[WikiEN-l] Titanic, illustrated

Sun Apr 17 11:06:30 UTC 2005

Ray Saintonge wrote:

> Christiaan Briggs wrote:
>
>> Richard Holton wrote:
>>
>>> Mocking people for their world view is not constructive.
>>
>> I understand the point you were trying to make Richard but mocking 
>> people's world view actually has a hugely constructive history. Many 
>> a revolution would never had happened if this form of polemic had not 
>> being employed.
>
> Trolls looking up through a tranparent bridge floor would be 
> encouraged by such a comment.
>
> There is a kind of utilitarian truth to your observation, but I would 
> still question the ethics of such a revolutionary.  I prefer a 
> Dostoevskian revolutionary who will hesitate to throw a bomb when he 
> realizes that it would harm others beyond his intended victim.

That's quite a revealing conflation of mocking and throwing bombs if I 
might say so. I'm reading The Vote: How It was Won and How It Was 
Undermined, by Paul Foot, at the moment. It's a long history of "moral 
force" reformers (most from the comfortable middle class) undermining 
the reformers and revolutionaries who could have got the job done 
centuries ago.

We came across exactly the same situation on the human shield action to 
Iraq. We had a bunch of comfortable middle class Brits with us who made 
every effort to undermine the action and further their own resume (and 
pockets in one case). One even pronounced the slogan "Truth Justice 
Peace" too "hardcore" and pushed for it to be removed from the buses. 
When in Turkey some argued that we shouldn't criticise the Turkish 
government because it wasn't our government and therefore might cause 
"offence"!!

The millions of people around the world who came out onto the streets 
to protest the invasion of Iraq on February 15th, 2003 were again 
afflicted by this horrible disease; had they been ready to riot and 
confront our rotten politicians with violence (the only language they 
know) then I don't doubt for a second that the invasion of Iraq would 
never had gone ahead.

I prefer the revolutionary who gets the job done and doesn't foreclose 
on any strategy on any basis other than that of effectiveness; I've 
learnt from experience to despise the so-called "revolutionary" or 
"reformer" who does otherwise, they're barrier to emancipation and 
always will be, and they're certainly not revolutionaries.

Christiaan