Mercy for Pinochet

I agree with the conclusion of your Jan.19 editorial :

    " When they're arrested abroad "  . General Pinochet of Chile

    is - and there is much evidence for it - a political monster.

    But let Chile deal with him - now a fading, sick old man.

           Castro is indeed a dictator as your editorial points,

    but it is preposterous to compare him to the fiendish Pinochet.

         Perhaps even old Nazis should not be hounded forever. Is it

    not a very Marxist idea that the ROOT of evil is not in warped

    individuals but in the social structure ?


          What science already knows about the human mind - the soul-

    would undermine the whole superstructure of bourgeois criminal

    law. But what science knows is ignored by almost every criminal

    judge in the country -and the vast  majority of citizens who

    support or clamor for the death penalty.

          Were not observers of the Nuremberg Trials amazed by

    the sheer banality of the Nazi villains on trial ? So in

    their hearts - not in a malignant social order - we see the

    roots of the Holocaust ?

           No doubt General Pinochet's last thought on his death

    bed will be  that cold draft from the window .

            We must change society fundamentally in order to begin


    to change the human soul.


           Dictator Castro at least has that right.