LINK to Daily Telegraph article, Our human rights culture has now become a tyranny, by Charles Moore.
Charles Moore makes some very good points, but what he is criticizing are mere symptoms of a disease inherent to the state, which in the past we were generally blissfully unaware of, and even now are only beginning to wake up to. It is the state's need for moral authority, in order to justify the immense power it wields (to raise taxes, make and enforce laws, to send its men folk to war, etc.), which it used to derive from its preferred - varying according to circumstance - interpretation of Judeo-Christian scripture.
Charles Moore makes some very good points, but what he is criticizing are mere symptoms of a disease inherent to the state, which in the past we were generally blissfully unaware of, and even now are only beginning to wake up to. It is the state's need for moral authority, in order to justify the immense power it wields (to raise taxes, make and enforce laws, to send its men folk to war, etc.), which it used to derive from its preferred - varying according to circumstance - interpretation of Judeo-Christian scripture.
Until quite recently, the people of these Islands were not free to choose their own beliefs, but were coerced into accepting Christian dogma, which the Church, through the state, that it was instrumental in creating and running, used to exercise its power over society, from the highest noble to the lowest peasant, and from which, of course, it derived huge material advantage for its, especially higher, members (a lot better to be a shepherd than a sheep).
The precipitous decline in Christian belief in the past century has left a partial moral power vacuum, which has been increasingly filled by secular (overwhelmingly liberal-left) morality, itself virtually the exact, but almost equally extreme, opposite of Nazi morality and ideology, which, of course, its rise to power was largely an - at the time, understandable - overreaction to, as well as to the injustice and inhumanity of Apartheid and Jim Crow.
This liberal-left ideology, which Jonah Goldberg poignantly refers to as Liberal Fascism, now represents the "moral high ground", which everyone (including those on the liberal right) must accept the validity of - or be dismissed and condemned as a rightwing extremist, neo-Nazi or "racist", which are the modern, liberal-statist equivalents of the medieval Jew! Heretic!, Heathen! or Non-Believer, i.e. "not one of us!"
This liberal-left ideology, which Jonah Goldberg poignantly refers to as Liberal Fascism, now represents the "moral high ground", which everyone (including those on the liberal right) must accept the validity of - or be dismissed and condemned as a rightwing extremist, neo-Nazi or "racist", which are the modern, liberal-statist equivalents of the medieval Jew! Heretic!, Heathen! or Non-Believer, i.e. "not one of us!"
No comments:
Post a Comment