Still, my argument holds. Gandhi brought about major social and political change in India through peaceful protest, thus disproving Hiiri's blanket statement that peaceful protest does not work.
The British of that era believed in the Christian god. They had to answer for their "immoral" actions to a higher power far above the government, a particular higher power that is usually represented as caring for the weak and the poor, and whose own story is permeated with peaceful resistance. As for MLK, I even forget what he did for a living. Maybe he was a hip-hop star?
These people and their oddly peaceful form of resistance were permitted by the peculiar underpinnings of western society. Maybe they were great men, but then you'd aso have to give credit to the one society that allowed them to be great men. It didn't work anywhere else, and it won't work in the west once everyone is thoroughly de-Christianized, both theologically and ethically. I say this despite being a
small-a atheist.
No one today seriously believes in anything but themselves. What happens in a godless country, when peaceful protest occurs? Tiananmen Square in China. Peaceful protest is a big wet kiss to the powers that be in most societies. Here are the troublemakers right here. They've thoughtfully concentrated themselves in one area, with no means of defense, and with a finite number of escape routes.
The strange thing is, what if Communist China
had fallen like the USSR? There may have been anarchy that would have been worse for China. Before the protests were put down, no Chinese person would have conceived that his government could turn guns upon its citizens, and leaders of the protesters were hardly as capable of directing government policy as Deng Xiaoping. They were mainly whimsical college students like the Occupiers. Peaceful protest absent a sense of danger in pursuing that path calls out to many unserious and whimsical types that could hardly form the start of a new social order by themselves. The unserious people usually don't know what's best for them anyway. If Occupiers could get their way, they probably wouldn't much like the results. The real results, not the imagination in their heads. Deng Xiaoping probably made the right call when he sent the tanks into Tiananmen. Sadly enough.
Speaking of imagination, the most bizarre image in my mind is envisioning a card-carrying, iPhone-using member of the downtrodden Occupier movement actually getting dirt or blood on his hands. When there comes a time bad enough for real social change, the people who can actually effect social change will rise up. I'm not sure that we should look forward to that day or to whatever it might precipitate.
On that note, I'll be surprised if a chunk of the third world today isn't significantly more powerful in 2050, and social liberalism will be much slower there.
Probably 80% of Chinese girls are virgins at marriage. You have to pay her father about $5000 for the right to marry her. And before you can even show your face to him, you'd better have a house for her. Sound liberal yet? I doubt this will ever change much, either. Especially with the western world tottering on the verge of something bad. Most of the posts in this long thread were sad reading for me as an expat, and the ideas of western liberalism don't seem to have borne fruit in quite such a way that will encourage other cultures to shed their own millennia of social traditions.
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Topic: How's your generation doing? (Read 44804 times)