THE MORAL EQUIVALENCE GAME, PART II
The odious George Monbiot was at it again yesterday, with a Guardian "comment and analysis" piece called "The Taliban of the West." (This link is to Monbiot's own site's posting of the article under the similarly hyperbolic title "The End of Enlightenment"-- I can't find the article on the Guardian on-line site, though it definitely was in the print edition. Censorship!)
No prizes for correctly identifying this Western Taliban: it's the United States of America, by gosh! When you strip away the lies, the underlying structures are revealed, and it turns out that, just as you suspected all along, America turns out to be the cause of all the trouble!
The comment: "nothing has threatened the survival of 'western values' as much as the triumph of the west."
The "analysis:" "this is an inevitable product of the fusion of state and corporate power."
Mmmm, deep.
There certainly is reason for concern about suspension of civil liberties and stepped-up government surveillance that could be applied in a general way against ordinary citizens. (If I were British, I'd be more worried about the general elimination of the right to a trial by jury than about Bush's military tribunals-- maybe it's the British who are the true "hidden Taleban.") It should be examined, discussed, and if necessary, resisted, and this will require ceaseless vigilance, as the saying goes. But until the FBI starts beating women with steel cables, pushing homosexuals off of tall buildings, that sort of thing, I'd say we still fall short of the Taleban standard of excellence as paragons of repression.
Monbiot's other examples of the true "Taleban nature" behind our blue eyes are deliberately misleading. The Nancy Oden Bangor Maine Airport Security Incident is a well-documented hoax; the Katie Sierra case (in which a student was suspended for, among other things wearing a home-made anti-war T-shirt) was deemed a school discipline issue rather than a free speech case by the state Supreme Court, since she was allowed to wear the shirt off school premises. (By the way, Monbiot's "analysis" of the "true meaning" of the T-shirt incident is unintentionally (?) hilarious: the government-corporate leviathan has an interest maintaining its death-grip on the T-shirt design market, and therefore "those who, in defiance of this dispensation, write their own logos on T-shirts are now being persecuted by the state." Quite Pythonesque.) Anyway, I think the various cases of school limits on kids' free expression often go too far. Yet, in my view it doesn't rise to the Taleban standard.
Once again: does George Monbiot really believe that a high school punishing the violation of a school dress code with a temporary suspension is even remotely equivalent to the Religious Police beating a woman with a steel cable for uncovering her ankle? Of course not. So how can he use such obviously and undeniably phoney "data" to further his "analysis?" Answer: in the real world, he oughtn't to, but it's a perfectly legal move in the rule-book of the Game of Moral Equivalence.
Posted by Dr. Frank at December 20, 2001 03:17 AM | TrackBack