It would be awesome if this actually happened:

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-latin-america-12260873

Haiti's ex-leader Jean-Claude "Baby Doc" Duvalier had the right to return to the country but must now face justice, President Rene Preval says.

Mr Preval was making his first comments on the issue since Mr Duvalier's unexpected return from exile last week.

Mr Duvalier has been charged with theft and misappropriation of funds during his 1971-1986 rule.

He is also being sued for torture and other crimes against humanity. He has said he is ready to face "persecution".

In a news conference on Friday, Mr Duvalier called for national reconciliation, claiming his return from France had been prompted by the earthquake that devastated Haiti last year and his desire to help rebuild the country.
________________________

While this starts with Baby Doc, I'm going to ask a rather broad set of questions here about war crimes trials in general.

1) How much are these trials really about the crimes themselves v. the ones who try to do those things without a sufficiently powerful ally to shield them from flack for it?

2) If a dictator has control of a rather wide-ranging slew of allies, like for instance much of a country's political and/or military leadership as auxiliaries of his crimes, should all of them be brought to trial? What happens then?

3) Should members of much of the US Administrations, Democratic and Republican alike since the start of the Cold War be arraigned for war crimes trials if the basis of war crimes is decided on a morally consistent basis?

To avoid Rule #8 my answers to all of the above:

1) In my own opinion very much the latter. Crimes against humanity for some reason never tend to be prosecuted if for instance it's a victorious army which does them as opposed to a defeated one.

2) In my opinion all of them should be hung, with the country given a chance for a blank slate to choose leaders on a truly democratic basis.

3) Yes.

Memories

[gunslnger.livejournal.com]

I just wanted to take a moment and share with the class a short excerpt from The Psychology of Everyday Things(pages 118-119) that I think is relevant to some of the posts in the past couple weeks.

If there were a thousand similar events, we would tend to remember them as one composite prototype. If there were just one discrepant event, we would remember it, too, for by being discrepant it didn't get smudged up with the rest. But the resulting memory is almost as if there had been only two events: the common one, and the discrepant one. The common one is a thousand times more likely, but not to the memory; in memory there are two things, and the discrepant event hardly seems less likely than the everyday one.
So it is with human memory. We mush together details of things that are similar, and give undue weight to the discrepant. We relish discrepant and unusual memories. We remember them, talk about them, and bias behavior toward them in wholly inappropriate ways.

Just something for you to keep in mind and ponder over, and maybe it will influence the way you at your experiences in the future.

If you want a bigger question, ask yourself just how your own perceptions of the world influence what you think about it, how your memories change your outlook on the future, and whether your memories are actually accurate to reality since you're really only storing your interpretation of what happened and not a factually accurate video. Now imagine every other person in the world doing the same thing and maybe you will come closer to understanding how someone can disagree with you when viewing the same "facts".

The pretty face of nationalism

[ddstory.livejournal.com]

OK, women are changing politics as was demonstrated here recently. But is it always for the better?

Meet Marine Le Pen, daddy's daughter. With her deep categorical voice, stylish haircut and the elegant costumes who give her that trademark French chic, you'd say she's the undisputed star of the right-wing in Europe. She succeeded her aging daddy Jean-Marie Le Pen as leader of the Front-National party by picking up 2/3 of the votes on the party's elections last Sunday. The 82 year old daddy founded FN in 1972 and he's been the leader of one of the most influential far-right parties in Europe ever since.

Many say Marine represents the new generation of far-right leaders rising in Europe, who'll try to substitute the fascist rhetoric with a more moderate tone while basically pushing the same, or a similar agenda. Newsweek noted that she's the new face of the French nationalists, and Der Spiegel called her the Jeanne d'Arc of the Far Right.

Probably because she's a woman and because of the way she communicates, Marine Le Pen may not look as menacing as her predecessor. She appears as a very energetic, dynamical and eloquent orator. She likes a good political fight, she fares well in the TV studio, using simple phrases that are easy to understand, but at the same time almost devoid of populist punchlines and catchy talking points; she tries to sound as sensible and pragmatic as possible. While Jean-Marie Le Pen used to be associated with WW2 with his staunch Holocaust denial and his clearly defined antisemitism, this isn't visible in his daughter who wasn't born long after the war was over. As early as the 90s it became evident that FN was at a crossroads, hesitating if it should be antisemitic, anti-Muslim or both. After 9-11 the decision made that the anti-Muslim stance was by far the more favorable one.

( How the daughter could surpass the father )