soldier for most of his life - and with all that killing, horrible mistakes were made,
Not mistakes. The evidence is for quite deliberate choices. Who do you think you're defending? Brittney "Oops, I did it again!" Spears?
> - so I guess, as Den said, I'm a bad person. But I'm an honest bad person who enjoys the fruit of
Sadly, while you seem prepared to acknowledge your moral turpitude, I'm afraid I can't agree with you. You may or may not be a bad person. But if you claim to be an 'honest bad person' that's wrong. You are lazy and dishonest, which perhaps is why you are a bad person. I'm being personally insulting of course, but as I've pointed out that's how you started on me. The difference between us is that you had nothing to go on but insults, and I've been hanging you with your own arguments.
I suspect that at this point, no one is reading and no one cares. Fine with me, the discussion is on the verge of going nowhere. I'll sign off with a piece of advice - You don't have to be lazy, Jeffrey. And frankly, it doesn't do you or anyone else favours to be lazy. You don't need to be dishonest, either. Again, you don't do yourself or anyone else favours.
I'm perfectly willing to acknowledge Sharon's good points. But I'm not willing to sugarcoat his evil, or to excuse his atrocities. If you want to argue for a balanced portrait of his life, that's fine. But I suggest that you are obligated to do more than lick at sugarcoating. Take the time out to really get a picture of the man and the good and evil, and take the time out to at least wrestle with the moral questions of the harm that he has done.
Maybe the next time we get into it, we can start with a foundation of mutual courtesy, and work through a clean discussion.
