Escape from reality

Fri, 31 Mar 2006 13:54:51 +0100

It's a very interesting experience listening to Condoleezza "Condi" Rice talking today in Blackburn about Liberal Democracy. It is useful to remember that, as a Professor of Political Science, she has been trained to manipulate events in history to make her own point. She's very good at it.

She makes reference to Jefferson & Madison as architects of liberal democracy in the US. But Jefferson had no blind love of democracy and with the other framers of the constitution made it clear that America was a Republic. The Bill of Rights is specifically intended to protect the individual from the mob.

Rice and her fellow neo-cons have accelerated the accretion of powers that should reside with the individual to the state. She and her fellow conspirators against liberty have cast a wider cloak of secrecy around the actions of the executive. I'm not sure Thomas Hobbes, whom she also claims to admire, would have approved.

Is she well equipped to be the next Republican President of the USA? She seems happy to preside over mass murder, to equivocate and to twist meaning to suit her current purpose. Sure she's qualified.

She did make two good points in her speech, however.

The first is that we in the west take for granted our Democratic cultures and I think voter apathy probably supports that viewpoint. As someone who doesn't believe that democracy, as we understand it, is a panacea I'm abivalent about that point.

The second point she made was her concluding remark:

Advancing the cause of freedom is the greatest hope for peace in our time.

I completely agree with that. It's just a shame that she, apparently, doesn't. Or she has some kind of "freedom at the point of a gun" concept in mind.

Douglas Hurd, former UK foreign secretary, made some following remarks the most enjoyable of which was when he said that killing others was unacceptable even if you are a foreign invader with a good cause. You have to admire his use of coded diplomatic language.

By the way is there anybody in UK policis more smug and supercilious than Jack Straw?

Curiouser and Curiouser! on republic

Escape from reality