Word: absolutist
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Mendelsohn's motion was more extreme, criticizing the "bankruptcy and immorality" of American involvement in Southeast Asia and President Nixon's "assumption of absolutist powers" and "promotion of a climate of repression and violence...
...much of what Hook feels called upon to do in the name of his absolutist faith is cruelly vengeful and it puts his Christianity in darkest question. Indeed, his cruelty places him beneath the craven Jones. For Jones, life is dear even though he does not know how to live it lovingly. For Hook, life is disastrously cheap. Mano seems to suggest that despite Jones' selfishness, there is more cowardice, a more profound "giving up," in Hook's idealism. That idealism eyes heaven too hungrily and, at its tortured extreme, sees war as salvation because in death there...
Grass's intention is broader than one at first suspects. Local Anaesthetic, in fact, may go down in history as the first novel to turn the dentist's chair into an allegory of life. Absolutist revolutions, religions and moralities have all foundered on the problems of pain and how to cure it. Now Grass's dentist steps forward, an apostle of technology, a priest of the "relative." He reduces philosophy to Seneca plus hygiene. He is the exact fulfillment of Spengler's prophecy that absolute engineering is man's historical destiny...
...Such absolutist considerations had little to do with the actual proceedings against the Nazis, both for war crimes and denazification in general. These were, as FitzGibbon notes, much tainted by expediency and confusion. In practical terms, too, their results have been mixed. Ironically, some of the criminals of Auschwitz got off "extremely lightly" because the rules of evidence, which the Nazis had scrapped, had been reimposed in the name of justice by the Allies. Most Nazis were soon issued their Persilscheine ("whitewash slips," a name derived from a brand of soap powder). Modern Germany is run by the Persils...
...Rails. Earnest, articulate and somehow despairingly sanguine, Ginsberg at 43 is busy providing a kind of air-ferry service across the contemporary great divides: the generation gap and the moral abyss that seem to separate absolutist youth from pragmatic age. Behind Ginsberg's freaky fagade there has always been a core of pure humanism and of religion-in an almost planetary sense. In an era in which most people accept violence as the way life is, Ginsberg has managed to remain fervently gentle. If he still calls for nothing less than a complete revolution, he also insists that...