Tuesday, March 23, 2010

Telling Us Who They Are

Tom Hanks proves what we always suspected about Hollywood actors. Needless to say, he's not really talking about the war in the Pacific. Nope, he's making a heavy-handed analogy: 'Does that sound familiar, by any chance, to what’s going on today?'.

Actually, he's right: it does remind me of modern politics. Specifically, the bit about liberals explaining how America being attacked by bloodthirsty fanatics proves America is evil. It shows not only just utterly rote this recitation of American sins really is ('was the Apollo program raycist?'), but also the essential narcissism of liberals. American history, and the rest of the world right now, is naught but a reflection of US domestic politics. That Imperial Japan, or the Taliban, might just be evil for their own reasons and in their own way, never occurs to them. They're only of interest in so far as they show America in a bad light. For folks who claim to believe in universal human rights, it's noticeable just how the universe seems to shrink to the places where US forces are engaged.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

"was the Apollo program raycist"

Lol!

Well, to the degree that white people were responsible for the entire thing - yes!

Just as they are responsible for just about everything that represents modern, viable civilisation.

Ross said...

It's a particularly weird accusation to make given that the US prioritised the defeat of the (very) white Germans ahead of the Japanese even thought Germany didn't attack the USA.

TDK said...

folks who claim to believe in universal human rights

You're wrong: the left (or a critical mass amongst them) don't believe in Universal Human Rights anymore.

If it's not multiculturalism, it's post modernism explaining away how "they" are different and "we" mustn't impose our Westernism ideology upon them.

And then you get the deliberate confusion between classical negative rights and newly minted positive rights or entitlements as any reasonable person would admit.

It is clear to any sane person that positive rights can only exist at the expense of negative rights. Look what happens when they clash: Dean Steacy censorship investigator at the Canadian Human Rights Commission testifed, under oath, in this very case, that "freedom of speech is an American concept, so I don't give it any value”. Source