Where is the line?

au - I agree with you re saddam and motives - I was asking a general "line" question - whether, for the international community, ther eis a "line" which can be crossed when the world ought to react.

I'm 12 000 miles away and he scares the hell out of me!

Bush?

Hmmm - another line has been crossed for me now - there was a very (as is the Oz tradition) free and frank debate in parliament about our Prime Minister's decision to commit troops unilaterally to Iraq.

The American Embassy here has objected to the words of some Opposition MP's which were highly uncomplimentary to Bush - said they have threatened the alliance.

Now - to be fair - I am trying to imagine how we would feel if a couple of Congress people said such things about our PM - and if we would react in such a way - I am also trying to imagine how Americans would react to such a reaction to their free speech.

Sure seems like an attempt to control the rights of our publicly elected officials to debate something as serious as committing our troops to a war. I might add that the MPs in question said much ruder things about our Prime Minister. Our parliamentarians can be pretty rude.

That scares me too.

PS: Ooops! I don't mean the rudeness scares me!!! I mean the American reaction scares me.

dlowan

Now there's a lovely example of line-crossing, and it ought to scare you. Let's look at just what that is:

- attempted suppression, notably in someone else's country, of critical speech by that state's elected officials where it counters the intentions of the US administration or denigrates its Great Leader. So it's not merely evidence of the totalitarian impulse regarding speech (attempts to control critical speech is always totalitarian and as clear an indicator of that impulse as any one might find) but also of an amputated sense of sovereignty...perhaps we ought to think of it as the totalitarian impulse extended internationally.

It would be less troubling if unique, but it is hardly that. I started a thread earlier on the Drug War inititated and conducted by the US (the thread didn't go far as too much reading was required) but the linked study recounted New Zealand's moves to liberalize drug legislation and the subsequent threat from the US that it would move to decimate a part of the sheep industry there if New Zealand's internal policies were altered in a way the US didn't want. That's just one example of very many.

As worrisome to me as this sort of dictatorial bullying at the government or international level is what is going on within the US itself amongst citizens. Didion's piece (linked on one of the first pages) recounts how the self-questioning of the causes of 9-11 (what might we, the US, be doing to bring such hatred into being?) were quite abruptly labelled as anti-American (counter-revolutionary) thought. We see it here on this site as well. If one (and I'm talking about tabula rasa clean Americans, as opposed to cognitively-poisoned Brits, French, Germans or Canadians - and now, Australians) speaks against the war or against the administration, one is 'doing the traitorous bidding of the enemy'. Of course, this is not even close to a universal response, but it is common enough to alert one to something pretty nasty going on.

"Attempted suppression"? Isn't that just a bit of a stretch there blatham? Did Deb report that there was any attempt to stop anyone from saying anything? Was there any attempt to supress the ideas/concepts? Or was it just a comment by the US Embassy about word selection just as you and I do on this very forum every day when we chide people about "inflamatory comments" in threads?

Free speach works both ways.. The Aussie MPs had their opportunity to voice their opinions.. What happened to the US's freedom to speak? I would remind you that your own government hasn't had much problem lodging complaints through the Canadian Embassy in Washington DC any time there is any negativity towards Canadian political leaders in teh US Congress. This type of thing is, and has been for centuries, standard diplomatic protocol.

fishin!!!! It's been too long since we threw spitballs at each other's mothers in law!

I do not think this benign, even as an example in isolation, which it isn't. "A threat to the alliance" is the key phrase. How could this be a threat? Surely only because the authority and competence of the President has been denigrated publically, therebye possibly reducing the willingness of the Australian population to fall into line with plans for war. If they'd said simply 'that was rude, we don't talk about your PM that way, and this hurts relations between our countries', it would be different, if still quite ignorable (as in the cases of anti-canuck statements). It is an attempt to thwart and quiet speech counter to administration goals for proceding with this war.

Criticism is not supression. If anything and everything in the US is, and it seems to be, open to worldwide criticism, the rest of the world should not be so sensitive. The glass houses thing?

Now then, what's this about someone whacking every tenth sheep in New Zealand? Hadn't heard that one.

It's like bush is running a fraternity.

Looks to me like Bush is losing more and more support every day as it should be.

But.. but.. I don't have a mother-in-law!

(That's why I play in politics. Plenty of opportunities for spit-balling! lol)



The phrase is a bit of rhetoric but claiming it's supression is a bit over the top as well. No one was prevented from making the comments and the reporting of them wasn't prohibited in any way. Are you guilty of supressing the US Embassy's comments because you've criticised them here? I think you'd agree that would be a stretch...

rog and fishin

Fishin is right to suggest I'm pushing this one a bit. The tricky aspect of this question, like so many, is the progressive nature of such tendencies in a culture. For example, I'll just do this quickly because I have to stop typing soon, and I'll take an easy one asking you to excuse one more analogy with 1930s germany. But it would have been the case within a certain segment of that population that the speech act "I really quite like Jewish people" would have changed from being acceptable to being an act for which you could be brutally punished. So there is possibly some means of identifying important points of change along that continuum. Let me see if I can work up something coherent about this. Because I do think there are evidences that such a shift, if not nearly so dramatic and destructive, is (at least possibly) going on now.

...and we're back on topic! Yay blatham!

That's exactly what I was getting at about lines. Where is that line, how do we identify it, what do we do if it's crossed?

Just a thought, now, but some lines are not crossed. They just gradually get moved in one direction or another. Blatham's example of Germany in the 1930s is an illustration, but I'm not really sure where he's going with it.

Mr. Hinteler, I did not argue the obvious fact that SPD-Greens came to power in a democratic way. But, in my mind, the fact of leftists being at power results in current German approach to the U.S. plans regarding Iraq and Saddam. Democratically elected coalitions have such an advantage: they may lose power one day without any violence, just by being rejected by voters.
The fact that Social-Democrats exist more than 100 years (and they first appeared in Germany) does not make this party less leftist and more conservative; if I am not mistaken, Marx and Engels had some relation to founding this political party. By the way, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union was called in 1896-1917 the Russian Social-Democratic Workers' Party, so Messrs. Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin had quite a certain relation to the international Social-Democratic movement: they belonged to its regional leadership... Russian Communists left the Second (Socialist)International and founded the Third (Communist) one, aka Comintern, only in 1917-18.

Ok, lemme comment on the line thngy.. IMO, we each draw our own line on each issue and for most of us that line is probably more of a squiggle than a straight line. It's a fluid thing that changes with context and as we gather more information. Those individual lines are summed together and we end up with some sort of collective undulating blob that we call "society". The only constant is change.

Beyond that the discussion of where the line is is rather fascinating.. Soz, you started this thread by point to 2 specific articles concerning abortion so I want to focus on that specific issue for a second and roll in the discussion of "supression" at the same time.

Abortion is, and has been, a hotly debated issue for some time. No surprise there to anyone. There have been several comments on this very board about Roe v. Wade being overturned, appointment of public officals and their views on abortion, etc.. and generally there is a large contingent that gets crazed any time anyone with an anti-abortion stance is mentioned for any public office. How is that not suppression? The general public is largely split down the middle on the issue yet one side is attempting to dominate the issue by eliminating (or preventing) any dissenting voice from gaining government office.

The argument, contrary to the screams of "we the people" becomes "we the people that believe what I believe".

Right now those that feel the most uncomfortable are those who are seeing people from the other end of the spectrum on issues they are aware of coming up as nominees for public office and having an influence on public policy. I don't see why that should be anything other than good overall. You or I may not like the changes or influence because it may make us uncomfortable but if you or I always have only our veiws represented then there are million of others that NEVER have THEIR views represented.

Which is the truer democracy?

Um, I think you're holding that graph upside down. :wink:

And does so on almost every issue.

Fishin',

Crazed, eh?

The majority of the people were for slavery at one time, too. And segregation, and and and...

This line thing, in my mind, has to do with individual conscience outside of that framework. While the majority of the people were for slavery, some weren't. I respect those people, and want to be like them.

and by, popular consent the world, is still flat, the sun comes up in the east and sets in the west, and all god's chillin' gots shoes. here be dragons.