Crusaders for Democracy
Martha Raddatz, ABC News: Let me go back to the Americans. Two-thirds of Americans say [the Iraq war]'s not worth fighting, and they're looking at the value gain versus the cost in American lives, certainly, and Iraqi lives.
Vice President Dick Cheney: So?
Vice President Dick Cheney: So?
Labels: Democracy
posted by David Wearing at 7:43 AM
5 Comments:
Dick Cheney is probably one of the nastiest, most malevolent people to have occupied a senior post in government. Nonetheless, there is a certain honesty about what he is. He has contempt for democracy, international law and human rights, and he is kind of upfront about that.
I think I prefer that to the so called liberals, like Clinton, Like Obama most probably, like Blair, who in terms of foreign policy are not very far away from the Rumsfelds and Cheneys of this world, but hold on to this idea that they are somehow humanitarian statesmen, and convince a whole load of the woolly, pseudo intellectual liberal public in the process.
For those interested, this is the latest post from the Stop the War coalition. I am definitely going along...
WALL OF SOUND TO SILENCE TONY BLAIR
Stop the War Coalition is asking as many people as possible
to help create a wall of sound to accompany Tony Blair as he
gives a lecture on Faith and Globalisation at Westminster
Cathedral in London on Thursday 3 April. (See
http://www.rcdow.org.uk/lectures/)
No doubt Blair will be pontificating about the "values" and
"morality" of his "faith" and how they guided him in making
"difficult" decisions, like the slaughter of up to one
million Iraqis and the total destruction of their country in
an illegal war.
Blair is a war criminal who should have been silenced five
years ago by MPs in parliament, when they had the chance to
vote against a war which they knew was opposed by the vast
majority of people in this country. On Thursday 3 April, we
will meet every hypocritical word he utters with a wall of
sound representing the values and morality of that majority,
which was against the war in 2003 and wants all the troops
withdrawn now.
We want people to bring musical instruments and sound making
implements of every kind -- drums, trumpets, saxophones,
violins, cymbals, whistles, sirens, horns, rattles,
saucepans and cans to bang; we want every type of band,
choir and musical group to join us, all with the aim of
drowning out the speech of a man who should not be in a
cathedral pulpit but in the dock of a criminal court.
Please come at 6.30pm. Blair will speak at 7pm. Spread the
word among as many people as you can and encourage them to
join us on the night we aim to drown out Blair's shameless
lecture.
WALL OF SOUND TO SILENCE BLAIR
THURSDAY 3 APRIL 6.30PM
WESTMINSTER CATHEDRAL
FRANCIS ST, LONDON SW1P 1QW
JUST SOUTH OF VICTORIA STREET
Nearest tube: Victoria Station
Its a small point perhaps, but I'm not sure I necessarily prefer Cheney's 'honesty'. It would give me more faith in human nature to think that the likes of Blair etc actually believed what they said i.e. that, for their own benefit, they have to situate their actions within a convincing moral narrative.
Blair left office saying that whatever people thought of him, he did what he felt was best for his country. It occured to me at the time that Hitler would probably have said the same thing. At one level, its clear that what you judge is the objective morality of a person's actions; not whatever good intentions or personal feelings the perpetrator may have about those actions. But the thought that even monsters like Hitler need to have their own personal moral narrative, however warped it may be, might be a rather encouraging one, if we reflect on it.
If the nature of human beings is such that we have to believe we're doing the right thing, even (especially) when we're doing the wrong thing, and if the resulting moral justifications are designed (however erroneously) to conform with commonly accepted ethical principles, then that suggests that there's scope for our behaviour to improve in the future.
The task would be to challenge those erroneous moral justifications, and offer instead a more rational, fact-based understanding of the world. Easier said than done, to say the very least. But it does offer a glimmer of hope. That's the assumption I proceed upon anyway.
If people were capable of accepting they're doing the wrong thing and doing it anyway, then we really would be in trouble.
Just to add to that last comment. I'm reading Louis Fischer's biography of Gandhi at the moment, and thinking about the latter's philosophy of Satyagraha. The aim of Satyagraha is to take aim, with your political actions, at the morality of others; be they your opponents, or allies who you believe to be in error.
I guess that's kind of related to what I'm talking about here. However, I do think there are limits to it. A moral instinct may be intrinsic to our humanity, but some of us may have suppressed it more than others. You would have to say that in the case of someone like Hitler, the situation would clearly be irredeemable. The man could have lived to be a thousand years old, and the moment where he slapped his forehead and exclaimed "you're right! I see it now! Genocide is wrong" would never have come. Even in the far lesser case of Blair, the need to hold on to the self-constructed moral narrative, if only as an internal defence mechanism, would probably be too strong to be breached.
But those are minority cases. People who are the perpetrators of extreme actions and/or people who are far too personally invested in those actions to change or repent. However, such people are only able to do what they do with the acceptance/acquiesence of large numbers of others; be they voters like ourselves, members of a government, army etc. If you proceed on the basis that many people can have their minds changed, then you can at least isolate the likes of Cheney, Blair etc, and render them impotent.
Its on the same basis that we say that if the legitimate grievances of the peoples of the Middle East were addressed (as they should be regardless) then the terrorist hardcore would be isolated, powerless and ineffective.
So a bit of fine tuning of the analysis there, but it leads to the same conclusion ultimately.
In relation to your last comment David, I have to wonder where real political power lies most of the time. From an American perspective, when our citizens accept the actions of our government, which seems to me to be the vast majority of the time, the popular perception is that the president holds the reins of foreign policy power. I'm not sure that's true though: Eisenhower famously cautioned against the military/industrial complex which expanded significantly under his administration, and Carter's administration sponsored some really vile regimes, despite his desire to base foreign policy on humanitarian goals. You can either see this as gross hypocrisy or as the president having little real power to change basic policy. The latter seems right to me, but I don't have any information on that. I'd appreciate any insight on this.
Derek - apologies for the delay in responding.
If you go here , and scroll down to ""guiding principles", you can see my general analysis of the political economy of Western liberal democracies.
I agree with you that power is complex and dispersed. Policymaking is subject to all kinds of influences, and political power by no means begins and ends with the President or Prime Minister of a given country.
However, this is certainly not to say that such figures have no power at all. Rather, they represent one of a variety of locations where power resides, and so they do have a significant share of influence over what government policy is and how society and the world is run.
On Carter in the 70s, I wouldn't underestimate the capacity of human beings to do the wrong thing while convincing themselves that they're doing the right thing. To the extent that people are able to do that, they can go a long way in the business of government and societal power. (I'm something of a fan of Carter in his current incarnation, I have to say)
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