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| Authored by: uws archive on Friday, March 07 2003 @ 05:31 PM CST |
This is an archived comment posted by gadfly. You can view the original
here. Once again: it's all morally equivalent to you people. It's like saying the police are being the aggressors when they chase after a bank robber who just robbed a bank. Whoa! The robber is only running away from the bank! Stop being so "aggressive" by chasing him down! Or, as Churchill used to say, maybe you're just being even-handed, like being halfway between the fire and the fire brigade.
I entirely agree with your disgust at such moral relativism.
Your analogy is flawed, however. Casting Iraq is the "bank robber" and America as the "bank", even in exaggeration, projects this onto a one-dimensional axis of good and evil, after which no arguments can be resolved.
The problem is that hyperfocus on First World issues and general unconcern for American foreign policy have made it difficult for anyone other than rapid political junkies to distinguish moral relativism from just critiques of American foreign policy.
The United States of America is a force of good in the world. Its popularization of the ideals of democracy, intellectual, social, scientific, and economic freedom have pushed scores of nations across the world to adopt and promote these ideals themselves. This adoption has created is perhaps the most idealistic and most free age of the human species.
Yet this does not excuse the many atrocities committed by the American government. I don't speak of Hiroshima, because I think the Americans have "paid" for that, in the sense that both they and the rest of the world recognize that a terrible thing was done. Their real sins are in the effects of their government's covert actions in other countries.
Is it moral relativism to condemn the United States, for example, for the murder of Salvador Allende? It doesn't matter if the Communists would have done it, or that it was probably not done from explicit American orders, but it was done by American-funded soldiers, and condemnation act of this is justified.
To summarize: the left, particularly in developed countries, is quite truly guilty of moral relativism. It repulsed me to hear a Quebec City protestors who'd been arrested liken his being obliged to eat meat in jail to the treatment of political prisoners in Nazi Germany.
But we mustn't throw out the wheat with the chaff. Read. Learn that not every account of American atrocities is one taken out of context by a sheltered nitwit with on a moral pedestal with no understanding of power, politics, or military necessity.
The word "propaganda" comes from the Latin Sacra Congregretio de Propaganda Fide, "sacred congregation for the propagation of the faith". We all need to be taking much less on faith these days, whatever the source.[ Parent ]
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