The Empire's Corps: Book 04 - Semper Fi
Page 44
It is a curious fact that distance lends enchantment. By any reasonable standard, Stalin's Russia, Mao's China, Saddam's Iraq and all of the other dictatorships on Earth (past and present) were truly awful places to live. They have been described, aptly, as prison camps above ground and mass graves below. And yet many truly decent people seem to believe that things are not as bad as they seem in the dictatorships … and rant and rail against the West's far smaller flaws. The protesters who marched through Manchester prior to the war would not have been allowed to hold their protests in a dictatorship. Those who doubt that might want to look at just what the Iranian Regime was prepared to do to those who marched against it. It was not a pleasant sight.
Why is that the case?
My personal theory is that it is simply a lack of experience. Those who have grown up in a democratic society find it hard to grasp the fear that pervades every level of a dictatorship, or just how heavily the media can be controlled overseas. A democracy allows a substantial level of press freedom, where the media can criticize to its heart’s content; a dictatorship, by contrast, only allows news it considers acceptable to be printed and distributed. Someone unprepared for the Pravda approach to news will not recognise that it has been censored, if it wasn't blatant lies from the start. (Part of the reason Al Jazeera is even less popular among the governments of the Middle East than the West is because it was largely uncensored by their standards.)
The West is not perfect, but its flaws are far more noticeable to the average Western citizen. This tends to lead to a problem where people react to what they can see, rather than what is. For example, there is no moral equality between the limited torture, used in desperation, by the West after 9/11 and the torture routinely handed out to political prisoners in dictatorships. Yet many on the Left will choose to ignore the dictatorships and focus entirely on the West’s flaws. Worse, perhaps, many on the Left chose to support the USSR, even though it was one of the worst regimes in human history. They saw the little flaws of the West (in comparison to the USSR) and failed to see the major flaws that would eventually bring down the Soviet Empire.
Many of them told themselves (and others) that they were being politically neutral. That is, quite frankly, nonsense. Neutrality implies nothing more than refusing to take a side. But tell me; if one person has £1000 and the other has £100, should I be ‘neutral’ and regard them as equals or acknowledge that the first person is richer than the other? Avoiding the question is a meaningless act; at the end, one is still richer than the other.
To call yourself neutral when contemplating the differences between the West and its enemies is an act of pointless moral cowardice. How can anyone look at the facts and remain ‘neutral’?
Consider this; if you happen to be homosexual, there are places in the West where you cannot ‘marry.’ Terrible. But if you live quietly, you are generally allowed to live your life as it pleases you. What if you’d been born in the Middle East? You would be arrested, perhaps killed, just for loving your own sex.
Or ... if you’re a woman in the West, you are often faced with mass sexualisation; porn can be found everywhere. And there are businesses where there is a glass ceiling. Terrible, right? But what if you’d been born in Saudi Arabia or Taliban Afghanistan? You would be, to a very great extent, property. Your male relatives would rule your life, chose your husband and insist that you wore an all-enveloping garment when you went out of doors. Being born a woman would make you an automatic second-class citizen.
You want to be neutral when such evil exists? Please!
I shall close this essay with an observation. Every so often, there are political protests in the West, some of which get out of hand. The police move in, arrest a few dozen people and then ... well, generally they get released. And yet there are people who admire the protesters, who say that they are brave. Maybe they are.
But it’s easy to protest when your life isn’t in real danger. Those who protest in a dictatorship, on the other hand, are very likely to end up dead. They are the ones who show true bravery.
And yet their sacrifice is often ignored.
Christopher G. Nuttall
Kuala Lumpur, 2013