Saturday, 15 August 2009

Duly Noted: Ransom For Careless Citizens

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George Handlery about the week that was. Create equality: Shall theory or experience count? Conservatives are for structured change. History‘s lesson: what not to do. Pay ransom for careless citizens? Why some hate what they emulate.

1. North Korea has returned the journalists it had captured, tried and duly condemned. A group of climbers is held by Iran. In both cases, regardless of the sympathies for the pawns, raised eyebrows are provoked. Westerners tend to get in harms way. It is the result of mindlessly exposing themselves to the danger that is inherent in getting physically too close to radical tyrannies. To their advantage, the evil of such systems is dangerously under estimated. This inclination of arrogant innocents to provoke trouble suggests that the ones who stumble into traps  set for them do not understand the nature of the systems to which they expose themselves. Most conveniently, for politically uneducated Westerners the last dangerous totalitarian was the National Socialist Hitler they downgrade as „Fascist“. This not only exonerates Stalin -and thereby existing systems with a connection to his- but also reduces the wariness that is due to existing radical totalitarian regimes.

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