Told You So…

in this week’s edition of New Statesman John Gray justifies Iraq, torture and such as follows:”When we are liberating human beings from oppressive regimes, we must reckon with the dead weight of history. Many, perhaps even most, human beings display an irrational attachment to their existing identity, and it cannot be taken for granted that they will automatically welcome the freedom that is being offered them after regime change. They may fail to perceive their culture as being oppressive and be tempted to resist the advance of liberal values. If regime change is really to work in these circumstances, the entire society must be rebuilt. However, in order for that to be possible, it must first be destroyed.”and”It is no accident that torture has been reintroduced by the world’s pre-eminent liberal state. To be sure, torture is used by many regimes – not only those inspired by liberal ideals. It is routinely employed in tyrannies and the ramshackle failed states that litter the globe; but only in liberal states is it part of a crusade for human rights. Liberalism is a project of universal emancipation, and torture will be necessary as long as the spread of liberal values is resisted. When the Bush administration authorises the use of torture, it does so in the cause of human progress.”read the full article at http://www.newstatesman.com/200501170012

Thanks for sticking up for my naivety, Manic. The thing that confused me was that John Gray -if it is the same one – used to be a right-winger and atlantacist. But then turned Left. I wondered if he had been having second thoughts.”In the 1970s, John Gray was a rising star of the British New Right. AnOxford-trained political philosopher, he penned prose poems to the freemarket, crisscrossed the Atlantic to fuel up on the high-octanelibertarianism of American right-wing think tanks, and, says a longtimefriend, enthralled his comrades late into the night with visions of thecoming “anarcho-capitalist” utopia. But after the Berlin Wall collapsed,Gray defected.”http://lists.village.virginia.edu/lists_archive/sixties-l/2776.htmlquoted from hereIt was so plausibly written and has in it some straight-forward analysis too as far as I can see.