Re: MD Pursuit of happiness AKA GREED

From: RISKYBIZ9@aol.com
Date: Thu Sep 20 2001 - 01:29:40 BST


To: All interested in MORALITY
From:Rog

In response to Squonk and Gerhard and the others that squeel with glee at a
chance to align with the sentiments of terrorists and to criticize the Great
Satan as she burns, attached are excerpts from a British collumnist that I
found on the web. She reinforces the disturbing popularity of the
America-bashing and gives her two cents on the topic. Her emphasis on
morality is appropo.

*****************

A message to the Left: grow up, this isn't a game
By Janet Daley

    
 A WHOLE swathe of this country's educated class is unable to distinguish
between right and wrong. There is no other possible conclusion. There are
apparently thousands of people out there (or maybe hundreds, or maybe it is
just a few dozen with exceptionally good media contacts) who think that it
is quite acceptable to see the mass murder of innocent people as a "message"
that needed to be delivered. The puerile anti-Americanism of the British
Left has seemed a harmless enough joke during the good, safe years when
there was enough capitalist bounty to give socialists a good party. Now, in
this moment of terrifying international crisis, we are discovering something
in our midst that goes way beyond the rather cuddly imbecility that most of
its critics have attributed to it. For how long exactly has the liberal
conscience been this malignant? Has the hatred and foaming malevolence now
rising to the surface been bubbling away under that smug, lazy facade for a
generation, just waiting for the triumphal moment to gloat about what many
of its spokesmen have called America's "defeat"?

....anything is
acceptable if it helps to undermine the great United States plot to force
American values on the rest of the world. Preventing the dissemination of
free markets, with their corrupting prosperity and materialism, must be
worth sacrificing a few mundane moral assumptions. Who is America, after
all, to tell the world how it should live: if local populations prefer their
Marxist tyrannies or their theocratic dictatorships, where does the United
States get the right to bully them into personal freedom and private
economic security? And when the theocrats and the dictators strike back,
surely we should spare our sympathy for their tormentor.

This is grotesque.
But it is also a revelation, as fascinating as it is repulsive. On the one
hand, it has the clear ring of elaborated neurosis: the extrapolation of
your own adolescent rebellion into a cosmic political philosophy in which
the most powerful country in the world personifies the domineering adult
authority against which you pit yourself. But it also suggests an
intellectual decadence that should be laughable - and was, in the innocent
past of a week or so ago, laughed at. But they aren't funny any more. These
are not champagne adventurists but salon terrorists who are excited - really
excited - by this horrible event. Even when they contain their outright
vindictiveness toward the country upon whose successful economy the
developing world is utterly dependent, they suggest that there is something
rational and meaningful in this "message" that has been delivered. As Martin
Amis puts it in (where else?) yesterday's Guardian: "Terror is political
communication by other means." What kind of discourse is it that includes
this kind of utterance? At what point would these people decide that an
action was so evil, so utterly beyond the pale of human conscience, that it
was ruled out as part of the argument?

And, as any sane person should be able to say with ease, there are not two
possible answers to the question: was the attack on innocent civilians in
America justifiable? There may be differences of opinion about the
appropriate tactics for dealing with this gross criminality which threatens
the lives of free people (and the freedoms which make their lives so worth
living), and those differences will certainly be aired in private.

The moral confusion of a whole section of opinion formers and
well-educated British people is being exposed and tested. No one will forget
what has been said and written this past week.

***********************

Very true final words. "No one will forget
what has been said and written this past week."

Roger Parker

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