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CSUDH Habermas UWP

California State University, Dominguez Hills
University of Wisconsin, Parkside
Created: May 21, 2001
Latest update: May 21, 2001
jeannecurran@habermas.org

This essay is based on Rich Gibson's post on Progressive Sociologists Net Rich Gibson's report on the discovery that Senator Robert Kerrey participated in the murder of civilians in Vietnam as a Navy Seal, and "Villagers on the scene say Kerrey's Seals not only shot more than 100 women and children with automatic fire, but slit the throats of five people, all judged less than human: Gooks, Slants, Slopes, Cong, Charlie, VC."

"This is what Nebraska's Robert Kerrey said in the opening paragraph of an article titled, "On Remembering the Vietnam War:"

"Around the farm, there is an activity that no one likes to do. Yet it is sometimes necessary. When a cat gives birth to kittens that aren't needed, the kittens must be destroyed. And there is a moment when you are holding the kitten under the water when you know that if you bring that kitten back above the water it will live, and if you don't bring it back above in that instant the kitten will be dead. This, for me, is a perfect metaphor for those dreadful moments in war when you do not quite do what you previously thought you would do."

"Such is the choice, drowning cats or universal solidarity against despotism."

As you read bear in mind Laclou-Labarthe's Heidegger, Politics, and Art, and that philosopher's description of Auschwitz as an industrialized center for the extirmination of humans considered waste. A euphemism for considering people waste might be along the same path as "a cat gives birth to kittens that aren't needed." "This, for me, [say Senator Kerrey] is a perfect metaphor for those dreadful moments in war when you do not quite do what you previously thought you would do." Think on this, especially when you are tempted to believe that science and our civilization would never do anything inhumane.

I also suggest that you read professor Frank Elwell's comments on Marx and Weber to discover that this recognition of the seed of human sensitivity exists well before it came to light in the recent postmodernism, post-colonialism, and focus on alterity. Marx and Weber recognized the concern. Elwell is quoting Coser in 1977. This suggests that the concern of scientific/technological issues overriding humanistic issues is not new in the history of sociology.