“That doesn’t mean that we should ignore their motives and dismiss them. What if someone who IS competent, and honorable, and courageous, and charismatic finds those same motives have merit and decides to lead a real revolution? Punishing those we perceive as wicked while dismissing their motivations is peril.” Mr. Forrest at #80
It is PRECISELY their motives that I, being a former Marxist, understand, note, and judge as immoral and unacceptable. I guess I don’t understand what you are getting at, even though in the above statement you lay it out. It doesn’t make sense to me because you cannot have motive and all those attractive qualities without content. The content of their ideology fuels their motive. This isn’t some kind of vapid romanticism, sir. We have a perfect right to judge the motive and its content to be reprehensible and unacceptable to our society.
Your question, perhaps, would be more familiar to me, of my Roman Catholic background, in the form: Can someone do a deed which, in their conscience, they truly do not perceive as wrong and believe to be right (even though it be objectively wrong) and thus escape moral culpability for the act? This is called the argument of the uninformed conscience, and it is, realistically, a purely hypothetical. Why? Because the objectionable and morally wicked deeds HAVE CONSEQUENCES FAR BEYOND THEIR UNDERSTANDING AND THOSE CONSEQUENCES HARM A LOT OF PEOPLE. In fact, I would argue that the people in The Weather Underground knew exactly what they were doing, knew that our society rejects it, and they went and did it anyway. They hardened their hearts to the victims. And in their meetings with the informant present they talked about re-education camps and even liquidating reactionary, recalcitrant people. In other words, the very same plans and deeds of Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Ho, Castro and Guevara, and Pol Pot, to name a few.
You seem to be saying that the scant “admirable” qualities of these Communist terrorists somehow can earn them a sliver of the benefit of the doubt, because of their alleged good intentions.
You see this is the kind of moral reasoning that corrupts our young people today that is disseminated from those practitioners of post-modernism and deconstructionism. The school of “thought” that says there are no moral absolutes and no correspondence theory of truth. It’s all PERSPECTIVAL! Therefore, we can invent our own absolutes and how dare we criticize the motives of others.
Folks, feast your eyes right upon this, for what you are observing is the influence of cultural Marxism at work. The ethics of expediency. Now, I’m not saying Mr. Forrest is advocating it. He may just be playing Devil’s advocate here. But I believe it’s my duty to expose the underlying logic of what he gave expression to. He may deplore the terrorists, but he certainly is pointing out a current that is quite popular in our intellectual circles for a few decades now. I’m just trying to point out the nonsense that it is.
So, what could be morally attractive about Communist ideology, its ethics of expediency, and the actions required to bring about the socialist revolution?
