Once more, harper displays his simplistic view of, and sales pitch on...everything.
(I)n contemporary debates that influence the fate of the Jewish homeland, unfortunately, there are those who reject the language of good and evil. They say that the situation is not black and white, that we mustn’t choose sides.
…And we declare our faith in humanity’s future in the power of good over evil. - Harper
This is a very dangerous stance for anyone to take, let alone the leader of a country. Who is fit to define absolute good for all? Who can unerringly lock down what is evil? No one, because contrary to what steve says, the universe and all it holds is not inherently divided into two camps of diametric opposites.
So when a megalomaniac like steve comes along trying to impose his world of absolutes upon us, he is shoving everything, everyone, and all actions onto one side or the other of his personal lines of division.
These lines of his aren’t static, though. He knows there are shades of grey. We know this because he constantly wades into them, selecting one point or another and placing it on whatever side of the line is convenient at the time. Coalitions are bad. Coalitions are good.
As he messes with truth, he polishes up the new version into tightly scripted talking points, short and snappy ones meant to appeal to dumb emotion, or speeches that draw on metaphors and symbols so ingrained many people accept them as holding something akin to reality.
“As I said on the 60th anniversary of the founding of the State of Israel, Israel appeared as a light, in a world emerging from deep darkness. Against all odds, that light has not been extinguished. It burns bright, upheld by the universal principles of all civilized nations — freedom, democracy and justice.”
Israel - A light coming out of the dark…burns bright…then - freedom, democracy and justice. The Good Guys (Good), obviously. And, in steve’s world it goes without saying that anyone who attacks them in any way are The Bad Guys (Evil).
There. That was easy, wasn’t it? Saves all that agonizing over who is right, what is the best course of action…
Except – and whenever anyone tries to say good is on one side and evil is on the other, there’s always an except – harper and people like him have already decided what action they want you to take and based on that, they decide how to re-define what is good and what is evil...for today.
While the substance of anti-Semitism is as crude as ever, Mr. Harper said, its method is now more sophisticated. “Harnessing disparate anti-American, anti-Semitic and anti-Western ideologies, it targets the Jewish people by targetting the Jewish homeland, Israel, as the source of injustice and conflict in the world and uses, perversely, the language of human rights to do so,” the Prime Minister said. “We must be relentless in exposing this new anti-Semitism for what it is.”
New anti-semitism is of course…Evil. It’s the new evil, so it gets to be defined by harper, and it suits harper to define it as vaguely and broadly as possible so that he can use his new definition as a weapon against as many opponents as possible.
The definition only becomes an effective weapon for harper if enough citizens accept that meaning. If enough do, then a self-serving, divisive, narrow-minded fundamentalist has managed to alter the character and dynamics of our society, and not in a good way. The us-and-them mentality prevails over tolerance and appreciation of those who open our minds to other perspectives. Fear replaces the desire to understand, and physical aggression occurs more often because there is no real desire to work things out with the Evil ones anyway.
It’s a sad Canada harper would shape.
2 comments:
I am very saddened by the current state of moralization that is occuring around the globe today. Absolutism is the realm of the scared and weak (of body, mind, and will) and those who look for absolute rights and wrongs are simply desperate individuals hoping to hang on to what little they feel they have. Call me a bastard, a bitch, or simply a moral relativist (some might consider the last the most insulting term) but there are times when even those rights we consider "inaliable rights of man" should be revoked. There are some people the world would be better off with out. The question many would follow that up with is who then gets to decide who those individuals are? Well I guarantee that it's not some non-demnominational superbeing (if one exists). If our incentive for being good only exist in the next life and human memory bearly last until next week, we would just think we were being unfairly judged and curse the judge for his/her incompetence. For those of you who subscribe to a picture of the world in 2 dimension black and white, I hope for your sake you do not get hit by that huge truck down the road that you cannot percieve (for those who may be wondering about the last sentence I would like you to imagine judging movement in 2 dimensions). Life is so much simpler when you don't have to consider many different options or agonize over moral ambiguous decisions, but for those who need a reminder of what moral certainty can do let me give you a list of examples.
1. The Iraq War: Saddam is an evil bastard and we must convert his heathen population to worship at the shrines of "Freedom, Democracy, Equality" our new Holy Trinity.
2. Jewish occupation of Palastin's territory: Because this is our god given land and we can do what we want with it, the stuff on it, and anyone who happens to be living there. (Lucky this is not the majority of the Israely citizenship who feel this way)
3. The Holocaust: Those people were greedy, stealing, bastards who took from good decent people.
4. 100 years war: Because God really wants us to do things our way and all the rest of you are wrong and must be show the errors of your ways...even if we must kill you all to do it.
5. The Spanish Inquisition: Right and wrong is not for us to decide, if we want to staunch the infection we must kill them all, God will sort them out anyways.
6. Crusades/Jihads: Heathens (anyone who does not believe what I believe) must be converted or killed.
The sad part is I went general and just mentioned the most memorable experiences of moral certatude. If you insist on black and white, as our current Prime Minister does, then the world will alway be a dangerous place to live in because color has a nasty habit of seeping in to unwanted places.
well said, thanks for that.
Even when I was a practicing Catholic, I couldn't understand why god wanted the French to kill a bunch of English in his name as Joan of Arc was said to have claimed. Couldn't understand the good and bad bit.
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