antw. re Re: MDDM Gershom's Intervention
Doug Millison
millison at online-journalist.com
Sat Jul 6 11:00:55 CDT 2002
At 7:24 AM -0400 7/6/02, Paul Mackin wrote:
> No one asks why the Egyptians didn't
>abolish slavery.
In a literary line that continues all the way to Pynchon, the Old Testament
prophets certainly had such a judgement (condemning Pharoah for not
freeing the Hebrew slaves) in mind every time they compared the lack of
justice among the Israelites to their suffering as slaves under Pharoah:
centuries of backwards-looking criticism in that tradition, as a spur to
treat one another with justice and love in the present. (In their writings,
the Prophets don't present Pynchon's range of nuance and irony in
understanding how humans could perpetuate such injustice, of course.)
If you mean contemporary thinkers, it's perhaps because the Egyptians
didn't hypocritcally worship a philosophy that enshrined personal liberty
above all else while owning and profiting from their slaves as Washington
did.
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