Sunday, January 04, 2009

The Right Wing and the Forced Failure

If you ever want to destroy an institution, the best thing to do is to take control of it and make it fail. At that point, you can declare it a failure and destroy it.

As examples of the all too frequent use of this policy by the wealthy and elite of the right wing, I list the following.

1. The destruction of North American tram and train lines by the Big Three automakers to support the increased consumption of their own products.

2. The damage done to the Ontario educational system by two successive Conservative governments. Mike Harris and Ernie Eves, as Premiers, set out to "get government out of the education business" by attacking teachers on television, defunding public education through private school "vouchers" and various other tricks.

3. In Rwanda, when Romeo Dallaire insisted that a slaughter could be averted with enough troops, no one reacted. The international community made sure that peacekeeping could be seen to fail so that they could stop doing peacekeeping ... even if the citizens thought it was a worthwhile expenditure.

In that vein, the right wing lunatic fringe of American politics has spent decades undermining the United Nations. While they insist that the U.N. is a "debating society" and denounce it for its effectiveness, they spend a lot of time making sure that it is not effective.

Take, for instance, the U.S. veto used to prevent a resolution in favour of a ceasefire in latest Israeli slaughter of Palestinians with modern weaponry and Palestine rocketfire in to Southern Israel.
The United States thwarted an effort by Libya on Sunday to persuade the UN Security Council to call for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza after Israel launched a ground invasion, diplomats said.

Yep.

Keep up the good work.

h/t Galloping Beaver

Recommend this PostProgressive Bloggers

No comments: