Quote:
Originally Posted by Wynonie Harris
Perhaps you could enlighten me on something that has always puzzled me, Eric. Why is it that many (although not all) liberal-minded "idealists" are very choosy about the repressive police states that they condemn? Apartheid-era South Africa, Allende's Chile and Israel have all been on the list. However, left-wing and black-on-black repression seem to elicit a decidedly lukewarm response from our comrades. Communist China, North Korea and a depressing list of African countries such as Amin's Uganda. Then, of course, there was the Soviet-era USSR which, despite its massive abuses of human rights, drew positive praise from some quarters of the left. I'm consistent in as much as I condemn all dicatorships and police states - others seem less so.
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I don't think that I'm all that good at enlightenment, and I don't agree with the "liberal left" all that much. I believe that most, maybe all, protests of the kind going on right now are tinged with more than a little hypocrisy. Maybe this applies to all protests of human rights abuses. And it always seems to me that a lot of sinners are casting a hell of a lot of stones. I think I tried to make this point earlier when I talked about Canada's poor record ... little short of abysmal ... in dealing with First Nations issues. Maybe Kissinger summed it up when he said that one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter. No protest is completely idealistic, all are tinged with national politics and ideology. Perhaps we should question our own ideologies before we condemn those of others - or better still, at the same time. In the developed, "western" world we remain in the grip of ideology, conforming to social reality as "natural" rather than critically questioning how it -and ourselves - came to be constructed, and so can possibly be transformed. I believe that it is good to take and hold the moral high ground ... but we have to be sure that our morality is the right one, or is at least as moral as it can be in this screwed up world. If everything were as clear cut as the struggle against Hitler and that against Apartheid acting in the right way would be easy ... but things are not that simple.
I don't think this has been enlightening ... but I don't have time to write the book
Maybe the answer lies in Anarchy.