Lately, a lot more has been bothering General Augusto Pinochet of Chile than his bad back. Visiting the United Kingdom for surgery, the former dictator of Chile was threatened with extradition by a Spanish judge for mass murder and brutality during his reign. Britain's House of Lords declined to give him the immunity heads of state usually receive, since hostage-taking and torture "do not qualify as legitimate acts of a head of state." By December 11, the British home secretary must decide whether or not to give the man with the bad back a break.

'Tis the season to be sorry. Volkswagen, Mercedes-Benz and other thriving German companies are now facing class-action suits from the thousands of slave laborers forced to work in their factories during the Nazi era, while Swiss banks that once swallowed Jewish assets have offered up $1 billion to Holocaust survivors. Former Bosnian leaders are facing international tribunals for crimes against humanity. And Jiang Zemin, his own human rights violations notwithstanding, has embarked this week on his first state visit to Japan, demanding written apologies from the Japanese government for its brutality in China during the 1930s and '40s-an apology that Japan has already issued to South Korea. But what's really behind this drive for apologies and punishments? Is it a quest for justice, or revenge?

There is a good argument to be made that Pinochet's extradition has been less than fair, and in a recent Wall Street Journal article, former British foreign secretary Malcolm Rifkind claims exactly that. Pinochet's arrest would give international weight to the rulings of a single Spanish judge; his arrest, if demanded by unitary actors as it is now, would be clearly biased and unfair: "The proper courts of law for international criminals," Rifkind claims, "are international courts."

But even international courts have opponents-and one of those opponents is our very own United States. The U.S. has not shown much enthusiasm for international justice, voting against the recently-established International Criminal Court and failing to acknowledge decisions from the World Court, denouncing it both as political and as a threat to national sovereignty. What if the Cambodians, for example, suddenly wanted to extradite Henry Kissinger, charging that his direction of bombings of civilian villages during the Vietnam War constituted a crime against humanity? Or if the engineers of the Iran-contra scandal were to face an international tribunal? Being committed to justice on paper is easy. Being prepared to subject yourself to it is another story.

It's interesting to note that the world is crawling with former brutal dictators who are currently living it up. (My parents, for example, vacationing in Paris a few months ago, found themselves in the same hotel as former Zairan dictator Mobutu Sese Seko.) And it's even more interesting that someone who kills one person is more likely to wind up in prison than someone who kills thousands. But what's most interesting about both of these facts is that neither of them seem at all remarkable to us. Why not?

One reason is plain old cynicism. Corruption and crime predate civilization, so why should we bother to stop them now? But another reason, running far deeper, is harder to admit. As the American hesitation to support international justice reveals, we do not like it when other people make us play by the rules. That's not because we feel comfortable dodging justice. It's because most of us are the kind of people who at bottom believe, despite the educated words we might use in debate, that the rules do not apply to us. It is the same attitude that allows people to claim that it wasn't their fault that they broke Joey's leg during recess; Joey was provoking them, and they were just defending themselves, wouldn't you do the same thing? Or that it wasn't they who accepted campaign funds illegally, that they have no idea where that money came from, that it's perfectly legal, just look at this thousand-page brief, see? Or that they didn't really lie under oath. Or that they didn't inhale.

Most of us have inhaled. Or if we haven't yet, we will. The more powerful we become, the more likely it will be that our decisions will affect other people's lives-and the more likely it will be that we will have the ability to escape responsibility for those decisions. Many of us grew up being told at every turn that we are exceptional. We expect to win contests, to become influential, to get what we want. When things don't work out for us, we tend to blame our failures on the system that rejected us instead of on our own weaknesses. But what makes people exceptional is not their knack for being the exception to the rules, or even their knack for making the rules. It's their knack for seeing those rules as fair-or for trying to change them for everyone, not just for themselves, if they aren't. It's their knack for admitting when they've failed. But most of all, it's their knack for believing irrationally in something that very few of us actually believe: that people really are created equal.

So let Kissinger be tried, if the Cambodians demand it. If we believe in justice, and if we believe that our policies are just, then we should be able to support international courts without hesitation. If those courts are corrupt or biased, then that is no reason to avoid them; if we are part of the international community, and we certainly can't claim that we aren't, then the quality of justice in such courts is also in our hands.

Pinochet may not end up being the precedentsetter that human rights advocates have dreamed of. Chances are good that by the deadline of December 11, the British will decide that his arrest isn't worth damaging their diplomatic relations with Chile and will set him free. But there are plenty of other dictators out there, and most of them aren't that hard to find. They are in hotels in Paris and resorts around the free world, ordering pina coladas while we watch them on TV. They may not know it, but they are testing us, determining whether we really believe in justice, and not just revenge. Dara Horn '99 is a literature concentrator in Eliot House.